Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 263

The Labour elite's secret problem... they can't stand the working class

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday Column

How long does it take for the penny to drop? It is amazing how slow voters  have been to see  that the two major parties have been stolen from them, and are now their enemies.
I spend a lot of time here pointing out that the Tory Party is a now a nest of anti-British, anti-family liberals. But Labour is just as bad.

The Labour Party of 1945  was pretty Left-wing. But it was patriotic, Christian and genuinely working-class. It hated cheats and it loathed crime. Several members of the Labour Cabinet of 1948 voted  to keep the death penalty.

It did not support immigration. It set up the NHS to care for hard-working people whose illnesses were in many cases caused by that hard work. It was (rightly) deeply suspicious of the first steps towards creating what is now the EU.

It supported grammar schools, seeing that they gave the children  of the poor a ladder out of that poverty. It favoured strong national defences.
I suspect that millions of Labour voters still feel roughly the same way. But the party does not. Like the Tory top deck, Labour’s London elite loathe and despise their members.

We have absolute proof of this thanks to the meeting between Gordon Brown and Mrs Gillian Duffy during the last Election, when Mr Brown responded to Mrs Duffy’s completely reasonable fears about mass immigration by calling her a bigot behind her back. He apologised – for being caught – but who can doubt it was his real view?

This week we saw two more examples of the problem. One was the absurd shadow Minister Chris Bryant, trying to be strong on immigration. Mr Bryant has been told by Labour voters that their jobs are threatened by migrants, and so he wants to keep their votes by sounding tough.

 But in fact Labour –  as I have pointed out here more than once – deliberately created that immigration. Its leaders, 1960s revolutionaries who have never grown up, knew exactly what they were doing.

But now they fear they have been found out, and that millions of Gillian Duffys – who would die rather than vote  Tory – are now thinking of defecting to UKIP.
Luckily for us all, Mr Bryant’s speech blew up in his face like an exploding cigar. This is what ought to happen more often to politicians who dishonestly seek the votes of people whose opinions they despise.

The other interesting moment was a Channel 4 programme  in which three modern welfare claimants were subjected to the rules of the original welfare state set up by Labour.
That welfare state was a proper, decent thing – people who worked hard insuring themselves against age and illness, and genuine efforts to find work for all, even the seriously disabled.

It was completely unlike the Sponger’s Charter that modern Labour has set up, under which the genuinely poor tend to suffer, and cheats prosper. Labour, like the Tories, no longer speaks for any major part of the British people. It only pretends  to. When the penny does eventually drop, what a reckoning we shall see. But I wish it would be sooner.

Happy pills and guns – welcome to our future

Film trailers are almost always much better than the movies they advertise, and I’m very taken with  the trailer for Elysium.

Matt Damon is shown living in a horrible New Labourish future, where a gazillionaire elite dwell in disease-free paradise while the rest of us scrabble in shanty  towns, being whacked over the head by policemen who actually are robots, rather than just acting like them.

My favourite scene involves the hero, Damon, confronting a mechanical bureaucrat who first infuriates him, and then, accusing him of being ‘stressed’, offers him a selection of free happy pills to calm him down.

It sounds all too like modern Britain.

In the past two weeks, we have learned that prescriptions for Ritalin and ‘antidepressants’ have hit unheard-of levels.

More and more we are turning to legal drugs to make bad things more bearable. Ritalin ‘cures’ bad schools and  bad child-rearing. Antidepressants ‘cure’ long-term unemployment, overcrowding and the misery caused by the collapse of family life.
In the film, everything comes out right. Don’t bank on this happening in real life.

Egypt's brutal coup is our fault

Who can now say how bad the Egyptian disaster will get? How much happier Egypt would be if the ‘West’ had not encouraged her people down the perilous path of democracy (something we’re not that good at ourselves).

And yet the foolish liberals who did this still will not grasp what is going on. Having enthused over the Tahrir Square crowds, then grasped – too late – that they had helped Islam into power, they made excuses for a crude army putsch which was the only way out of the mess they helped to create.

I remember the fury of the fashionable Left against military coups in Greece and Chile. How they all loathed the Greek colonels and General Pinochet.
But the BBC, the Church of Leftism, still chokes and splutters rather than condemn this putsch. Because it’s their putsch. A few days before the Cairo generals began the latest massacre, a Radio 4 bulletin referred to these officers as the  ‘military-backed interim government’. How long before they admit it’s a ‘junta’?

Everyone knows that the British Foreign Office longs to betray Gibraltar and hand its people over to Spain. Everyone knows that Spain, if it chose to, could persuade the people of Gibraltar to join Spain, by using charm and persuasion instead of threats and bullying.

The only people who benefit from these periodic confrontations are cheap politicians, like our Prime Minister and Spain’s, who can  bang drums and dispatch fleets in the hope of persuading jaded voters that they are real national leaders.

Please don’t be taken in because the pathetic remnants of our Navy have been allowed out of port for once. Do you really think they’re allowed to fight for British interests any more?

Eric Pickles, the Government’s Minister for Pretending to be conservative, frets about the  EU taking over registration of births. Yet again, this is straining at a gnat after swallowing a camel.

Years ago we all ceased to be British subjects, and became EU citizens, without being asked. There is  no such thing as a British passport, only an EU one. Even the Queen is an EU citizen, which in law means she is not our sovereign any more. Nobody cared when these things happened. Because they closed the cell door softly, we didn’t realise we were locked in.

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Yet Another Student Interview with PH

This is a rematch with the York student who interviewed me rather briefly a few months ago (requested by him).

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ATJ23...

Since when was saving your children a 'lifestyle choice'?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

There’s something a little jaunty
about the expression ‘lifestyle choice’. And maybe in the super-rich
world of our Chancellor of the Exchequer, this is how full-time
motherhood is regarded.

But actually quite a lot of couples view it as a stern duty.

They
see the terrifying world of bad schools, bullying, drugs, internet
filth and peer-pressure to do the wrong thing, which now menaces
children, and they resolve to make their homes a fortress against this.

To do so, they give up many of
the pleasures of life. Families with full-time mothers don’t tend to
live in big houses, they often go without holidays and the array of
shiny consumer goods that two incomes buy.

They reckon it is worth the  sacrifice. They do not expect to be thanked. Far from it.

But
they think it a bit much that their heavy taxes go to pay for
nurseries for those who choose to have two incomes rather than one.

They learned long ago that the state was suspicious of them and hostile to them.

The New Labour Commissar Patricia Hewitt said back in June 2003 that mothers who stayed at home were a ‘real problem’.

The
Tories, who largely supported Labour’s Marxist (see below) ‘Equality’
laws and have their own ‘Equalities’ Minister, have always acted as if
they agreed with Ms Hewitt.

They have subsidised every form of childcare except that done by the child’s own mother.

And
now the millionaire Chancellor (what is his name? I can never remember)
has airily dismissed the embattled minority of traditional families as
indulging in a ‘lifestyle choice’, like smoking or owning an allotment.

He’s
just as much an enemy of the strong family as Commissar Hewitt. The
minds of the Tories are so empty that they have been colonised by the
ideas of the Left.

For instance, where do you think the following quotations come from?

‘Complete equal rights for women and men are anchored in the laws .  .  .’

‘Equal work is obviously rewarded with equal pay, regardless of sex. Women hold many leading positions in society .  .  .’

‘The
overwhelming majority of women today do not want to be housewives with
nothing more to do than wash and cook and run the home .  .  .’

‘Fathers
pushing prams and husbands who have learned to operate domestic
appliances more or less perfectly are no longer a curiosity.’

Actually
they are in Everyday Life In The GDR, a propaganda booklet published in
1982 by communist East Germany, in praise of itself.

It boasts that the communist state has no need of women’s liberation organisations because their demands have all been met.

And
it quotes Karl Marx’s 1868 words: ‘Social progress can be measured
precisely in terms of the social status accorded the fair sex.’ (The
hairy-faced old brute added the words ‘The ugly ones included’, which
would have got him into trouble with the Guardian and the BBC today, and
perhaps also an invitation to join UKIP.)

Revolutionaries
hate the strong family, the fortress of private life, tradition and
individuality. They believe in the parental state, all-wise and 
all-powerful.

The Tories
have taken the wrong side, and betrayed their supporters, on this and on
all other issues. No wonder they now have fewer than 100,000 members.
They should have fewer than 100,000 voters.

I wish we were like the Germans

In
a rare moment of inspiration, the BBC sent Justin and Bee Rowlatt, and
two of their children, to live in Germany the way Germans do, for a TV
programme.

It is amazing how little we in Britain know of our great rival, and this was a clever way of opening our eyes.

I
just wish the Rowlatts, especially Bee, had made a bit more of an
effort to learn the language and to wonder if the Germans didn’t have
something to teach us, especially about raising children.

Here’s what they found. Germany has schools that teach people the skills of work. It has real apprenticeships.

It has family-owned manufacturing industries in every town, which export around the world on quality as well as price.

Work itself remains hard and disciplined, but it is well-paid, and money goes further there than here.

If you have children, you are subsidised and mothers are not pressured to go out to work – rather the reverse.

Debt is feared and despised. Thrift is encouraged. Millions of Germans belong to clubs and societies.

Older British people will remember when much of this was also true here.

Sunday
is a real day of rest. Noisy neighbours get into trouble, and
inconsiderate drivers meet with immediate disapproval. The beer is quite
good and you don’t have to wear leather shorts.

I
might add that it still has grammar schools and wonderful railways. And
that it is the only Western nation with millions of citizens who
actually experienced communism, and who were liberated from it.

Which is perhaps why they value their country more highly than we value ours.

Here comes the next housing disaster

I
have yet to come across a serious economist who does not despise the
Government’s ludicrous plans to subsidise home buyers, so inflating the
housing market. 

I have yet
to come across an economist who does not think the current so-called
‘boom’ is credit-based, and no different in principle from New Labour’s
rash policy of ten years ago.

It also involves thieving from savers by imposing comically low interest rates.

So why is there so much uncritical boosting in the media of this dangerous, unfair and doomed adventure?

Why
are commentators pretending that the Tories, at 28 per cent in the
polls, are set for victory at the next Election? Ask them.

You’d hardly know it, but Turkey last week took another dangerous step towards becoming a nasty Islamic dictatorship.

After
a shameful, unfair, evidence-free show trial, more than 200 soldiers,
academics, lawyers and journalists were crammed into jail for their part
in a non-existent conspiracy.

What they actually had in common was they were opponents of Turkey’s bilious Islamic despot, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

This unpleasant government is still absurdly called ‘mild’ by the fawning Economist magazine, and is a member of Nato.

The migration scandal goes on unchecked.

This
week’s astonishing birth-rate figures, with their frightening
implications for schools, housing and public services, are clearly
caused by our open borders.

Then
there’s the overpraised Mrs Theresa May’s latest amazing escape from
scandal. Her department covered up its feeble treatment of illegal
migrants by blacking out chunks of a damning report. How does she get
away with it?

And then
there’s a ‘Whitehall source’ (in the foreign aid Ministry) quoted as
saying: ‘If there wasn’t a conflict in Somalia, there wouldn’t be 20,000
Somali migrants in Leicester.’ Are there? And how does that follow?

The
distance from Mogadishu to Leicester is 4,394 miles. This includes
Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, the Mediterranean and at least three European
countries. Refugees flee FROM countries, not TO countries.

Why are they here?

Summer Timetable Comes into Effect

This weblog (which recently clocked up its Twelve Millionth visit and its 117,894th comment) is now going on to its summer timetable. I shall be posting much less often, and for some of the time the only thing posted will be my Mail on Sunday column.

 

I have in the past tried to treat this time of year as if it were just like any other, but it is not. This is not just because politicians disappear from view, as they have very little impact on life. It is because a sort of subliminal signal seems to go through the world, like the shiver of spring that wakes up all the toads, as noted by George Orwell in his delightful essay on those enjoyable reptiles (sorry, I should have said 'amphibians').

 

But, rather than waking everyone up, August makes them long to be away from cities and streets, and to wish to set aside normal concerns for a few weeks. Maybe it’s an ancient impulse to get the harvest in before the autumn winds and rain.  

 

People who get up late miss the best part of this odd, restless, faintly disturbing month  – the beautiful combination of coolness and clear light that you get almost every day in the early morning, the effect enhanced by the darker green of the leaves.  

 

It’s a warning, really. Autumn is beginning to patrol the edges of the day. However hot it may be at noon, the planet is tilting towards winter, and next Christmas is already a lot closer than last Christmas.  Early risers also notice (perhaps this is why it is mainly funky metropolitan slug-abed types, who have breakfast at 11.00 a.m.,  who want to push the clocks forward to Berlin time) that the days are already shortening quite fast.

 

Anyway, that’s my excuse. This is no time to be hunched at a keyboard, peering at figures or searching for quotations.  You’ll hear from me occasionally, but I look forward to a renewed, refreshed more vigorous conversation some time round about the beginning of September.

Spain has Her Own Gibraltar

The revived dispute over Gibraltar (which Spanish governments always fuss about when they are in trouble with the voters and want to seem tough)  reminded me of a visit I made in September 2002 to the ‘Spanish Gibraltar’, Ceuta in North Africa, from which you can see Gibraltar across the Straits, ghostly in the haze.

 

It was in many ways a very interesting journey. I reached Ceuta by fast ferry from Algeciras (the origin of this name is the same as that of the TV station ‘Al Jazeera’, meaning ‘the peninsula’, and of course the origin of ‘Gibraltar’ is also Arabic. On the journey back I was astonished to see  a submarine (later identified as belonging to the Spanish Armada) surface within about 100 yards of the ferry, the only time I’ve ever seen such a thing.  Having visited Gibraltar several times, it was interesting to see it, brooding across the bay, from Spanish territory. It is said (but I have no idea if it is true)  that Franco deliberately uglified Algeciras Bay as a sort of act of spite against Gibraltar, which would otherwise have a lovely outlook. It is certainly not a beautiful city, though an interesting one. The Arabic place-names, and the closeness of North Africa, plus the increasing use of Arabic script on road signs, rather emphasises the curious history and uncertain future of Europe, and especially the period of ‘El Andalus’, or Muslim Spain. Many Muslims to this day regard Spain as 'lost territory, which belongs to Islam and should be returned to Islam.

 

I have no idea how  the  future of Gibraltar will be resolved. Quite how anyone could persuade a group mainly composed of English-speaking Genoese, who enjoy being British, to give that up, and to abandon their own sovereignty over that superbly spectacular rock, I have no idea. Why would anyone (apart from our Foreign Office, whose instinct is to surrender anything as soon as it can) want to? Britain’s strategic interest in the rock vanished 50 years ago, but the population are absolutely set on staying under the Union Flag and the Crown of St Edward, and why shouldn’t they, in this age of self-determination?  It does Spain no harm, and adds much interest to the world. An actual land border, with Guardia Civil on one side and helmeted British coppers on the other is an interesting and instructive thing. People ask l how I would feel if there were a Spanish naval base and town on (say) Portland Bill. Actually, I’d take great pleasure in visiting it and enjoy having it there. I like such geographical quirks (the strange city of Kaliningrad, formerly Koenigsberg, is another).  As it is, there is such a Spanish base in Africa, and that, too, was a pleasure to experience.

 

'As Madrid steps up its demands over the Rock, Peter Hitchens discovers that when the Spanish are asked to give up one of their outposts, they reply with fierce refusals and stern lectures...

 

Spain does not want you to know that she has her very own Gibraltar, a mirror-image of Britain's Rock which she has absolutely no intention of handing over to any foreign power this side of doomsday. Even while Spain demands the right to rule over 30,000 Gibraltarians who defiantly want to be British, Spanish troops, ships and helicopters stand guard over another rock, just 30 miles away, whose people equally defiantly want to be Spanish, but which Morocco claims for her own.

 

The Spanish Gibraltar is called Ceuta (say it see-you-tah, to rhyme with 'scooter') and the similarity between the two places is eerie. Both are military and naval bases dominated by fortified mountains in which tunnels and caverns conceal secret installations. Both have disputed borders. Both are small and cramped and long ago lost the purpose for which they were originally conquered. Both have populations which are racially mixed, but united in loyalty to the mother country.

 

Gibraltar has achieved harmony with a mixture of Jews, Catholics and Muslims. Ceuta's equally successful cultural melting pot has the same ingredients but also includes Hindus.

 

Spain wants Gibraltar. Morocco wants Ceuta.

 

The Spanish could easily puncture Morocco's demands by holding a referendum which would certainly show that almost nobody in Ceuta wants to leave Spain. But they dare not. For that would hugely strengthen Gibraltar's case -  a case which will be underlined by a completely predictable pro-British vote due to take place a few weeks from now, where the only question is whether the pro-Spain faction will score above single figures.

 

It might also draw the world's attention to the fact that their case for holding on to this quirky little toehold is actually weaker than Britain's for keeping the Rock. By clever diplomacy since the days of the dictator Francisco Franco, Madrid has managed to keep up the monstrous pretence that Ceuta is not a colony, and therefore needs no changes, whereas Gibraltar is a colony, and so must be decolonised.

 

This argument is so far from the truth that the only sensible response is to laugh. Gibraltar, with its own culture, laws and customs, could justifiably declare independence tomorrow and seek admission to the UN as a small but proud European nation.

 

Ceuta, on the other hand, is much more like the classic idea of a colony. It is a little patch of Spain kept in existence on African soil solely by military power and diplomacy. Its landward side is guarded by a savage 15ft fence topped with barbed wire and dotted with watchtowers.

 

Its main border post with Morocco is one of the most shocking confrontations between the First and Third worlds that I have ever seen, starker and harsher even than the US-Mexican frontier at El Paso, where hungry shanty towns stare across into the world of fast food.

 

To get to Ceuta's gate into Africa, you drive along smooth, tree-lined and ordered streets which could just as well be in Barcelona, passing hypermarkets, shiny new office blocks and a surprising number of busy building sites with billboards declaring that they are subsidised by the European Union, which means you and me. Spaniards relax in pleasant bars and restaurants.

 

Well-dressed citizens stroll beneath palm trees and chat into mobile phones. Modern warships sit in the harbour. A smart recruiting van advertises jobs in the Spanish Armada, ie the navy, a mixed-sex force very different from the 1588 version.

 

And then you reach the city limits, turn the corner and see the filthy, flyblown fence, its barbed wire festooned with garbage. Just beyond it is the dirty, poor chaos of Africa, pounding at the gates of Europe. The scene is painful and disturbing.

 

Because Morocco refuses fully to recognise the frontier, a curious taxfree-port has developed here, one which nobody looks into too closely.

 

Multitudes of Moroccans, dressed in the fashions of the Old Testament, cross backwards and forwards, bringing who knows what with them, and returning with Western consumer goods. Where these are too heavy to carry, they plunge into the sea and float them back. I watched border guards ignore a swimmer as he navigated a Spanish fridge along the coastline and brought it safely to shore in the Third World. It gave a whole new meaning to the phrase 'duty free'.

 

Not all the border incidents are so amusing. Not all can pass. Some are brusquely turned away and put in a holding pen before being sent back.

 

I saw one little boy waiting forlornly behind the cruel fence after being refused entry. Europe's way of life is, of course, better than Africa's, and it would be suicide to open its frontiers to all who wanted to come in, but it seems specially hard when the poor can glimpse the richer part of the world but cannot touch it.

 

But you can, and do, quite easily, put this upsetting sight out of your mind when you return to the town.

 

Nothing here is quite the same as it is in more normal parts of the world. Sitting over mint tea in a cafe where some of the other customers openly rolled joints, I asked a leading Ceuta Muslim, El Mehdi Flores (no dope smoker he), if he wanted Muslim Morocco to take over the town. He definitely did not. 'We don't want a Moroccan administration in Ceuta under any circumstances,' he replied. He and other Muslims prefer Spanish prosperity to Moroccan poverty, enjoy the better schools and health services. He has his discontents with things as they are, but an Islamic kingdom does not seem to be the answer to them.

 

Later, over beer and olives in a citycentre cafe, I asked a group of thirtysomething Spanish Ceutans what they would think if their Premier, Jose Maria Aznar, tried to hand them over to Morocco, as Anthony Blair is trying to hand Gibraltar to Spain. Jose Olmo Sanchez, 34 and a civil servant, spoke for them all when he said: 'There would be outrage. It would be as if the Spanish government had taken its trousers down in public, utterly undignified.' He was also scornful of Britain for being so weak. 'It would be wrong for the British government to do such a thing,' he said. 'The people of Gibraltar should choose their future in a referendum. If they want to remain British they should be allowed to carry on being British in peace.' All these modern, European-minded young men were immensely proud of Spain's recent recapture of the uninhabited Parsley Island, just down the coast, seized by the Moroccans a few months ago. They nodded fiercely when Jose said: 'For the first time in our lives we felt proud of being Spanish.' They had a similar admiration for Britain's Falklands stand.

 

The official Madrid line remains that there is no comparison at all between Gibraltar and Ceuta.

 

Attempts to speak to the local authorities met with endless excuses and postponements, though an unguarded young soldier gave the game away by saying: 'Ah, you must be here to write about the similarities between Ceuta and Gibraltar.' The Spanish Embassy in London had earlier subjected me to a stern verbal pounding for so much as mentioning the two places in the same breath. The main part of the Spanish case, all the more intense for being so shaky, is that when they got hold of Ceuta there was no such country as Morocco. This means that, unlike Gibraltar, there is no treaty governing its existence. This is not quite true (three treaties were signed with local Arabs, in 1767, 1782 and 1799).

 

What is true is that Spain has done what Britain should have done, and bound its colony securely and permanently to the homeland. Ceuta sends an MP to Madrid and is officially as Spanish as Seville. In fact, it is a lot more Spanish than the Basque country, which constantly demands separation. Yet again, it reminds me of Gibraltar. There, too, a small, isolated, yet tolerant and multiracial people have become much more patriotic than the citizens of their mother country. This is mainly because they have a fairly good idea of the alternative, which begins on the edge of town. It is also because, in far too many cases, the people of Britain simply do not know how lucky they are.

 

Both these cramped stockades are inconvenient and irritating to the politically correct potentates of the world. These grandees think we all ought to live in the featureless, multicultural paradise they dream vainly of creating.

 

They forget that real people like to live in small places among known neighbours who share their hopes and fears, not in a vast global wilderness where your only identity is printed on a plastic card. Long may they both survive. '

 

I’ve also looked out a despatch from Gibraltar itself, on the last outbreak of the Gibraltar dispute in November 2001, when it was clear that the Blair government would have liked to cave in (no doubt the Foreign Office were keenly urging this course). The Mail on Sunday ran a substantial petition against any such sell-out, and the Gibraltarians managed to outmanoeuvre the Blairites too. That’s why the official attitude of the current government is more sympathetic to Gibraltar  :

 

‘The people of Gibraltar are as British as roast beef. They drink bitter, play cricket and proudly fly our flag. So why is the Government so very keen to hand over their home to their bullying neighbours in Spain? Like it or not, Gibraltar is just going to have to be liberated from its colonial British past. The Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain, an expert on liberating people, has decided that this shall be so.

 

The Prime Minister, who last week went to Nuremberg to proclaim his love affair with European integration, is right behind Mr Hain in the campaign to 'integrate' this British territory with Spain, its bullying neighbour.

 

But the question of whether they like it or not is the trouble. Gibraltar's people, a confusing mixture of Italians, Maltese, Jews and Portuguese, rather enjoy being British and think their colonial status is just fine. If this is living in the past, they say, then to hell with the present and the future. We like it here.

 

This is inconvenient of them. To the Foreign Office, which longs to reduce Britain to the status of a sea-girt Austria, the Rock and its unfashionable inhabitants have been an accursed nuisance for years. If the rest of the British Empire had been allowed to behave like this, then we would never have been able to hand it over to people such as Deng Xiaoping, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe and Kwame Nkrumah, and then what might have happened?

 

This isolated lump of land defies liberal prejudices. Officially oppressed, it has a noisy democracy. Mostly Roman Catholic but fiercely loyal to the Protestant crown of England, racially mixed but culturally united, the Rock is both exotic and suburban. This week, Gibraltar's main street is decked out for Christmas, with plastic Santas and snowmen displayed among the palm trees, and Christmas puddings flying off the shelves of Safeway.

 

Everyone speaks both English and a mysterious Spanish-English patois. They drink English bitter in pubs and play cricket on coconut matting; their national dish is steak and chips; they bet on British horse races and watch British TV. They follow the English national curriculum in comprehensive schools; their judges wear horsehair wigs and they have juries. Yes, they are a colony, with a governor in a plumed hat, but Scottish separatists would be overjoyed to have the Rock's independent powers - especially over taxation.

 

The Britishness here is captivatingly out of date, redolent of the days of Two-way Family Favourites on the wireless and Morris Minors. It has been formed by many shared perils and sieges - the most recent being Spain's long and spiteful closure of the border from 1969 to 1984, which left its mark on everyone living here and is the cause of understandable mistrust of Madrid. Left wing Islington snobs, who adore every culture but their own, would loathe it.

 

It is an undoubted fact that this promontory of two-and-a-quarter square miles, much of it uninhabitable mountain, and its 30,000 people, form a unique society with as much right to choose its own future as any other. It is also a society worth preserving: a happy, contented, prosperous, law-abiding and free place.

 

So why not just let well alone? It is easy to see why Spain once raged against a great foreign military base on Spanish soil and a giant foreign fleet in its territorial waters. It is easy to understand that after Spain's final loss of her own empire in 1898, the recovery of the Rock must have seemed essential to her pride. The unloved dictator Franco found that posturing on this issue actually made him popular. His democratic successors in a transformed nation really ought to have other things on their minds.

 

But Madrid still scratches at this sore place in her history. Gibraltar's airport is throttled by Spanish restrictions. The Rock's phone system is overloaded because of Spanish boycotts and obstructions. Spain even blocks Gibraltar's entries to dog shows and tries to keep it out of international sporting bodies. Spanish frontier officials keep up an endless go-slow, making a simple journey unpleasant and irritating.

 

In a neat paradox, ultra-British Gibraltar pointedly flies the European standard alongside the Union Flag at the frontier, and displays large permanent notices urging travellers to complain officially about Spain's infringement of their EU right to travel freely. Arrivals on the British side are greeted by a sign saying: 'Welcome to Gibraltar, territory of the European Union'. Spain, normally a keen EU member, keeps quiet about it here, where she clings to a petty nationalism that belongs in the 19th Century. Mr Hain has accused Gibraltar of being 'stuck in the past'. This border, with its banana republic pettiness, rubs in the truth that it is Spain which is stuck in the past, obsessed with ancient parchment treaties and battles long ago.

 

If Spain relaxed the frontier, unblocked the phone lines and freed the airport, Gibraltar might in time choose any number of futures. An independent Gibraltar left unmolested inside the EU would inevitably grow closer to Spain as past fears and mistrust faded. Perhaps one day it might even want to be Spanish, or would simply cease to care. Spain's attitude and behaviour are not merely babyish but futile as well.

 

That is why the predictable outcome of the new round of talks is that the people of Gibraltar will flatly reject any deal on sovereignty between London and Madrid - even though they fear Britain will then leave them twisting in the wind, as Spanish harassment is stepped up and London looks the other way.

 

They suspect British public opinion is already being prepared for a sell-out. When I met him in his elegant office - a converted former chapel with his desk where the altar used to be - Gibraltar's Chief Minister, Peter Caruana, was angry about what he sees as smears against Gibraltar and its people which have begun appearing in parts of the British media, especially unsubstantiated claims of smuggling and money-laundering.

 

They are just not true, he insists, and are 'a politically motivated attempt to besmirch us'.

 

He is hurt and worried by the recent tone of the British Foreign Office. He has always assumed Gibraltar's constitution - promising no change of sovereignty without a democratic vote - was a genuine choice. Now he wonders.

 

'If you could choose to remain British at your peril, it would be morally indefensible,' he told me.

 

But he is baffled at a process which is aimed at reaching a conclusion by next summer; which seems certain to involve some loss of British sovereignty over Gibraltar and which is bound to be rejected by the Rock's people.

 

'There has to be some other purpose to the process,' he explained. He fears that what is intended is to do a deal in the knowledge that it will be voted down - and then to put it to a referendum. He calls this 'making us choose between something that is unacceptable to us, or unspecified consequences'.

 

Mr Caruana - a youthful 45-year-old father of six - says that, if this is the plan, it will not work. 'The people of Gibraltar will not barter their British sovereignty. There is no amount of intimidation, harassment - or inducement - which will lead them down that road. We will organise soup kitchens before we accept that.' In this very British place, where older values of doggedness and determination survive perhaps more strongly than they do in the land from which they sprang, these are serious words.

 

It would be a grim day for Britain's standing in the world if they ever needed to be put into practice.

 

But why is it Britain which is in retreat and failing to defend a just cause? Why is it Britain which has begun talks with Spain in which it has conceded the main issue in advance? Why are we so keen to protect the rights of Kosovars and Bosnians, even to build a democracy in Kabul where we are not wanted, but anxious to dump Gibraltar, where we are wanted and liked?

 

The answer may lie in Mr Blair's visit to Nuremberg last week. There, too, a British politician was seeking to placate a powerful neighbour increasingly irritated by our independent ways. Almost incredibly, he chose that beautiful but sinister city, forever linked with Europe's shameful return to the Dark Ages, to make his most fervent declaration of love for European unity. It would be 'backward and self-defeating' for Britain to isolate itself, he alleged, as he proclaimed that our destiny lay as a full partner in a more closely integrated continent.

 

If he does not even want Britain to be British, what possible hope is there for poor little Gibraltar?’

 

 

An Interesting Article About the Sixties Generation

In my much-maligned (mostly by people who refuse actually to read it) book ‘The War We Never Fought’, I argued that there is now a constituency in this country for drug decriminalisation. It is a constituency of the influential, of the 60s generation come to power and influence.

 

I thought this was self-evidently true, and was very struck by the tragic case of Brian Dodgeon, the University lecturer whose store of illegal drugs was found by teenagers holding an unsupervised  party in his house, one of whom died after taking ‘ecstasy’ tablets she found there.

 

Mr Dodgeon is obviously full of remorse. He was badly injured some months ago after jumping off a Motorway bridge, and he tearfully apologised , in the Coroner’s Court, to the parents of the girl who died, Isobel Jones-Reilly.

 

The Coroner spoke to him sharply for leaving the teenagers unsupervised. Well, I don’t have a full transcript of what the Coroner said, and in separate  proceedings Mr Dodgeon has been given a suspended prison sentence after admitting drug possession. But it still seems to me that the issue is not really one of supervision, but about whether University lecturers in their sixties should keep and use illegal drugs in their homes. My view is that it is utterly morally wrong. But I know that the law is a good deal less interested than it pretends to be, and I tend to think that this weakens the moral barriers to such behaviour.

 

I suspect that this behaviour is fairly normal among people of Mr Dodgeon’s sort - vaguely leftish big city employees of vaguely leftish publicly-financed cultural and educational bodies. And I think that sympathy for such things, even among those who no longer use drugs themselves,  runs wider still. That’s what I said in my book, to explain the near-silent, but enormous political power of the decriminalisation lobby.

 

Now, in an article by Carol Sarler in Saturday’s ‘Times’ (3rd August 2013, which is behind a pay-wall and which I therefore cannot reproduce in full or link to) I have found a very interesting statement of the attitude of the Sixties generation (now, confusingly, in their sixties) towards drugs and the law.

 

Ms Sarler, whom I know slightly, and who I should say writes quite often for broadly conservative newspapers and magazines,  was discussing the political shift in Uruguay, which appears to be moving towards open decriminalisation of cannabis. Drug legalisers get terribly excited about such things, as they have about a similar development in Portugal whose outcome is much disputed. Yet they apparently cannot (or perhaps will not) see what is in front of their noses –namely the much more extensive decriminalisation of drugs, covertly permitted in this - much bigger and closer -  country.  They still co-operate with the politicians in the pretence that the British drug laws are sternly enforced.

 

Is this conscious? It certainly helps keep drugs more or less legal, and allows the police and courts to continue to fail to punish their possession effectively. Had the chattering classes been pointing out for the past 40 years that the laws are largely unenforced, and reading the Wootton and Runciman reports more carefully, they would long ago have realised that ‘prohibition’ did not exist. So whatever bad consequences we now have flow from ready availability of drugs, rather than from heavy-handed prevention.

 

But they don’t point this out. In fact the introduction of the ‘Cannabis Warning’ as the main police response to detected cannabis possession (their response to *suspected* possession appears to be to hope it will go away) passed virtually without coverage or discussion. This silence about a huge change in the law is not surprising, as this amendment to the Act was made by the police themselves, without Parliamentary authorisation, let alone the submission of the policy to the voters in any party manifesto.

So I tend to assume that most of those who pontificate on the matter simply aren’t interested in the facts, and continue to live in a 1960s world of stern drugs squads and young men and women doing hard-labour in broad-arrow-splattered convict suits for possessing small quantities of dope. It wasn’t really true in the 1960s. It certainly isn’t now (see my book). But they want to believe it, so they do.  

 

Ms Sarler wrote in the Journal of Record ‘…what matters is less the unfortunate consequences of taking the drug than the unfortunate consequences of outlawing it.’

 

She says that there was tough enforcement when cannabis use rocketed in the 1970s, even for allowing your premises to be used for its consumption. This is more or less true of the very early 1970s, but by 1973 it was over. The law on using premises was overturned in a decisive court case, and I think cancelled in the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act as well. Then the 1971 Act, replacing the previous Dangerous Drugs Act, and coming into effect during 1972, separated cannabis from the other common drugs and began a long process of reducing penalties for its possession, bit by bit. Lord Hailsham (then Lord Chancellor) told magistrates quite specifically, in October 1973, to stop sending people to jail for simple possession of cannabis.

 

Anyway, Ms Sarler’s point is larger than this. She writes of ‘those of us who perfected the art of rolling a joint’ while for some reason holding a Leonard Cohen album, then points out that many of these joint-rollers came from among students (then a much more privileged group than now) and, very soon, they were climbing career ladders.

 

She writes : ‘By the early 1980s conservative estimates had three million of us, largely young professionals, ushering in our nascent dinner-party years by passing the Joint around the route once taken by the port.

 

‘That is three million people born mainly to families that for centuries had prided themselves on their propriety — and here we were, our collective bum on the naughty step. No longer were we instinctively on the side of the police; we called them "pigs" and "fuzz" and the local copper to whom my father would routinely tip his hat was faced, one short generation later, by my sullen antipathy.’

 

She associates this with a ‘counter-culture of defiance’ , and argues that this ‘counter-culture’ was made stronger by the shared illegality of drug taking in this sector of society.

 

I couldn’t say. I had been a puritan Leninist at University, despising ( as I do now) drug takers for their zonked passivity and lack of self-discipline. And by the time she describes I was beginning the long process of growing up.

 

But not all my contemporaries were.  Ms Sarler writes ‘Because no matter how virulent the selective amnesia of many of the powerful might be when media inquisition turns to past drug use, the fact is that the people with whom I sat at those early dinner parties are now in positions of influence. And time and again they prove that the enduring effect of those years has nothing to do with ancient spliffs and everything to do with the severing of a historically presumed connection between the professional classes and forces of law, order and authority.’

 

I’m not wholly convinced by this myself. I think the spliffs were an essential, almost sacred rite of admission to the new cult of selfishness and personal autonomy  that rules our country (‘Nobody tells me what I can and cannot put into my body!’ Etc etc etc). I think the taking of this drug is central to the rejection of the Protestant ethic which is now almost total in our society.

 

In her most startling sentence (I do urge you to find your way to the article) , she seems to me to give a clue to the whole basis of the new orthodoxy. She says ‘…speaking strictly for myself, I still unrepentantly adhere only to laws that happen to suit my purpose.’

 

I think this is an astonishing thing to say, if you live in a civilization based on the rule of law. But I do not think it is that uncommon for educated, influential people to think this. And I am grieved to know it.  

Don't blame immigrants – they aren't the ones wrecking Britain

This is Peter Hitchen's Mail on Sunday column

The Government’s pretence of being resolute and decisive on immigration is a lie. It is almost as bad as New Labour’s secret decision to transform the country with migrants.Do they really think that hiring a couple of stupid publicity vans, fraudulently claiming that illegal migrants are in serious danger of arrest and deportation, will fool anybody? Alas, they do.Will you be fooled? I beg you not to be. I beg you, instead, to be angry and vengeful, and to make that revenge hurt, to vote UKIP as often as you can, to destroy the wretched ‘Conservative’ Party which so insults your intelligence.

It is because he knows that you are rightly worried about immigration that David Cameron is engaged on his slippery and dishonest propaganda campaign. He personally couldn’t care less about the problem.
It doesn’t threaten his job or push his wages down. It doesn’t alter his neighbourhood beyond recognition, trapping him in a place where he no longer feels welcome or at ease.
As he doesn’t know what Magna Carta means, and has never heard of the Bill of Rights, I think we can safely say he’s not that worried about the disappearance of our once-beloved culture of law and liberty.

He's even got a Minister – Nick Boles – whose job it is to destroy the countryside. If Britain becomes a featureless concreted-over province in a Multiculti Euroland, he won’t care.
He’ll still be rich enough to afford peace and space, when they have become impossible dreams for the rest of us.
For him, and those like him among the Relaxed Rich, immigration means cheap nannies and cheap restaurants.
For his friends in business it means cheap and easily bullied workers. For his friends in New Labour (whose heir he is and whose seat in power he is  keeping warm), it means even more.
Unlike Mr Cameron, the Blairites knew what they were doing when they opened our ports to all who came.

A secret government paper, circulated among Ministers in October 2000 (but censored before being released a year later), revealed their aim was to ‘maximise the contribution of migration to the Government’s social and economic objectives’.
What were those objectives? It’s easy to guess, looking at this collection of 1960s campus revolutionaries, spiced up with unrepentant ex-Trotskyists and ex-Communists, and cheered on by the anti-British London media classes.
But in fact we know. A typical London liberal and New Labour speechwriter, Andrew Neather, boasted about it  in October 2009  and then wished  he hadn’t.
He burbled about how immigration had been ‘highly positive’ for ‘middle-class Londoners’. He wrote: ‘It’s not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners – although frankly it’s hard to see how the capital could function without them.’
He was even franker: ‘But this wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London’s attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.
It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it’s pretty much unimaginable for us to go back.’

That’s an interesting use of ‘us’, there. He didn’t mean you, I don’t think. But above all came this admission from the heart of government, where Mr Neather once worked.
Controversial: Adverts have been driven around London on vans to encourage illegal immigrants to go home
The opening of our ports had ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.
Even this apostle of modernity was a bit worried. ‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.
‘Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing .  .  . there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.’
I happen to think this brief glimpse of the truth was the most important political revelation of our time. I believe the ideas behind it still rule.
And in case you’re still fooled by Mr Cameron’s disgraceful pretence, take a look at the Commons Public Administration Committee report on the Government’s noisy claims to have cut immigration. It is devastating. It shows that the figures used by Ministers to claim they are closing the doors are little better than guesswork.

Migration into this country, legal and illegal, continues apace. The transformation of Britain into somewhere else accelerates.
The official propaganda about economic benefits is mostly tripe (see an excellent analysis in Ed West’s powerful new book The Diversity Illusion). The pressure on schools, GPs, hospitals, housing and transport is huge and growing.
We have been betrayed. It is not the fault of the migrants, with whom we must seek to live in harmony. But those responsible, in all the major parties, must be punished for their lies.

We were fooled once. It  will be our shame if we are fooled again.

***************************************************
 
At last... Prezza's found a job he's good at

Now we know what John Prescott was born to be – a big fat PC Plod, directing the traffic.
His performance on point duty the other day – pictured left – was obviously the fulfilment of a lifetime dream.
What a pity he ended up in the Cabinet instead, for him and us.

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

Please let this latest grievous murder of a defenceless child not be used – yet again – as an excuse for snatching children from innocent families without evidence.
Social workers who repeatedly miss real cases should be treated with caution when they level charges, not assumed to be right.

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

Have you noticed how many public figures have started ending their sentences with the meaningless phrase ‘going forward’?
Is it a coded signal to their alien controllers? Listen out for it and you’ll be amazed how common it is.

Be very afraid.

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

Why don’t the windbags target Cairo?

If we admit that the Egyptian military coup IS a military coup, then the US, by law, has to cancel its multi-billion-dollar subsidies to Cairo.
Politicians and diplomats simply refuse to state the  truth, which nobody in the ‘West’ is allowed to acknowledge.

The Egyptian junta is a murderous military regime installed  by violence. It kills its own people in very large numbers. The generals had a good long look at the Arab democracy we all said we wanted, and snuffed it out. Secretly, the West was pleased.
I couldn’t care less, personally.  But where now is William Hague, the scourge of Syria? And David Cameron, the man who overthrew Colonel Gaddafi?
Or come to that, the capering, grinning Blair creature who overthrew Saddam? And the BBC, many of whose journalists wildly applauded the Arab Spring?
I hear no talk of a British intervention in Egypt, and I am glad. But a great deal of self-abasement is called for from these moralising windbags, and we should demand it every time they show their faces.

 

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

Not a Very United Kingdom - the Ukay Today

Here’s an interesting by-product of an argument I recently had on Twitter, about our shameful national surrender to the IRA in 1998.

 

When I discussed the Northern Ireland issue with American supporters of the IRA (and there were many) there were a couple of ways of stopping them in their tracks. One was to mention the amazing voyage of Sean Russell, the former IRA Chief of Staff who offered his services to the Third Reich in 1940, when its nature could not possibly be in any doubt, and was trained in the latest explosive techniques before being sent back to Ireland in a U-Boat.

 

What deeds he might have done with Hitler at his back we shall never know, for he died aboard U-65 (which had no doctor on board) and was buried at sea. He wasn’t  a fussy man. He’d co-operate with anyone to do down the English.  In 1926 he’d been to Moscow to buy weapons from the Bolsheviks. If he’d been around today, who knows who he might have asked for help? Colonel Gadaffi, obviously (but his successors in the IRA thought of that) . But perhaps North Korea too.

 

 

Anyway,  consorting with the National Socialists doesn’t tend to put you on the right side of the debate among Liberal Americans, and I remember one noted Irish-American Congressman trying very hard (but not hard enough) to shout me down when he realised I was going to mention Sean Russell’s trip to Berlin during a debate on live TV back in 1994. I have no doubt he knew all about it. By the way, Mr Russell got himself detained in Detroit by the US Secret Service, during George VI’s visit to the USA in 1939, and was then supported by lots of Irish American Congressmen, who must later have hoped that the incident would be quietly forgotten.

 

There’s a statue to Mr Russell in Dublin, just to show that his particular brand of Republicanism  does not lack sympathisers to this day, alas.  Someone, at this stage, will list for me all the many wrongs done by Britain in Ireland. I acknowledge and regret them, and – as I many times say here – sympathise with the patriotic feelings of Irish people, as any British patriot must. But one lot of wickedness never yet justified or excused another, and if I condemn the evil done by my country, then it seems to me that it is reasonable for me to ask Irish men and women to condemn the wicked acts done in the name of theirs.

 

My other favourite weapon was to ask Irish Americans (who railed against Irish Unionists as ‘occupiers’, settlers’ and so forth, and never ceased to complain that they had been planted’ in Ireland to sustain British rule) , where in the USA they lived, and if they knew which Native American nations (or Mexicans, or Spanish-Americans) had dwelt there before they arrived.

 

The point of course is that the timescales are not that dissimilar. If the Irish Unionists aren’t entitled to live in Ireland, because they are relatively new arrivals installed by force (one of the fiercest and cruellest generals in the wars against the Native Americans was Phil Sheridan, son of immigrants from County Cavan) , then most Americans, likewise, aren’t proper Americans.

 

Alternatively, the reasonable response, that these displacements were a long time ago and can’t reasonably be reopened now without doing more harm than good, applies just as much in Ireland as it does in Massachusetts or Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York,  or California (all of these states with large Irish-American populations). Something similar can be said about the Jewish colonisation of the Holy Land, which began in the 19th century not long after the British colonisation of Australia and New Zealand. And this is not to mention the great transfers of population (attended by much horror) during the wars between Greece and Turkey in the post Great War era, and during the implementation of the Potsdam Agreement after 1945, not to mention the partition of India,  around the time Israel was founded. It seems clear to me that those who wish to reopen or perpetuate such evils are extremely wicked. The best thing to do is to recognise the reality and seek a wise compromise. This isn’t always easy (see below) . But it can be done, qwith care and thought.

 

The question then comes up of what the fate of Irish Unionists is likely to be in a state in which, deep down, many of their fellow-citizens may doubt their legitimacy as Irishmen and women. The general view is that they’ll be tolerated as a picturesque minority. We’re told, for instance, (and I believe it) that Orange Parades are unmolested picturesque events in various parts of the Republic and that their traditions will be respected in the new multiculti postmodern Ireland.

 

Well, I suppose that this is possible. It’s certainly true that the Roman Catholic church is not the force it was, and neither, for that matter, is Presybterian Protestantism. But, as I point out when told that the Northern Irish conflict is a religious one, the great confrontation from 1969 to 1998 , from Burntollet Bridge to Bloody Sunday and Warrenpoint and then on to Omagh, was never truly about religion. As the rocks flew and the rubber bullets whistled back, and the bombs burst and the drums beat, nobody (to my recollection) was arguing about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Justification by Faith Alone, the validity of prayers for the dead, the existence of Purgatory,  the Authority and Infallibility of the Pope and the veracity of the Immaculate Conception.

 

It was and remains an ethnic conflict, fought under religious badges but not for religious reasons. And wherever one side or the other has been triumphant, the consequences for the losing side have been bad. Any sentient person must acknowledge that Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland were severely discriminated against during the rule of Stormont. In housing, employment, policing, justice and voting, the Roman Catholics were a deprived and unfairly treated minority. The ‘B-Special’ police force was used on occasion to oppress them with lawless violence. It was only when this got out of hand in 1969 that the British government intervened, eventually imposing the direct rule which eventually brought fairness, because neither side was in charge.

 

The paradox is that this discrimination was the result not of a British desire to hold on to Northern Ireland, but because of an unstated hope in London that Northern Ireland would one day somehow become part of an all-Ireland Republic. Full incorporation into Britain would have madfe this more or less impossible.   In 1921-22, it would have been perfectly easy for the British government to incorporate Northern Ireland into Great Britain,  as Wales and Scotland then were, with county councils being the highest  form of devolved government, and the Westminster Parliament supreme. This was pointedly never done. The great British political parties stayed out of Northern Irish politics, Northern Ireland remained a semi-detached, temporary and provisional part of the country (and there is strong reason to suspect that we would have handed it over to the Republic in return for an Irish declaration of war upon Germany in 1940) . It is interesting to think how we endured for so long the oddity of the official name of our country ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ ( actually adopted rather late in 1927).  There’s something suggestive of bodging and bolting on in this fussy appendage, with more syllables than the rest of the country put together.

 

Now that Scotland and Wales have their own Parliaments (and in my view are moving slowly but definitely towards becoming ‘independent’ states owing fealty directly to Brussels, rather than being linked to the EU only indirectly through London) , it would be logical to rename  our dissolving nation ‘The United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’, as all these countries, with the hilarious (but in my view fortunate) exception of England, now have their own law-making assemblies . It may not be long before we need to add London to this list, since the Livingstonian Presidential Republic of London is quite distinct from England, and is rapidly becoming more so.

 

The point here is that when direct rule was actually introduced in 1972, after it was clear that Stormont was no longer fit to be entrusted with the job, it was done so reluctantly, and with no intention of permanence. Yet the 1972-1998 period was actually rather creditable – a time during which the stupid discrimination of 1922-1972  was largely dismantled. There is no reason to suppose that it could not have been further dismantled after 1998, had ‘power-sharing’ not been introduced, replacing discrimination with the appeasement of factions under a sort of spoils system, and the exclusion from politics of the non-militant (matched by the welcoming to power of those who had been militant and more than militant).

 

But the British political class was fervently anxious to get rid of the responsibility, to stay out and get out, to scuttle from Ireland as it had scuttled in the past from India and Africa, from Cyprus and from Palestine,  busily making statements that this country had no ‘selfish’ interest in Northern Ireland, and that Northern Ireland’s continuing membership of the Ukay was based purely on the continued existence of a voting majority.

 

There’s interesting evidence of this long-felt desire to treat Northern Ireland as at best a semi-detached part of the country. Attempts to get the Conservative Party to recruit and organise in Northern Ireland, made by some English unionists in the 1980s, were met with trivial token gestures. Labour was even more reluctant. At that time it was easier to join the Labour Party in New York City than it was to do so in Belfast. Eventually, the 1998 capitulation set out in writing that Northern Ireland would be put under Dublin sovereignty as soon as a majority voted for this.  I do not think that there is any doubt that a majority could be found in the Republic for such a change, at any time. While there are good rational arguments against unification, they have no major political or media support in Dublin and would be overwhelmed by an emotional desire for unity.

 

And thus we are back where we were in 1914, trying to work out a settlement in Ireland by which neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants (to use the normal shorthand) would be placed under the unwelcome rule of the other. Northern Ireland’s Unionists will, once they are a minority, no longer be able to be Unionists, since the Union will be irreversibly dissolved and the country to which they wish to be united will have rejected them by Act of Parliament.  Their central political belief will be automatically subversive of the state they inhabit, and disdained by the state they hope to rejoin. This is not a comfortable position to be in, as many people found after the Versailles redrawing of Europe’s borders.  What is their future? Why does something tell me it will not be happy?

 

For in the past (the best guide to the future) , both sides have behaved atrociously when they have had the upper hand. My Republican critics here never pay any attention to my condemnations of Orange sectarianism and murder, however many times I make them, and however unequivocal they are. I am used to that, and merely mention it because I live in hope. But it's also true that Republicans ahve traeted Unionists very bady when they had the upper hand.  But it's not so well-known, because Ulster Unionism is not exactly a fashionable cause, and certainly lacks advocates in the USA. I urge any fair-minded person to read this 1998 article (it’s a review of a book which I have yet to read) by my friend Geoffrey Wheatcroft. It is typical of him (his ‘The Controversy of Zion’ is one of the best books ever written about Israel and Zionism) in being devastatingly just. And that is exactly why it is so powerful

IThe book is called 'Crisis and Decline – the fate of the Southern Unionists' . Geoffrey's review is here  (http://www.reform.org/site/1999/12/31/crisis-and-decline-the-fate-of-the-southern-unionists/)

 

Now, I don’t think Northern Ireland’s Unionists face the fate of their 1920s forefathers, as described here. I am absolutely sure that the modern Dublin government would not permit such things.  And I do not know (but I hope and assume) that the systematic murder of Protestant farmers’ sons in Western Ulster (mentioned in Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s review, in a reference to an NYRB article by Fintan O’ Toole which I have not yet been able to locate) has long ceased.

 

And yet I worry. I worry because it will be the poorer, less well-educated Unionists who will find it hardest to cope with the final hauling down of the Union Flag, and the poorer, less well-educated Nationalists who will perhaps be less than tactful about the new ascendancy. It will be in the relations between neighbours, in the schools and in the workplaces, that the new arrangement will make itself felt.

 

I know, of course, that non-sectarian direct rule (beyond doubt the best solution to this) is dead and gone, and Britain beaten in all but name, and the Union over in all but name. But I think those in charge of these matters, in London and Dublin,  should be thinking very carefully over how this is to be managed, or it may be that we shall live to see the Irish Army firing plastic bullets into angry crowds on the Shankill Road.   

A Few Responses on Monarchy and Inheritance

I don’t recall making any recommendations in my two articles on monarchy, democracy and liberty. Yet  I find a number of people telling me what I call for, or 'seem' to call for. I've mentioned here earlier the use of the word 'seems' to mean ' I have made this up, and have no evidence for it' .

 

Perhaps I should point out again that everything I write is now done for the sake of argument, and because I think it especially necessary to keep truth alive in an age of lies.  I'm not advocating policies for immmediate implementation. I long ago discovered that those who refuse to conform to conventional wisdom are ruthlessly excluded from decision-making, or from any activity that might influence it. Unless I have wholly misread the signs, I have no realistic hope of influencing practical events. I am interested only in the much more important matter of what is true, and what is right, and what is just.

 

So I am not invited to the many private and select London dinners for prominent columnists where they may meet and exchange thoughts with the powerful, or the would-be powerful. And quite right too, for my ideas are so out of step with theirs that it would only make them and me unhappy. So you will not see, in my columns or blogs,  expressions of admiration for political figures whose careers I seek to advance (hoping to benefit myself from that advance). Nor will you see me float some policy proposal, as if I had thought of it myself, in the hope of making myself useful to powerful persons from whom I will then expect and receive future favours.

 

I am not temperamentally suited to this sort of thing, but , alas, it is what modern political journalism is.

 

But you may be sure that much of what you read in British newspapers and magazines results from such relationships, or from the cruder, more simple bargains (gossip and 'new' stories, recounted in such a way as to help the guest’s career,  in return for food and wine) which take place every day at lunchtime in London’s costlier restaurants.

 

Having discovered that dissent from this world leads only to abuse and ignorant defamation, and having realised that my hopes of influencing events from outside were meagre, I concluded that my job could best be described as that of obituarist.  I am writing the obituary of Britain, in the hope that future generations, somewhere else, will be able to work out why and how a happy, prosperous and peaceful civilisation committed a long, slow suicide. It’s interesting in itself, and might just possibly prevent any repetition, though I doubt it, as the main lesson of history is that nobody learns any lessons from history.

 

As with all obituarists (this was particularly noticeable in the case of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother), I have to wonder whether I will outlive my subject. I rather hope that I won’t, as I have no great wish to see or experience what follows Britain final dissolution.

 

But I really am not arguing for solutions.

 

So claims such as Mr Marthews’s ‘You seem to argue that it is a straight choice between the idea of election and hereditary systems.’ Are baffling to me. I have said no such thing, and believe no such thing. Rather I  have  sympathetically portrayed the idea of a mixed constitution (such as we and the USA used to have, before we developed our strange obsession with universal suffrage democracy) , in which inheritance, tradition and law all help to restrain the dangerous force of the people’s manipulated will. For there will always be people who seek to manipulate that will, and are good at it.

 

Then there’s Mr Parsons, who misunderstands me in a  different way. He says ‘Although a conservative by nature, Peter, I am unable to share your enthusiasm for our monarchy, mainly because it promulgates the deception that it is the ultimate defender of our way of life and nationhood.’ What enthusiasm is this? I defend the institution of constitutional monarchy, not the individual who wears the Crown.  I am sure I have in the past criticised the present Monarch for her endorsement of political correctness in a Christmas broadcast, her endorsement of the 1998 surrender to the IRA and her general failure to challenge the EU’s extinction of British sovereignty. And I think I have attacked the Prince of Wales, for marrying a person with a living husband, which he cannot do according to the rules of the Church of which he hopes to be head, and also for his craven decision to cut off a planned contact with me on the advice of his PC spin-doctors. I have no ‘enthusiasm’. I defend the institution, because it is my duty to do so, whatever I think of those who personify it.

 

It’s a similar duty that impels me, from time to time, to make the case for the death penalty - not because I have the slightest hope that my arguments will be heeded and the penalty restored, but because the ‘case’ which is produced against it is an insult to the intelligence.  

 

The same goes for ‘gun control’. I have no desire to own a gun, and wouldn’t own one if it were lawful for me to do so. But the arguments for banning law-abiding persons from owning guns are so bottomlessly stupid that I can’t sit by and let them go unchallenged.  I did at one stage set these two arguments aside, in the hope of gaining a greater audience for my wider case for liberty . ( I dropped chapters on these issues from ‘The Abolition of Liberty’). But I regretted the decision. It did no good.

 

This (and my general willingness to say what I believe,  regardless of whether it makes me popular) has nothing to do with my hopes, slender as they are, of being elected to Parliament, as one contributor suggests. (The current rise of UKIP, though faltering, makes any such thought particularly futile. I wouldn’t want to stop UKIP doing the maximum damage to the Tories).

 

 I would scorn to be elected by concealing my opinions on anything. If I were ever to be within reach of winning an election, my enemies would be bound to search through my rather large body of published works looking for ways to smear me. Apart from those things on which I’ve clearly changed my mind (particularly the viability of the Tory Party , which I had not dismissed at the time I wrote ‘the Abolition of Britain’ ),  I would be absolutely bound to defend everything I had said. I can easily imagine the ways in which my writings could and would be misrepresented by my enemies, in this case. To object to that would be, as Enoch Powell once said ‘like a sailor complaining about the sea’. But it would, even so, be a rough sea, which I would enjoy navigating.

 

Somebody rather presumptuously calling himself ‘Oliver’ (whose great namesake would have laughed at such nursery twaddle) plainly hasn’t read a word that I have written before commenting ‘You can be a slave if you want. You can look up to your superiors and do whatever you are told. You can renounce the right to question and criticize those who govern you. But to do so is babyish. It is a mindset belonging to children who are still being weaned by their parents. I cherish my right to vote. For I am an adult. I want responsibility. I want to have my say in the government of my country. That is maturity. To want to go back to when our supposed betters did everything for us is childish. We all need to grow up and take more responsibility for things. That includes deciding the government.’

 

He really thinks that a scrawled ‘X’ on a ballot, maybe ten times in his lifetime, each time endorsing the selection of somebody who has a) been picked by a closed elite and will b) be the obedient servant of the executive in Parliament, is an expression of liberty and self-government. I have read Ladybird books which expound a sounder grasp of the British constitution and its workings.

 

Yet on the basis of this he asserts that he has the same entitlement to a share in how the country is governed as a thoughtful, informed and educated person, who had actually taken the trouble to understand the workings of our system .  

 

The amazing thing is that he is right, and he does.

 

I am accused of wanting to take people’s votes away, though I have never expressed any such wish, and have not voted myself for many years, so why would I want to take anyone else’s away?

 

But I did once mention Nevil Shute’s interesting idea (set out in his novel ‘In the Wet’) of giving extra votes to people who had earned them by achievement and experience. This would probably be the only way of achieving a more informed suffrage, but even this would be extremely difficult to get past a political class who know that their freedom to bribe and manipulate (and hence much of their power) would be gravely threatened by such a system.

 

Mr Lewis Newburn asks interestingly ‘Could you clarify, Mr Hitchens, if you support inheritance of titles by the eldest daughter?’.

 

This needs to be answered on several levels.  I believe that special arrangements have been made ( I think the best-known  example was of the late Lord Portal)for allowing the title to continue through the female line where no male heir exists. I can see nothing wrong with this in itself if someone wants a title to endure. But since he asks, this is one of those points at which the incompatibility of old and new societies makes itself felt.

 

Inheritance and binding marriage are of course deeply linked, and a female heir (see Queen Elizabeth I) is placed in a dilemma if she lives in a world where such things are still taken seriously (of course, we don’t live in such a world, but it’s still interesting) .

 

If she marries, her children will normally bear the family name of her husband, and succeed to his titles, not hers.  It was his fear of this problem (he could not get a male heir) which drove Henry VIII to seek the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, which changed the history of the world. The  arrangements by which Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II married men who were not themselves Kings and could be content with the position of Prince Consort would not have been possible in the time of Elizabeth I, and was only feasible under a constitutional monarchy. Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain greatly alarmed the nobles of England, and led to rebellion. Had she borne a male heir to Philip, who knows what might have happened?

 

See also the curious arrangement of William and Mary, a unique co-regency designed to legitimate William’s ascent to the throne, which would otherwise have been little better than a putsch. Mary was the daughter of the deposed James II, as was her sister Anne, last of the Stuarts. Both Mary and Anne, whose father James II was a Roman Catholic,  were brought up as Protestants on the instructions of Charles II, that old fox, who could see that if they were brought up as Roman Catholics it would bring on a constitutional crisis during his reign.

 

As it happened, the crisis came in James’s reign, largely because of the birth of a Roman Catholic male heir, the future Old Pretender, on 10th June 1688 . In these events are rooted the supposedly ‘archaic’ rules about male primogeniture and Roman Catholicism which surround the British royal succession to this day.  They are principally about the supremacy of Parliament and Law, but of course their enemies don’t portray them as such.  And they are outward signs of things long gone, so their destruction is purely symbolic.

 

People such as me, who take pleasure in old and hallowed things, might brush away a tear as we see them stripped away by oafs, much as we would mourn the needless cutting down of ancient trees or the mutilation of a lovely old building.  But our reasoning minds know it does not really matter. The battle was lost long ago, and on another field.  If the British Royal family became Roman Catholics tomorrow it really wouldn’t alter the destiny of the country. Continental rule, the thing the Act of Succession was aimed at preventing, arrived through the secular European Union, not through the Pope.  

 

Those who want to get rid of these old things wish to destroy them because they hate the survival of tradition, because they feel restrained by it in general and instinctivelywish to smash it when they see it. It is only because they want to destroy them that I am tempted to defend them. If they desire something, it is likely to be worse than what we have.

 

But the rules are different in the peerage. In the traditional aristocracy, marriages are usually made with other aristocrats for dynastic or property purposes, or at least with them in mind. If a female heir does not marry and has no issue, her line ends and the title and lands pass to distant relatives or possibly to the Crown (the same happens if a male heir has no issue) . If she marries, and has issue, the title also passes to another. But if a male heir marries and has male issue, the line continues, and the estate is not absorbed by others or divided  and subdivided until it vanishes. The estate is important because it is upon this property that the independence of the individual rests. If he has no property, he is much more easily bought by a salary or a sinecure.

 

This arrangement is pretty hard on younger sons as well as on daughters, I should add. It would be a mistake to see its intention as being anti-female.

 

But this is why the nobility (and the monarchy) have tended to desire male heirs. For those to whom this does not matter, it does not matter. For those to whom it does matter, it matters a great deal. I am not attempting to persuade, merely to explain that ,  whatever you think about this issue, it is important and it has had important implications. It is not just a matter of taste, like preferring Classical architecture to Gothic, or Irish whiskey to Scotch whisky.

 

In the world of inheritance, private property,  lifelong marriage and tradition, male primogeniture remains important. But we have decided to do away with such a world, and so find ourselves in the world of the mighty state, of family and private life being weak and easily dissoluble, of property being at the whim of the state rather than absolute, and the skilfully manipulated will of the people conferring increasingly absolute power on a cold and fabulously wealthy new elite with no roots in the land they rule, and certainly lacking in the ancient virtues of duty and humility.  All very liberated, though.  

Another Student Interview with PH

 Did I really say 'gotten'?

 

http://www.yorkvision.co.uk/features/an-interview-with-peter-hitchens/27/07/2013

 

COMING SOON! A full-length post on Monarchy, Democracy and Liberty