Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 264

Monarchy and Liberty Part 1 - the Threat to the Crown

I take as my text for today Mr Peter Charnley’s accusation that I have sounded ‘a ridiculous klaxon of ill-timed negativity. A negativity based upon assumptions which are blatantly false.’

 

Wasn’t it Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew who railed against the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’? Well, look what happened to him. What is this alleged ‘negativity’? What is the ‘positivity’ to which it is opposed? Who precisely decides which is which? And how does he decide? The truth is there is no such thing in a free country. Only despots require everyone to be ‘positive’ and cheerful all the time. This guff reminds me of the happy wake-up music they used to play at breakfast-time in Soviet hotels, just to ensure everyone was cheerful about the coming day in Utopia (and to help pick out those who were not sufficiently positive).

 

 Mr Charnley is another of those people who seems to think that disagreeing with him is some sort of misdeed. Here and on Twitter, I repeatedly encounter people who denounce what I have said as wicked or wrong, or claim to have been ‘offended’ by it. Or they go on and on about how gloomy and miserable I am , completely failing to see that private happiness and unhappiness have little to do with critical discontent at the general state of affairs in this country. I don’t regard it as the job of the government, the BBC or the EU to make me happy. And, like most Englishmen of my generation, I am quite capable of enjoying myself in a number of apparently very sombre ways. Few things give me more pleasure than a really gloomy Remembrance Day parade in the drizzle. I believe quite a lot of people have fun watching their local or national sporting teams ground into the mud by their opponents.

 

This attitude -that dissent is in some way bad, sad or offensive -  is just silly. A free, thoughtful person is not threatened or wounded by the expression of a contrary opinion. He is not made sad by another’s discontent. He is either able to rebut it, or provoked by it into thought, and changes his mind. The expression of an opinion (in itself) can never be wrong. The limits of speech lie at the borders of incitement to violence or crime, and nowhere else.

 

On the other hand it can be actively dispiriting to engage in debate with people who just don’t know how to argue, and lack the logical skills and generosity to rebut or accept a point of argument.  Generally they become personally unpleasant at some point or other. I imagine it is much the same for a chess grandmaster, playing against unskilled opponents who angrily turn the board over when they lose, rather than trying to work out why and how they lost.

 

But it is much easier to argue properly than it is to play chess. All one needs is the relevant facts, as clearly referenced as possible, and the logical consequences of them.

 

So, to the Monarchy. Perhaps Mr Charnley would like to tell me which bits of what follows are 'blatantly false'.

 

Apart from Mr Charnley,  there were a number of other interesting if unproductive responses. Two groups particularly struck me. The first expressed incredulity that anyone could believe that the Queen was divinely appointed. A number also confused this with the constitutional theory of the Divine Right of Kings,  which has not been current for 450 years, and is, as Charles I might have said,  ‘ a clean different thing’.

 

The Christian believer (as we have discussed ad infinitum elsewhere) attributes the workings of the universe to Divine Providence, rather than to accident. From this flows a belief that, if a person is born into the succession to a throne, and actually succeeds, this is the consequence of Divine Providence. Theories as to how pervasive this Providence is, and how it can or cannot be frustrated by human will, vary. A Calvinist friend of mine jokes (though actually he is being quite serious) about the Calvinist preacher who falls down a flight of stairs and is badly bruised. He gets up, dust himself down and says ‘ Well, I’m glad that’s over’.

 

There were certainly quite a few people who believed well into the late 18th century that the heirs to the Stuart line were the rightful Kings of England, and the Hanoverians usurpers.

 

But, more importantly for this argument, this belief in the monarch being divinely chosen was very common within living memory. As Brian Groom wrote in the Financial Times of 1st June 2012, ‘This was a deferential, conservative society in which 35 per cent of people thought the Queen had been directly chosen by God, according to an opinion poll in 1956.’

 

Read that again carefully. In 1956, 57 years ago, 35% of adults held a view of God and Monarchy which is plainly astonishing to several of my contributors,  and which nobody ( except me) is prepared to explain or defend.

 

Yet many other contributors, and several critics on Twitter excoriated me for my prediction that, 70 years from now, the monarchy would have gone because its last remaining foundation – popularity – would have gone too. One even claimed I had said the monarch would ‘soon’ be gone. I suggested that if she thought 70 years hence was soon, she must work for the railways.

 

In fewer than 60 years, a widespread belief that the Monarch is chosen by God (35% in 1956, probably closer to 90% in 1914 if anyone had asked) has almost entirely disappeared and is viewed with shock and incomprehension. I do not have the impression that the pace of change in this country has slowed down recently. How, in that case, is it unreasonable to speculate that public support for monarchy ( fickle even now) will have vanished by 2083? And, given that some many people have been complacently writing articles saying that the succession is now settled for generations to come, why is this the wrong time to raise this doubt?

 

I was also accused of being 'offensive’ or some such, for pointing out ‘The Tories, who pretend to be monarchists, would cheerfully guillotine the Queen or Prince Charles if they thought it would help them stay in office. They prove each week that there is nothing they won’t swallow, with this aim in mind.’

 

Well? On the vital issue of the hereditary peerage, the Tories buckled under New Labour pressure, and refused to defend the hereditary principle (I will explain later why they should have done. The important thing is that, faced with a chance to argue for the very principle on which monarchy is based, they ran away as fast as their little legs could carry them) . Yes, they ‘saved’ a rump of 92 hereditaries, but this was a sop granted to achieve the greater aim of ennding the hereditary House of Lords for good. The Lords is now in  a transitional state (much as Northern Ireland is), crammed with party appointees,  and I regard it as virtually certain that it will be replaced by an elected Senate in the next 10 years or so. This will make it more obvious that the monarchy is now the only part of our constitution governed by inheritance, and that Parliament and the Tory party have rejected such a principle.

 

For further evidence of Tory unreliability on matters of tradition and patriotism, let us recall: The Tory destruction of the armed forces, both now and during the Macmillan and Thatcher eras; The Tory support for the surrender to the IRA, preceded by their willingnss to talk secretlyto that body; the Tory failure to argue on principle for Unionism in Scotland or Wales; the Tory role on joining the Common Market, in joining the Single Market and signing the Maastricht Treaty; the Tory failure to replace the Royal Yacht Britannia as 1997 approached, thus making it easy for the Alastair Campbell government to scrap her, and their subsequent failure to take any serious steps to get replacement;  the Tory attack on the pillars of the British constitution, and the Tory collaboration with New Labour’s similar attack. This has gravely weakened jury trial, abolished the right to silence, done heavy damage to Habeas Corpus through detention without trial, came close to the introduction of Identity Cards .

 The Tory failure to reverse or modify the chief measures of the Jenkins cultural revolution, especially no-fault divorce, the evisceration of the criminal justice system , the nationalisation of the police and the abolition of preventive policing,  and the state attack on fatherhood; the Tory collaboration with (and failure to reverse) the destruction of the grammar schools. I might add the frequent Tory flirtation with the Murdoch press empire, which is , at the least, cool towards the monarchy. And, on the point of tradition and history,  the Tory abolition, in 1974 of the beloved English counties. If I were the Windsors, I wouldn’t rely on them for a moment.

 

Actually, if I were Fred Bloggs in a back street in Derby, I wouldn’t rely on them for a moment. Past behaviour is the best guide you’ll ever get to future performance.

 

Labour are doggedly republican but have more sense than to say so just now. Retired Labour politicans tend to be franker than serving ones. They discussed the matter once at their London conference in 1923, and ( I looked up the minutes and am trying to trace the ‘Spectator’ article which I wrote as a result some years ago), George Lansbury told the delegates in the Queen’s Hall that he agreed with them that the monarchy should go at some point, but that this was not the right time. Labour was then seeking respectability as a national party, and its inbuilt republicanism would have been a handicap to its further growth, and its ability to supplant the Liberals. I have good reason to believe that the usual metropolitan scorn for monarchy is equally rife in the Liberal Democrats.

 

These bourgeois bohemians think it so advanced, grown-up and intelligent to be republicans. Poor dears, they have rarely thought about it. As usual, their views are formed by fashion and conformism. In Part Two, I shall explain the sound arguments for keeping the Crown.  

Monarchy and Liberty Part 2 - The Case for Inheritance

So why is Monarchy a good thing? And why isn’t it necessarily smart and freedom-loving to be a fashionable republican?

Even to discuss this involves heresy. That heresy is this: To a) doubt that we have ‘democracy’ in this country or anywhere else and b) to doubt whether ‘democracy’ , if we do or did have it, is or would be an entirely good thing.

 

Democracy, or government by universal suffrage, is a very new thing. As I have mentioned here before, neither the Cromwellians who made the English Revolution, nor the Founding Fathers of the USA, who made the American one, were keen on universal suffrage democracy. They didn’t establish it, and they mistrusted it. Cromwell even mistrusted parliaments  as such, and ended up as a military dictator.

 

Since these are the principal practical founders of the republican idea in the Anglosphere in which we live, I think we have to pay attention to what they did in practice. Continental Republicans, who largely came to power through mob slaughter or total national defeat in war (and who murdered each other) , have little to say to us, in my view .

 

Before the French Jacobins usurped the idea of freedom, most Continental radicals in the 18th century admired Britain for its liberty, and for what they regarded as its near-republican form of government, namely a limited monarchy forced to rely for its income and its ultimate authority on a bicameral Parliament, one half hereditary and the other half chosen by a small elite.  They also noted the extensive freedom of speech and the press (though not as extensive as they would later become in the late 18th and early 19th centuries), the subjection of executive power to law through independent courts,  and the de facto separation of powers which stood in the way of autocracy. They also admired the freedom from arbitrary arrest and the safeguard against tyranny which is jury trial.

 

If they were paying attention, they understood that the 1689 Bill of Rights and the Act of Succession placed the ultimate power of king-making in the hands of Parliament.  Thus, the Monarch succeeded through heredity, but if he or she misbehaved, inheritance could be overridden by Parliament, as it had been in 1688 and would be again when Edward VIII came along. Even so, the hereditary principle had to be observed in the choice of a successor. Parliament couldn’t pick just anyone.

 

The US Constitution, as we have discussed elsewhere, (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/06/what-is-so-good-about-democracy-whats-wrong-with-libertarianism-and-who-has-the-right-to-review-what.html )

tried quite hard to mimic much of this. That is why it is now so very old-fashioned, with a monarchical President far more powerful than the head of state of any other free country with the possible exception of France (and that only since De Gaulle) and a hugely powerful judiciary.

 

There is no American equivalent of the office of Prime Minister, and there cannot be (whereas French premiers are often quite powerful).  And for the first several decades of its existence, the USA did not have universal suffrage. In many parts of the USA only 70% of adult males were qualified to vote, in the first half of the 19th century. (A reader has rightly pointed out that it was even more undemocratic, thanks to the exclusion from the ballot of the large slave population and of most of their emacipated descendants) The US Senate was originally not a directly elected body, because many of the founders admired the House of Lords and wished to emulate it, and sought to defend the Senate against the  ‘fury of democracy’. This era only ended a century ago with the passage of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, opposed by several good, liberty-loving men.

 

They could see that the unhampered will of the majority could be tyrannical. Indeed, it is democracy that is responsible for the troubling ‘Homeland Security’ legislation which has so badly curtailed American freedom. Just as democracy , the channelled and professionally inflamed will of the people used by demagogues to gain their ends, which is responsible for our own equivalent assaults on liberty. Who, in a modern democracy, dares stand up for jury trial, the right to silence, Habeas Corpus, the protection against double jeopardy and arbitrary arrest. Get into trouble in this country now and find out how little the presumption of innocence actually means, as you are swabbed for DNA and fingerprinted on arrest rather than after conviction, and in many cases face the choice between accepting fixed penalties or risking  bankruptcy by challenging the charge in the courts. These changes have been brought to you by democracy.

 

And it must always be remembered that the National Socialist tyranny came to power by democratic vote, sustained itself through plebiscites whose results may not have been particularly badly rigged (especially in the Saarland) and was governed entirely according to the Weimar Constitution (once vaunted as the freest in the world) until capitulation in 1945.

 

‘Republic’ is not in any way a synonym for freedom. All it means is an absence of monarchy. Thus, East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), Despotic China, the USSR, Apartheid South Africa and present-day North Korea are or were all republics. This does not mean that republic are automatically despotisms – just that they are not automatically paradises of liberty.

 

By contrast, the former British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which never had much in the way of democracy, was,  on its handover to the Chinese,  one of the freest and most lawful entities on Earth.

 

And of the seven longest-lasting continuously law-governed free nations on earth (Our own country, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States) most are constitutional monarchies on the British pattern.

 

Again, it would be wise to be careful about drawing too much meaning from this. But it would also be a mistake to dismiss it as unimportant. 

 

What’s so good about monarchy?

The first good thing is that it provides a barrier to majoritarian rule, or elective dictatorship. It denies politicians the grandeur of the headship of state.

 

This can be very important indeed. During the second Iraq war, it was much harder for loyal Americans to criticise their President, who was also head of state and commander in chief than it was for British people and media to criticise the Prime Minister, who as a mere head of government and party leader, was legitimately open to mockery, derision and harsh denunciation, without any suggestion of disloyalty. Something similar could be said of Hugh Gaitskell and Nye Bevan’s opposition to Anthony Eden’s Suez adventure, opposition which did much to rescue our national reputation at that awful moment.  The USA has no real Leader of the Opposition at such moments.

 

This non-political focus of loyalty is also important in the judiciary, the civil service, the police and the armed forces. Perhaps it is most important to the concept of a neutral civil service. When Richard Nixon was covering up Watergate, those who worked for him in the White House had nowhere to turn. To refuse what they feared was an unlawful order was also to defy to the embodiment of the nation, the head of state and Commander in Chief.

 

Some of you may remember the presidential way in which Mr Blair behaved in his early years in office, the grotesque fake demonstration of support , Stalinist in conception and execution, which was staged for him in Downing Street after his election victory, his reading of the lesson at Princess Diana’s funeral, the way he paraded himself in front of the crowds during the state Opening of Parliament (a day which belongs to the Queen) and the row over his attempt to muscle in on the Queen Mother’s funeral, not to mention his posing with soldiers as if they were ’his’ during the Kosovo intervention. Others may remember Margaret Thatcher’s’ unfortunate habit of turning up monarchically at the scenes of disasters. In both cases large parts of the population were repelled, and rightly. The existence of a monarch keeps this sort of thing out of the hands of politicians, and a good thing too.

 

Finally, a few words about the virtues of hereditary office. The usual wiseacre hurled Tony Benn’s old jibe at me, asking how I’d like to have a hereditary dentist.

 

To which I replied that I would like it no more than I would like to have an elected dentist.

 

We then got side-tracked into a  discussion of qualifications. But the point about political office is that it is not, unlike dentistry or even accountancy or law, a profession for which people have to be qualified.

 

But why is it so much better to be ‘elected’ than to be hereditary?

In one simple way almost all of us support the idea of inheritance, in hoping to leave what we have to our children, or to inherit from our parents. It is a perfectly good and benevolent thing, supporting continuity and peace. Aren't we pleased in some mysterious way to discover that a certain house has been in the same family for centuries? In any case, private property would be impossible without inheritance, which maintains the power and independence of family at the expense of the state, its great, bitter and jealous rival. And without private property there would be no freedom, for all would be the servants of the state.

 

What does election mean?

It means personal submission to central executive authority, the essential preliminary to the real selection process for MPs. This is not the actual parliamentary election, in which tribal voters willingly accede to the choice made for them by the machine of whatever party owns the safe seat in which most of us live.  This central control was always strong (the Tory high command tried hard to deselect Winston Churchill for opposing Neville Chamberlain in the late 1930s, and might well have succeeded if events had gone slightly differently). But in recent years , since the advent of Alastair Campbell on one side and of Michael Howard on the other, it has become even tougher.

 

The old-fashioned brutal chief whip has now been supplanted in both parties by a sort of monstering system which combines the traditional thuggish blackmail of the whips’ office with the enormous powers over the media, and so over MPs too,  of the Party’s ruthless and centralised spin operation.  

 

Those who defy the leadership can expect no mercy, in Parliament or out of it. Rare exceptions, such as Torbay’s Sarah Wollaston, selected by primary, have not prospered and will not prosper. They are too independent-minded to serve as foot soldiers in the ‘elected’ chamber Nor will the primary experiment be widely repeated.  

 

All those whose lives bring them into daily conflict know that MPs are employees of Downing Street or of the Opposition Leader’s office, and that the main influence over them is not the voters, but the leadership of their party. Favourites , tale-bearers, backstairs crawlers and toadies prosper. Free spirits suffer. The behaviour of whips and spin doctors, a mystery to the general public, is as savage as at any medieval court in the days of star chamber, except that punishment is through career damage and whispered denigration through leak and gossip, rather than by death or torture.  Why should anyone prefer the products of this system of propaganda, bullying and centralisation to the hereditary peerage? Why is the ‘elected’ (ie subservient) House of Parliament so widely assumed to be superior to the unelected and thus independent House? The only fault of the old House of Lords was that it did not rebel enough. What sort of person, knowing all this as professional politicians all do, would *want* to destroy the independent part of the constitution?

 

By contrast, in the old House of Lords, the whips were powerless head prefects, able to josh, cajole and provide free drinks, but quite unable to compel or bully.

 

I might add that a man who has from birth been brought up to the knowledge that he will one day sit in the Lords, whose father has encouraged him to watch debates from the steps of the throne, and who in the fullness of years comes to his inheritance, is probably far better qualified to make laws for the country than some oily Oxbridge careerist who sees politics as a route to fame and money. Very few normal people, let alone ordinary people, become MPs. Many of the old hereditary peers were by contrast both normal and ordinary, and in many cases had a great deal of knowledge of the world as it is. So did the life peers who sat alongside them, many of them grammar school boys and girls who had seen war, love and death face to face, and knew enough about the House of Commons not to be overawed by its pride.

 

A certain amount of democracy is a good thing, as a restraint on complacency and a way of ejecting governments when they have grown tired and barren. But any sensible country, especially one that values its liberty and its law, should make sure that democracy is restrained by tradition and heredity. Myself, I think there is a connection between the fact that we have a constitutional monarchy and the fact that we don’t have any torture chambers.

Celebrate while you can - the Windsors will be history soon

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Why does everyone assume that the royal baby born last week will one day become King? It seems most unlikely to me that the British Monarchy will last that long.

I am a keen monarchist myself and am sorry that an institution I love and revere is dying. But there is no point in pretending things are better than they are.

What actually holds it up? All the major parties long ago drove the hereditary nobles from the House of Lords. They implicitly accepted that inheritance didn’t entitle anyone to any office. It is only a matter of time before that logic takes its final step.

Nobody but me stands up for inheritance  – though there’d be no private property or liberty without it – or challenges the idea that the rigged, corrupt and closed system we humorously call ‘democracy’ is the best possible way to choose our rulers.

Hardly anyone believes in the Christian God any more – though a growing number believe in Allah – so that means they also cannot believe the Monarch is divinely chosen.

We all know that the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are crammed with republicans who are waiting for the chance to get rid of the Crown. They circle round the royal finances in the hope of working up a public demand to impoverish and humiliate the Monarch.

The Tories, who pretend to be monarchists, would cheerfully guillotine the Queen or Prince Charles if they thought it would help them stay in office. They prove each week that there is nothing they won’t swallow, with this aim in mind.

As for the Commonwealth, it is mostly made up of republics, and its remaining monarchies feel – understandably, if wrongly – that they cannot really be grown-up nations until they have their own heads of state.

All this will become much more urgent when a new reign begins. Having narrowly escaped the fury of the Diana-worshipping mob in 1997, our present Queen has won an exalted status as the nation’s favourite grandma. Yet even she has to humiliate herself from time to time to seek the favour of the masses, as she did in the Olympics opening ceremony.

But this popularity is personal to her and will not pass to her successors. It flows from the fickle emotions of the mob. The same mob is quite capable of turning on a future King. I suspect it will do so. The generations who were brought up to revere the Royal Family, in the dear domestic days of George V and his stamp collection, or of George VI’s tours of the Blitzed ruins of London, are fast departing from among us.

Nowadays royal personages employ spin doctors and hope to win public affection by following fashion and courting popularity. They cannot be blamed for doing so – if they did not they would probably have been forced from the throne before now.

But those who ride that tiger always end up inside it in the end.

Another scandal the BBC won't talk about

One of the many bad things about the BBC is the way it can prevent a scandal from catching fire, by refusing to pay attention to it.

It is using this undeserved power now.  A major development of national importance is unknown to millions, mainly  because the Corporation’s vast publicly-funded news network will not give prominent coverage to it.

The disgrace involves another state-funded, unaccountable body, the grandly titled Serious Organised Crime Agency. This body was once dubbed Britain’s FBI but is more accurately described  as Britain’s KGB. It clearly feels it has  a greater duty to the powerful than to the public.

For it refuses to disclose  the names of 102 clients – including celebrities, major corporations, banks and law firms – who used private detectives to hack phones and steal personal information. These people did much worse things than voicemail hacking. There was also police corruption, computer hacking and perverting the course of justice.

The scandal is at least as big as the phone-hacking accusations which have led to a full-scale inquiry into the press, and also to a vast police investigation, complete with dawn raids, arrests and high-profile prosecutions. It is probably bigger. Yet SOCA claims it would damage the human rights of those involved if it published their names, and might also damage the ‘financial viability’ of the companies involved.

These are extraordinary and inadequate excuses. They would never normally allow anyone to escape investigation for serious alleged wrongdoing. SOCA was not set up to practise selective justice.  It should act.

The BBC’s disgraceful behaviour fuels suspicions it is happy to see the press restricted, while remaining beyond  anyone’s control itself. To disprove  these suspicions, it should give proper airtime to one of the biggest stories of  modern times.

A slice of what makes us British ...coming to a cinema near you

Like most people, I don’t live in any of our major cities, and cannot easily go to see national theatre productions. So I am thrilled by a great new technical advance, which beams great plays, operas and ballet performances into cinemas all over the country.

Last week I was able to see Kenneth Branagh’s powerful and moving version of Macbeth, right, in this way. It may even have been better than going to the actual theatre, thanks to superb sound and plenty of close-ups.

I do hope there is a lot more of this, and that schools take advantage of it. Seeing Shakespeare’s great words actually spoken as they should be is part of being British, for that is how they lodge in the mind forever.

If more of us knew these plays, along with the Bible and the Prayer Book, we would be better people and a stronger, happier country.

An endless appetite for creating misery

For those who still thirst to intervene in Muslim countries, may I just mention that Iraq is now once again a war zone – though you hear little about it because it is now far too dangerous for Western media to visit most of that country.

More than 3,000 Iraqis have been killed in the past four months. And you can believe what you like – because there’s no independent verification – about  a major battle which took place outside Abu Ghraib prison on Sunday. But Sunni rebels claim that  hundreds of prisoners were released.

Suicide bombings are a regular event. And the vaunted ‘democratic’ government in Baghdad has almost collapsed. You’d think those who brought this about would be embarrassed. But they want to do it again in Syria and Iran.

How we despise our forebears for bowing  and scraping to the aristocracy. But we do the same to rock stars.

Leeds City Council has apologised to Bruce Springsteen for ticketing his tour trucks when they were left on double yellow lines. The tickets were ‘legitimately issued’. But thanks to ‘special circumstances’ they were cancelled.

As far as  I can see, the special circumstances were Mr Springsteen’s celebrity, and his celebrity. Oh, and his fame.

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J.Bonington Jagworth Rebutted Once More

It is amazing how sensitive the car lobby are to any sort of criticism. Because I suggest that car owners often take the selfish option, I am accused of assuming that all car owners choose to be selfish, and told heart-rending stories of how one of them stops to let toads across the road. Well, jolly good, but any cyclist on country roads sees at close quarters the proof that a lot of drivers do not take this kindly view. In an hour on any busy rural highway you can be sure to come across a grisly toll of flattened hedgehogs, dead badgers, mangled foxes, smashed pheasants and squashed rabbits, most of which would have survived if drivers had been a tiny bit less impatient and self-centred than they are. The point about cars is that they make their owners worse people than they otherwise would have been (this is certainly the case when I get behind the wheel, as I candidly confess), and unhealthier than they otherwise would have been. They rapidly get into the habit of driving when they could once have walked. They drive round for ages looking for a parking spot close to their destination, rather than parking a short way away and walking.

 

But I’m well aware that many people are forced into car ownership by the design of our cities, and have repeatedly said so.

 

Notably here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/03/could-we-manage-without-cars.html

 

I wrote then ( as I have done many times before) that car ownership is forced on people by planners who assume that cars are benevolent and good, and base our national transport policy upon car ownership.

 

I said ’It [The car] has become ‘essential’ only because it exists.  The shape of the modern city (and countryside) has, since the 1930s, been determined by the needs of the car-driving minority ( a segment of the population which always excludes the young and the old, and many of the poor).

 

Instead of clustering round railway stations and interurban or tram stops, housing sprawls in endless ribbons. The need for the flow of individual traffic (especially but not exclusively in older countries where the street pattern is determined by past settlement), is used as the pretext to scrap trams, interurban trolleys and other fast, efficient means of short-distance transport. Los Angeles and Kansas City are prime examples of this. Many US cities had elaborate systems of public transport until pressure from the motor industry and the road construction industry forced their destruction.

 

An urban shape is created which actually compels many people to use cars if they are to work, shop or get their children to school in such circumstances (one effect of universal car ownership is universal heavy traffic, hostile to children walking or cycling to school, and hostile in general to walkers or cyclists).

 

Rural communities and medium sized market towns have their rail-borne public transport withdrawn (as was done under the Beeching-Marples changes in Britain), substitute bus services are unreliable and easily cancelled,  and so their inhabitants become dependent on cars . And their goods must also be delivered by lorries (which often do not break loads, giving rise to the cynical use of enormous trucks to deliver a series of small loads to mini-supermarkets, which most inhabitants of Britain will have noticed).

 

While this is going on, governments, lobbied by oil and construction interests, embark on the building of vast nationalised superhighway systems (comically claiming that these gigantic Pharaonic state enterprises are in fact some sort of celebration of the free spirit of capitalism) . These inevitably destroy railways, which are far less generously subsidised, as the nationalised superhighways undercut railway passenger charges and railway freight charges.

 

The superhighways having created a demand for, and an expectation of fast dual-carriageway road systems in all places, these are extended into cities and towns, and into areas of countryside not populated enough to justify full-scale superhighways. In cities, these system discriminate fiercely against pedestrians and cyclists (and of course against children and the old in general) .

 

Generally they are too dangerous for cyclists to use, or for pedestrians to cross except via inconvenient bridges or unpleasant tunnels.  They rely heavily on sweeping engineering and lengthy one-way systems which are no major inconvenience for drivers with powerful engines, but hugely unfriendly to cyclists.  Anti-personnel fences are erected on the edges of roads to prevent adventurous humans from trying to cross at unregulated points. Drivers, used to speed, become increasingly reluctant to stop unless ordered to do so by lights. The old Zebra crossings are thus made generally obsolete, and replaced by light-controlled crossings, which greatly reduce the freedom of walkers to cross the road.  Road engineers approach hills with the minds of drivers, creating straight, steep approaches rather than the curving, gradual routes which are friendlier to humans without engines.

 

After about 40 years of this, the idea that anyone should travel by anything other than a car becomes positively eccentric. Employers feel entitled to assume that their employees can and will drive. They provide benefits to drivers on that basis.’

 

Somebody who knows nothing about me proclaims that I work from home. I don’t, as it happens, but do a 135-mile-a-day commute five days a week, using two bicycles (nine miles) and the train (126 miles). I travel round my home town largely by bicycle or on foot, and do the same in London. My home town, which is Oxford, is indeed very friendly to pedestrians and reasonably so to cyclists (though less so than you might think, given how many cyclists there are). Yet even so many of its inhabitants are entirely car-borne, even for very short journeys and are amazed when I tell them I have come distances of two miles or so on foot or by bike. The truth is that most drivers, if they eventually abandon their cars and try walking or cycling, are often astonished by how short distances actually are and by how little time they gain by driving.

 

I’m all in favour of tradesmen who need to carry heavy tools being able to own private vehicles, just as I’m in favour of taxis. I just think we should redesign our country to make it easier and pleasanter to use foot, bicycle, bus, tram and train, and that driving licences should be far harder to obtain, and much easier to lose (and more difficult to regain) after being convicted of bad driving.

 

I’m happy to be attacked for these opinions, but bored by being attacked for views I don’t hold and haven’t stated.

 

 

 

Peace, Cars and Gullibility - the Debate Rages On

I’ll reply to some sample comments to make general points (marking my responses ***) :

Mr ‘Nigel Falls’ (I am sorry to doubt this name, but I would equally doubt an 'Angus Shankill' or a 'Billy Crumlin') wrote : ‘I find it slightly insulting that Mr Hitchens regards us as gullible sheep duped into a political doublethink by politicians by voting for the Good Friday Agreement.’

 

***I have not, so far as I know,  used this expression. When I make the accusation of gullibility I make it mainly against those on either side of the Irish Sea who continue, when the implementation and detail of the agreement are quite clear, to maintain that it was an equitable and honourable peace agreement, rather than what it visibly was - a shameful surrender to criminal blackmail.  The repellent campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote in Northern Ireland, which seemed not to be governed by any rules of fairness, included a last-minute rock concert to try to influence the youth vote after polls showed it was tending the wrong way, and the Blair creature’s famous handrwitten ‘pledge’ (of which I still possess a copy) that there would be no prisoner releases until violence was given up for good, and that those who used or threatened violence would be excluded from government. Ho ho.

 

 

 

He also wrote :’ I would be more cautious than to say the Provisionals won the war. They too did not win a complete victory based on the long held ideals of the republican movement.’

 

***I never said their victory was complete. But it will be, thanks to this surrender, which opened the way to complete victory. The fact that Sinn Fein made a tactical accommodation simply testifies to their good sense, not to their weakness. They could have expected a total surrender, nor could any British government have granted one. It would have to be disguised and postponed to get it past the Unionist vote, and to get it past the British electorate. The success of the disguise was guaranteed by the desire of the deceived to believe a lie (this is the most reliable way of getting people to believe demonstrable rubbish. They have to want to believe it. And they do, my, how they do).

 

The true nature of the agreement is made clear by the fact that SF had to conceal the extent of their gains, whereas the British government sought to conceal the vastness of its defeat. I know of no moment in history when anyone has ever tried to claim that the cession of sovereign territory to an armed enemy is anything other than a defeat. The fact that the cession is delayed is not the point the fact that the British government is committed to irreversible handover as soon as a vote has taken place ( and the fact that this vote can be held repeatedly until cession, every seven years, but ceases to be held once cession has taken place, ought to be a clue to anyone interested in the truth).

 

 

‘I will concede that history will record they fought a successful campaign. Abhorrent as I find Adams and the methodology of the Provos the refusal of the British state to address the very real abuse and discrimination of Catholics here boosted their support base leading to the resurgence of armed republicanism.’

 

***Piffle. Direct rule got rid of most of the discrimination against Roman Catholics, especially in voting, employment and housing.

 

‘ The continued failure of the British political class to acknowledge Catholic grievances and address the state sanctioned discrimination in Northern Ireland by the Stormont government was a missed opportunity that had tragic consequences.’

 

***True enough, but he seems to have failed to notice that Direct Rule was introduced in 1972, 26 years before the Great Surrender, and the Stormont government ceased to exist at that point.

 

 Throughout history diverse political philosophers like Burke and Marx pointed this out and history will look unfavourably on this. Maybe I am one of life's optimists but However I am not as cynical as Mr Hitchens about the future. Recent figures highlight 52% Catholics want to remain in the UK and 32% want a United Ireland. So long as the mistakes of the past are not repeated by either side the emotional arguments for a United Ireland will diminish and regardless of whether he thinks the IRA won the war they will comprehensively lose out in the peace.’

 

***We shall see. My own guess is that the first vote will take place in 2022 (it would have been 2016, 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising but the economic crisis has probably made this impracticable) , on the centenary of the founding of the Free State. And that by then Protestant emigration and general demographic change will lead to a ‘yes’ vote and the transfer of sovereignty. Few would have predicted that the Unionists would have so swiftly lost control of Belfast City. Yet they did. Many younger Protestants no longer attend Universities in NI, and many of them will not return once they have left.

 

Mr William McDougall wrote: ‘ Both sides gave things up. The Nationalists for the first time in 100 years accepted that the six counties are a unit that can vote separately,’

 

**A tactical move, or long-term gain, not a principled concession

 

‘ that British rule is legitimate unless those six counties vote to leave, that Nationalists may take office in the government of those six counties,’

 

***Tactical moves, see above. SF still won’t take the oath, and still don’t recognise the border.

 

‘ and that violence should not be used to achieve their aims.'

 

***Ho Ho Ho . Does Mr McDougall seriously believe that Irish republicans have ceased to employ violence or the threat of violence to get their way in their ‘communities’, or that the continued threat of major violence on the mainland does not lie behind the Britush state’s readiness to fulfil its side of the 1998 bargain? Does he seriously believe that the IRA’s guns and bombs are no longer available should they be needed to enforce the agreement?

 

‘ Those are major gains.’

 

What are? Some tactical concessions made to ensure a long-term total victory, and an empty promise to abandon violence, unverified and unenforced. Set against mass release of convicted prisoners, withdrawal and dismantling odf British militray anmd police power, surrenderer of national territory, public official rape of the rule of law? The whole deal is based on British fear of resumed IRA violence, especially in the City of London. Combined with fear of US diplomatic pressure.

 

‘ Of course security should be toned down if as has happened violence is reduced.’

 

***Why?  The IRA has not ‘toned down’ its capacity for violence by one ounce of Semtex. Irish Republicans have, since the agreement, bombed, shot and even beaten to death many victims. (And threatened many others)  . Theworstasinge atrocity of the Troubles, at Omagh, was *after* the agreement.  The British state has responded to these actions by accepting without question that they are acts beyond the control of the current IRA leadership. Yet there is no doubt that any acts of violence by the British state would be treated as such by the IRA.

 

  
The reduction of violence is tactical and conditional on uninterrupted British concessions.  Were it ever to be resumed, the British state is utterly incapable of countering it, having dismantled its security apparatus, withdrawn its armed forces and dismantled its defences.

 

 

‘ And of course, as in Scotland, the people should have the opportunity to vote to leave.’

 

IT is not as in Scotland. The parallel is false in many ways. Scotland, if it chooses independence, will not then form part of another country, but will exist on its own as a single electorate, the same one that voted for independence. The Northern Ireland Protestant minority (as it will soon be in my view, and may already be) will not merely be a minority in a united Ireland, but a small and powerless minority, utterly without hope of ever being a majority.  It is at least theoretically possible that a majority of Scots might one day seek to rejoin the United Kingdom, if independence does not work out well. There is no such reverse gear for the Northern Irish Protestants .

 

The Scottish people never used a threat of violence or a 30-year murder campaign to gain this freedom. In any case, as we know, there are many people in Northern Ireland (for whom there is no equivalent in Scotland) who absolutely do not wish to leave because they do not wish to be transferred to what they regard as a foreign sovereignty.  What moral calculus says that a single vote, obtained under threat of violence and won by murder, should compel them to live under a jurisdiction they regard as foreign?

‘We really gave up very little in exchange for some major gains.’

 

It depends whom you mean by ‘we’. A heedless and ill-informed British population, unaware of the general threat to its national integrity and sovereignty, may not have been aware of the extent of the defeat, nor was it given any direct say in deciding whether to accept it.  The Northern Irish Protestants, by contrast, are increasingly aware that they have lost their birthright, the freedom to be British. Mr McDougall might consider that ‘very little’. But as the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz rightly says ‘Your country is like your health. You do not know how much you value it until you lose it’.

 

 And so far the agreement has achieved peace and is working rather well.’

 

***This is just  complacency. My information is that relations between the two communities , especially in poor urban areas and disputed parts of the countryside, have seldom been worse. These bad relations are contained either by physical barriers or by departure, which elsewhere would be known as ethnic cleansing.  My information is also that the criminal protection racket and other gangster activities of both Republican and Loyalist gangs are very much alive, and it is most unwise to fall foul of them. As for ‘peace’,  weren’t some British soldiers killed quite recently? Two were killed at Massereene  barracks in 2009, 11 years after ‘peace’ had been signed.

 

Mr Jerry Owen wrote: ‘Niall twists figures like most anti car persons. The fact is that not all road deaths are the fault of the car, many are the fault of the pedestrians. An obvious fact to me but not the partisan car loathers.’

 

Well, who said they were the fault of the car? But the mass use of cars for private journeys by greatly increasing traffic, makes such deaths more likely, doesn’t it?

 

And also wrote :  ‘Mr. Hitchens with another of his emotive non factual and ugly swipes at the motorist telling us how cars make us all suddenly evil...apparently something cyclists never are.

 

***Once again, this is misrepresentation. I think most observant, rational people accept that quite a lot of individuals do have their behaviour changed by the fact of being in control of a car.  Not all, but a significant number.  I have often criticised cyclists here, not least those who ride on the footpaths in Kensington Gardens, and have physically attacked me or abused me for asking them to desist. Unlike him, I am not tribal, and I will not defend behaviour even by my ‘own side’ which is bad. This false claim gives us more of an insight into him than into me.

 

‘He talks about the maintenance costs to 'just' keep cars on the road, whilst conveniently forgetting that all transport including his beloved trains need maintenance just to keep them on the tracks.’

 

***No, I don’t forget it. But most railway and bus equipment is used for far more hours in the day than are most cars, which spend most of ther lives depreciating in car parks or at the roadside. That s my point. He wilfully ignores it.

 

 ‘He talks about cars rusting and rotting away as if somehow his beloved trains stay mint forever....they last about twenty five years in fact, just as long as a motor car can last properly maintained.’

 

***See above, but I also wonder how many cars *actually* last for 25 years or anything like it.

 

 ‘He talks about the expense of bringing things abroad for them, where do rail tracks come from? Where does the diesel come from for diesel trains? Where does the coal come from for electric powered trains?’

 

***Well, if we had a proper electrified railways system (instead of having a smaller proportion of electrified track than Azerbaijan, thanks to our road obsessed transport policy) and if we were properly governed and protected our home industries, the rails, the coal, the iron, the steel and the power would all be made here, as once they were. We would need nothing from Saudi Arabia or Libya.

 

‘He talks about the taxes cars attract! Why is that a problem of the car?’

 

***I just point out this is a disadvantage of individual car ownership, in an attempt to puncture the advertising fantasy of freedom, sex , power and privacy which influences people into owning these nasty liabilities.

 

 ‘The car brings huge revenue for this country’

 

***As well it might given the expensive imports it sucks in, the huge number of cars which are imports, the afct that all car manufacture in this country is foreign-owned, plus the pounding it gives to the roads,  the vast damage it does to the nation’s health in so many ways, and the filth it pumps into the air, and the noise it creates, and the cost of policing the roads to stop car drivers behaving homicidally .

 

 ‘unlike the train system which is a costly burden for the tax payer.’

 

***And the roads are not? Why do drivers and Tories never seem to notice that the road system is a vast subsidised nationalised corporation?

‘ As for the 'expensive' fuel cars use, most of us are aware of course that oil is very cheap 'the other side of the taxman', and that is an abundant fossil fuel with new deposits being found all the time.’

 

***He’s welcome to his opinion. This country’s foreign policy has been dominated for a century by its ever-growing dependence on oil, and the expense of that, especially the defence budget and the damage to our relations with important countries,  has been and remains huge.

 

 Mr. Hitchens talks about the fantastic systems abroad...we only have his word on that and noting his irrational loathing of the car.

 

***Perhaps he can give me an example of this alleged irrationality. I am sure he can read up on the tram systems of Bordeaux, Strasbourg and Zurich.

 

 ‘ I tend not to believe him.’

 

***Yes, I imagine so. People do so very often believe what they want to believe.

 

 ‘As for trams only one tram system in Britain turns a profit...not good is it?’

 

***I couldn’t care less if it turns a profit. That is not its purpose.  It is a social good.

 

‘The advancement of the motor car in the last fifty years is clearly a fantastic achievement, the reliability performance and equipment is so markedly improved.’

 

***So what? If a thing is fundamentally damaging, its technological development will tend to make it more damaging.

 

‘Compare the the advancement of the train in the last fifty years to the advancement of the car....I am almost embarrassed for Mr. Hitchens!!’

 

***I am genuinely puzzled by this. I rather think that the technology of railways has advanced hugely in the past half-century, in speed,efficiency and safety , both as a carrier of goods (where the railroads of the USA are a vast commercial success) or of passengers ( see Japan, the French TGV, the Swiss railways system etc etc).

 

 

 

 

Peace at Any Price, and J.Bonington Jagworth Lives Again

Well, I count that a fairly straightforward victory. Amid the (entirely justified) complaints against British behaviour in Ireland, and the frequent wickedness of the ‘Loyalists’(none of which I dispute, as I am not a ‘Loyalist’ , have great respect for Irish patriotism, regard my own country’s Irish policy over many centuries as incompetent and myopic, have deep sympathies with the grievances of the Roman Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, and am myself in favour of the abolition of Stormont and the introduction of permanent direct rule from London), some simple-minded  piffle about it not being a surrender if it saved lives (whereas almost every surrender in human history, however shameful, however catastrophic, however attended by enslavement, rape, robbery, subjugation and humiliation,  has saved lives, if that is your only calculus);  and some bizarre stuff about Sinn Fein’s unreliability as republicans, which I couldn’t care less about as it’s not relevant and I’m not exactly their friend; plus a claim that a rational willingness to wait until they can get an irreversible ‘yes’ vote  (my current guess is 2022) is ‘acceptance of the unionist veto’ rather than a cunning realisation that final victory, once within your grasp,  is worth waiting for …..  nobody, but nobody has actually answered my point about the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

 

Namely, that it has all the outward and inward features of a defeat and a surrender, with all the concessions (specific, enforced, legally binding, visible, measurable and verifiable, in all cases involving diminution or destruction of military force and police effectiveness,  loss of power, prestige , sovereignty and legal authority)  being made by the British state, and all the benefits (specific, measurable, binding and verifiable, in all cases involving increased power, prestige and ability to deploy or threaten force) being pocketed by Sinn Fein and the IRA. 

 

The supposed concessions to be made by Sinn Fein and the IRA are by contrast non-specific, non-binding, unverifiable and unenforced, and also easily evaded by the simple method of deniable operations by actors who can be alleged  by both sides - and invariably are alleged by both sides - to be beyond the control of Sinn Fein and the IRA. Why does nobody ever see the significance of the way in which the losers in this deal cravenly chant ‘this must not be allowed to affect the peace process’ on every occasion when there are violent breaches if it by Republicans?  These words can usually be guaranteed to be spoken by some government spokesman or other within 45 minutes of any such outrage, and it would be worth putting a bet on that the next time it happens.

 

Well , ask yourself this : Why should it  not affect the ‘peace process’ ?  If it is a mutual  ‘peace process’ rather than one-sided surrender, then a grave and blatant breach of its terms would surely lead at least to its suspension, if not to its abrogation. If the thing is a mutual agreement with no loser and no winner, then a severe breach of its terms would end it in any othr circumstance.  But of course the British politicians who agreed to it would hate to suspend or abrogate it, since they had for years favoured such a surrender, have no intention of going back on it, and they are only cross about these events because they draw attention to their craven behaviour. What if the gullible populace actually realised what had been done in their name? That woukld never do. Fortunately for our leaders, the gullible are gullible (as we see here) because they desperately wish to be gulled.

 

One other interesting feature of this disgrace is the fact that some crumbs fell from the IRA’s table to the ‘Loyalist’ terrorist criminals. Why was this?  Because the other principal loser in this squalid gangster deal was the rule of law, and if it rewarded one group of lawless killers, it had, logically, to reward the others too.

 

Right, that’s that dealt with. If that's the best the objectors can do, then I'd be gald to hear no more whineging when I state the truth, that this was a shameful surrender( as I promise to do again before long).

 

 

I also note that various critics of my repeated reminders of the  correlation between mind-altering drugs and dangerous violence have not attempted to reply to my systematic rebuttals. Quite right, though it would be nice if these people would , having failed to undermine my thesis, support my call for a proper inquiry into this correlation. Why would anyone be afraid of such an inquiry?

 

And now we have Mr B.J.Mann, the living successor of Peter Simple’s J.Bonington Jagworth, the great Friend of the Motor Car.

 

He writes:

‘Oh purleeze, will you give the anti car bias a rest. Try checking out the per capita road accident death rates before the car. The total was something like 1600 in 1860. In "London" alone. Presumably the "CITY" only! Look up the deaths from the piles of horse manure and pools of urine in the streets (possibly millions pa). Investigate the links between that and the infant mortality rate. And while you're at it check out the WW2 road fatality figures (much of it trams blindly following their tracks in the blackout). And the number of pedestrians who die on the RAIL roads (around 250 to 300 pa, try that on a per mile basis, never mind per driver!).’

 

Purleeze indeed. For all I know, Mr Mann is a peaceable cyclist whose experience of motor cars is limited to long-ago innocent games with Dinky toys and has never owned or driven an actual car. But I will, even so, reply to him as if he were a spokesman for the ‘Cars are good, and people who don’t like them are probably Communists!’ lobby.

 

I don't have an 'anti-car bias'. I hate private cars because I view them rationally and coldly, am not seduced by advertisers or PR men, and see them for the damaging menace that they are.

 

Car maniacs are unable to understand that any other ground-transport technology (apart from the destructive, ugly, noisy, filthy but deliciously selfish, lazy and vain one which they unaccountably favour) has been developed in the last 150 years. The electric tram (which in Zurich is so efficient that it causes drivers to leave their Mercedes at home) drops no manure and leaves no pools of urine – though I think I might dispute the idea that these unpleasant things ever caused ‘millions’ of deaths, as Mr Mann seems to think they did).

 

The same can be said of the bicycle, which not only does not excrete in the street,  is also virtually noiseless and is extremely good for the health of those who use it.  Both the tram and the bicycle have benefited from myriad technical advances in the past century . Visitors to Bordeaux or Strasbourg can see what modern trams can be like. Modern bicycles, with their easily-used multiple gears, lightweight frames, all-weather brakes and high-pressure tyres, are vastly superior to the boneshakers of even 30 years ago. Cars, by the way, do excrete in the street, but their excreta are largely invisible and so harder tan avoid and more pernicious than the excreta of horses (By the way,  see the horse-drawn carriages of Savannah, Georgia, for a simple method of avoiding the problem about which Mr Mann is so worried). 

 

Nor can they ever grasp that it is mass individual private ownership of motor vehicles, used for daily journeys to work, shops  and school that could be accomplished on foiot, by bicycle or by public transport, ,  which makes them so damaging. Nothing wrong with taxis, or rental or shared cars. They are a far more rational use of such an expensive piece of capital than the individually-owned vehicle, which spends most of its aesthetically unpleasing existence sitting depreciating in a car park, blocking up the edges of narrow city streets or (worse) invading the space designated for pedestrians by parking on the pavement.

 

But the Jagworth/Clarkson tendency aren’t interested in cars as a means of transport. They have other needs. Several women of my acquaintance, if cut up or hooted by aggressive men driving noisy brightly-coloured cars, will steal up to the driver and tell him in voices of soft sincerity ‘I’m SO sorry about your…’,  well you will just have to guess what they are sorry about. Car advertisements, with their absurd films of shiny machines hurtling along deserted roads, when not even a billion pounds can buy such conditions in reality, or portraying the car as a self-indulgent personal space for its owner (or rather, mortgagee), give some clue as to what this is really about – a power fantasy for the powerless, a privacy fantasy for the person who, at home and at work, has no privacy. And of course an object of worship for the person who has no God, but must worship something, even if it is perhaps an image of himself as he would like to be. The gleaming, highly-coloured, violent and expensive car, with its eye-like lamps and mouth-like radiator grille, is as close as we can get to a modern Moloch (so far).

 

The truth, of course, is that most cars are liabilities to those who think they are their owners but are in fact their slaves. Cars lose a huge part of their value as soon as they are sold. They continue to lose it at an amazing rate during their short lives – yet ,against all the sane rules of credit, it is quite easy to chain oneself to a large loan to buy these depreciating assets. They require frequent expensive maintenance just to stay in working order. They drink expensive fuel. They are compelled by their purpose to remain outside for much of their existence, exposed to the elements which slowly rot and rust them. They attract all kinds of taxes and imposts. They require the expensive importation of goods from abroad (especially oil), many  of them unpleasant despotisms tio which this country is then obliged to truckle.

 

And, as we have discussed here before, they bring out the worst in their users, being the best observable example of the maxim that power tends to corrupt, and of the truth that, when it does corrupt, it is one of the worst corrupters of all.

 

So cross do the Jagworths get when challenged that they cannot see what their critics are saying. Mr Mann, for instance, goes on about direct road deaths, as if these were the principal evidence of health damage by cars. Of course such deaths are horrible, and avoidable, and these days fall mainly on non-drivers (drivers being protected from the consequence of their own hurry and stupidity by side-impact protection, seat-belts, anti-lock brakes and airbags) . I suspect the figures he adduces of so-called ‘pedestrian’ deaths on the railways (there are no pedestrians legitimately present on railways) are mainly attributable to suicides, which is not the case with pedestrian or cyclist deaths on the roads.

 

But I wasn’t talking about such deaths. The deaths and illnesses I was talking about are the heart disease, ‘depression’ and other ailments which result from our national aversion to exercise, an aversion made possible by mass car ownership. Do pay ATTENTION as Mr Mann, who may have mistaken his caps lock key for his overdrive, would say (whatever an overdrive is, or was. I could never work it out, any more than I could master the forgotten art of double-de-clutching).  

Surrender, Deterrence and Drugs

Some responses to contributors: I’m angrily told that it’s ‘nonsense’ to say that this country surrendered to the IRA  in 1998. Right.  Let’s go through this:

So, we released hundreds of convicted criminals. We dismantled the Royal Ulster Constabulary, including its highly effective Special Branch,  replacing it with a neutered, politically corrected UK-style ‘Police service’. We dismantled costly and effective surveillance equipment all over Northern Ireland. We permitted Sinn Fein, uniquely among all UK political parties, to raise funds overseas.  We withdrew almost our entire military presence from Northern Ireland. We made it illegal to fly the United Kingdom’s national flag from public buildings except on a few designated special days. We allowed Sinn Fein into government. We said that a referendum could be held at any time on the transfer of Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic. And that if there was a ‘yes’ vote our Parliament would immediately and without question transfer a large piece of our national territory to the sovereignty of a foreign country.  Voting would then cease. On the other hand, in the event of a ‘no’ vote, the referendum can be held again every seven years until it comes up with the right answer.

 

In return we got:   An unsigned promise of non-violence, followed by the Omagh bombing (the single worst atrocity of the Irish conflict), an unverified and non-transparent alleged ‘decommissioning’ of IRA weaponry , plus a number of violent bank-raids, the McCartney killing, a great deal of unrestrained protection racketeering,   smuggling etc by persons, er, connected with the IRA,  and the mysterious activities of the various ‘Continuity’ and ‘Real’ IRAs (sometimes extending to bombing attacks in mainland Britain) , which have never been punished by the Provisional IRA (a major breach of tradition in that movement, which in the past has never been slow to enforce unity with the gun , see Irish Civil War). Activities of these deniable outfits tend coincidentally to intensify whenever Sinn Fein wants more rapid movement in its direction in political matters in Northern Ireland. As an added ‘malus’ (can this be the opposite of ‘bonus’?), similar concessions were made at the same time to the self-styled ‘Loyalist’ gangsters.

 

Thus, the British state openly and verifiably disarms, disbands and withdraws its armed forces, their weapons and intelligence systems.  It disbands an effective police unit. It hauls down its flag and increasingly restricts expressions of loyalty to the flag, while permitting the widespread display of the flag of the Irish Republic. It also introduced, in street signs and public buildings (see the new railway station at Newry for a striking example of this) , the increasing use of the Irish language, a tongue not widely spoken in Northern Ireland but of great political significance for the Republican movement.   A part of the United Kingdom’s national territory has since 1998 been placed under provisional, conditional sovereignty, under notice of transfer to the control of a foreign power following a referendum which can be indefinitely repeated until this transfer is effected, and which cannot, once effected, be reversed. The rule of law is systematically violated to suit the enemies of the British state.

 

In return, the principal beneficiaries of this agreement, the Provisional IRA, are not even required to sign it, and do not so. Nor do their political representatives, Sinn Fein.  Many of their most effective operatives are freed from imprisonment. They are allowed to retain the weaponry, and its deterrent and menacing power, which has gained them the concessions they seek. Though they are one of the most bloodstained and effective terrorist organisation of modern times, they are entirely exempt from the measures directed against Middle eastern and Islamic terror groups and their political front organisations in the ‘War on terror’, and are welcomed in the White House.

 

Well, if this is how we treat Sinn Fein after we have ‘defeated’ them, how would we have behaved if they had defeated us?

 

By  the way, what does it have to do with the issue whether the surrender saved lives or not? The French surrender in 1940 saved hundreds of thousands of lives , but few would argue that made it a victory, or a good thing. Sometimes things are worth fighting for. Sometimes things are worth fighting against. As for the prosperity of modern Northern Ireland, most of that results from temporary subsidies. Let us see how things look, when they dry up.

I ask you. I cannot help it if people aren’t paying attention, but I decline to be told off by Mr ‘J’ because of his weird Marxoid fantasies about bankers and the ‘fanatically Left-liberal and philo-Unionist southern Irish state class, government and media.’  Fanatically left-liberal *and* philo-Unionist? One or the other, surely. But not both. Anyway, I seem to remember SF fighting doughtily against the Lisbon Treaty in the referendum campaign on that subject. Credit where it’s due. The point remains, Britain surrendered in 1998 by any rational measure, and it is time we recognised it.

 

Trident was absolutely no help in resisting the pressures which forced us to do so. Nor could it have been.  Nuclear weapons had one simple purpose – to counter and neutralise the enormous conventional forces deployed by the USSR in central and eastern Europe. These – especially the GSFG (Group of Soviet Forces in Germany -were a serious and genuine threat. I have always enjoyed this post-Cold War revelation by Vice Admiral Ulrich Weisser, after plans were found for the Communisation of West German Cities :

 

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930316&slug=1690795

 

Of course, everyone knew that the weapons were unusable. It was their unusability that paradoxically made them effective.  Most sensible people in positions of power realised, after reading accurate accounts of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that a general nuclear war was an absurdity. While there is a  theory that , if you build a big arsenal, you are bound to use it, this does not really work with nuclear weapons. It often didn’t work in othr instances either, because the conditions for its use passed, or because it became obsolete. The indecisive Battle of Jutland, for instance, showed that both sides were too scared of losing their fleets to engage in a full-scale trial of strength. Admiral Jellicoe was rightly described as ‘the only man who could have lost the war in an afternoon’, a burden he clearly felt very strongly. All admirals knew of and were haunted by  the catastrophe of Tsu Shima, a Russian national defeat which can be said to have led eventually to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and the only truly decisive combat of the battleship era.

 

 His opponent, Admiral Scheer, had more to gain and less to lose, since Germany, even without a fleet, would have remained in the war. But neither man could fully risk the enormous investment of national treasure and prestige under their command.  The horrible humiliation of the battleship and battle-cruiser, at Taranto by us (this forgotten British naval triumph is said to have given the Japanese the idea for Pearl Harbor)  , and then at Pearl Harbor itself and off Malaya by the Japanese,  put an end to that era forever. The last great naval battles, at Midway and Leyte Gulf, confirmed the superiority of the aircraft carrier.

 

 Once Mutual Assured Destruction was established (its misleading acronym, MAD, has tended to blind people to its essential sanity) , nuclear weapons placed a roadblock in the way of war which frustrated politicians all the time. We know (see Suez, Syria, Libya, Mali, Yugoslavia) how much democratic politicians love to go to war, and we also know that dictatorships and despotisms have quite a taste for it as well. But once MAD was established, war in Europe was pretty much impossible. Everyone knew that, once they began a move towards war, it would inevitably lead to a nuclear exchange which would be the end of the world. So they never did. What movements there were (the walling-off of Berlin, the crushing of rebellion in Budapest and Prague) were done with the cynical consent of NATO, which had implicitly accepted that Europe beyond the Iron Curtain was none of its business, in return for an implicit recognition by the Warsaw Pact that events west of the line were not its concern either. By the 1980s, the West was becoming worried about the obvious economic decline of the East, and wondering how to manage it rather than how to conquer the other side’s territory. They still haven’t really cracked the problem, as is shown by the mass migration westwards of so many former subjects of Leonid Brezhnev’s failed empire.  

 

I have often wondered whether there ever really were functioning nuclear warheads in our Polaris and Trident missiles. I have also wondered whether the boats’ captains and second-in-commands would actually have launched their weapons in retaliation if the moment came. As their missions (essentially a bluff)  would by then have failed, what would have been the point of destroying the only source of possible reconstruction?  

In one of his last reasonably good books, ‘The Russia House’, John le Carre speculated on whether the Soviet nuclear deterrent was really as accurate as we liked to claim on its behalf. For MAD had by then become a sort of industry sustaining the unending modernisation of American weapons at huge expense, and it would have – as it is said to be in the novel – deeply unwelcome to many Americans if this turned out to be true.  

 

I still have copies of a wonderful Pentagon publication of the Cold War Era, ‘Soviet Military Power’ full of beautifully-clear and impressive reconnaissance photographs (or, where unavailable, imaginative paintings) of Soviet warships, bombers, missiles and advanced radars,  giving the impression of a sleek, modern military machine. My own direct experience of Soviet military equipment, after some years of glasnost and perestroika, was that there was a lot of it, that it worked in a crude sort of way, but that I had some doubt about its reliability or modernity in matters of high technology.  The helicopters were particularly alarming. Had they been serviced by a drunk man, or a sober one? You couldn’t know, but your life would depend on the answer. I hated getting into them.

 

As for the manpower, much of it was demoralised and slovenly.

 

This contest was a bit of a ‘noble lie’, in fact. It worked for our apparent benefit for many decades, keeping us in the front rank of nations, or seeming to be, despite the disappearance of our empire and the shrivelling of our wealth.  It did keep the peace in Europe (though not in the East, nor in the Middle east,  where terrible proxy struggles between the Cold War Titans were licensed to take place without any nuclear umbrella to restrain them).  Alas, as it now appears, we allowed this illusion to comfort us too much. If the Cold War had never ended, our national decline might have been slower (in fact I’m sure it would have been) , and our allies would have been less willing to betray or rob us than they have been in the past 20 years.

 

But the fundamental problem of who we are and how independent we can really be, would only have been postponed a little longer.

 

A Mr Kev King writes ; ‘I wondered if you would use the tragic and horrible death of a good man to make a point about drugs or the death penalty. You rarely disappoint, Mr Hitchens.’

 

I am baffled by this. Why did he wonder, if he did not himself notice the connection between the culprits’ drug abuse and the wholly irrational and extraordinarily savage attack on an innocent man going about his kindly business on Christmas Eve.  

Here is a bloody murder by a complete stranger, motiveless, explicable only by wild unreason. The man who unquestionably wielded the pickaxe handle was a cannabis user. To suggest a connection is not to ‘use’ the event, but to make a valid social criticism of an establishment which regards cannabis as harmless fun. On the contrary, as I showed here once before to the shrikes and squawks of dope’s selfish defenders, it is often associated with acts of appalling cruelty and violence. My point remains that, whatever its effects may be, however varied they may be, and however hard it may (or may not) be to establish the direct causal chain between the taking of a powerful mind-altering drug and the commission of a horrible crime, the public relations legend that cannabis is ‘soft’ and ‘peaceful’ is not supported by such episodes. Dispute that, you spokesmen for DopeCo .

 

It always amazes me that an exploitative commercial product of this kind attracts the keen partisan support of types who no doubt drink fairtrade coffee and rage against the exploitation of mankind by the makers of burgers and fizzy drinks.

 

Oh, and ‘David’ said : ‘Well no you didn't 'predict' that he was on cannabis you said they might be which is hardly a prediction.’

 

I’ll stick to my position. I could not *know* the killer was a cannabis user, since I did not know who we was, so I could not state it as knowledge. But I believed it was highly likely that the ‘peaceful’ drug was implicated(because of the irrational and ultra-violent nature of the crime, also because of the great prevalence of dope-smoking in the modern British underclass thanks to the collapse of law-enforcement) and so I kept a careful watch on the reports to see if I was right. I had no power to influence the trial or the investigation. Yet the fact eventually emerged.

 

'David’ further asks ‘Also how many times have you been wrong about predicting anti depressant use in Mark Saunders and Andreas Brevik? ‘

 

In what way was I 'wrong'about Mark Saunders? His inquest heard (Independent 21st September 2010) that ‘The barrister [Mark Saunders] had taken cocaine over the previous 48 hours and was on antidepressants at the time he died.( ‘The Times’ and ‘The Guardian’ of the same date confirm that he was taking antidepressants).

 

In the case of Anders Breivik  I wrote as follows :’It's the drugs, stupid. In hundreds of square miles of supposed analysis of the Norway mass murder, almost nobody has noticed that the smirking Anders Breivik was taking large quantities of mind-altering chemicals.

 

‘In this case, the substances are an anabolic steroid called stanozolol, combined with an amphetamine-like drug called ephedrine, plus caffeine to make the mixture really fizz. I found these facts in Breivik’s vast, drivelling manifesto simply because I was looking for them.

 

‘The authorities and most of the media are more interested in his non-existent belief in fundamentalist Christianity. I doubt if the drugs would ever have been known about if Breivik hadn’t himself revealed this.’

 

Again, in what way was I wrong?

Should I like the Novels of William Boyd? Would He Want Me to?

What are we to make of William Boyd? Unlike several of the novelists of his generation, he has never become political  or joined the world of celebrity. Yet he has quietly persuaded a lot of people to buy his books. I buy them myself, though it took me a while to get round to it. I hadn’t liked an Evelyn Waugh TV adaptation he did, and I had somehow given myself the impression that he was a standard-issue left-winger just like the others.  Actually, I have little idea of his politics, and I wonder if he does, though I am fairly sure that he doesn’t share my religious opinions. His most recent book ‘Before Sunrise’ disappointed me, but he will be getting a lot of publicity this autumn when his attempt at a James Bond book ‘Solo’ is to be published. I am sure it will be better than Sebastian Faulks’s recent effort.

 

Why?

 

Well, Boyd is just more interesting than Faulks, who doesn’t (in my experience) stand up to much re-reading. I recently gave up an attempt to re-read ‘Birdsong’, itself stimulated by the usual bad TV adaptation. By contrast, I’m now doing a complete re-read of all the Boyd books I’ve read over the past five years or so (it’s always interesting finding the abandoned airline boarding passes or low-value foreign banknotes  from half-forgotten journeys which I used as bookmarks, so telling me exactly when I last read the book concerned, often longer ago than I thought). He also once engaged in an enjoyable tease of the modern art world. which has to be good.

 

Two things keep me reading. The first is the clear but intelligent prose, never lazy, suggesting a lot of hard, thoughtful  writing and avoiding of clichés (Hemingway’s old claim that ‘It reads easy because it was writ hard’ should be on any writer’s mind). The other is a straightforward gift as a story-teller, coupled with a genius for evoking time and place.

 

Sometimes (this put me off ‘Before Sunrise’ and occasionally irritates me in other books) the minor historical facts seem to me to be poorly-researched or just mistaken, which is particularly shocking when everything else is of such a high standard. I can’t offhand think of anything more serious than the way his characters seem to leave from or arrive in London by the wrong terminus, as they do a bit in in ‘Any Human Heart’  and arrive in or depart from Berlin by the wrong station( as I suspect they do in ‘The New Confessions’), as well as one or two mistakes about Oxford geography (Bardwell *Lane*? Was it ever called that? ). And I find it hard to believe that a Belgian news-agency, in 1939, would send out its stories by Morse code, as described in ‘Restless’. I’m also a little puzzled as to why an obvious account of the very odd Venlo incident ( in which the Germans kidnapped two senior SIS officers on the Dutch border in 1939) needs to be described as taking place in ‘Prenslo’. Either make up your own incident, or put your characters into an acknowledged historical event, I should have thought.  But who except me would care anyway?

 

And what does it matter with such an imagination at work? His recent ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ successfully and believably did something I’d long wanted to do in my own long-projected and hopelessly stalled attempt at a thriller. A character manages to disappear entirely off the map of identity, credit cards, telephone, passport,  and obtains a new and trouble-free official personality thanks to a hilariously macabre death and the believably easy disposal of the resulting corpse. I envied this passage a lot. Much of this takes place in a marvellously-evoked London underworld of horrible crooks.

 

But this is nothing compared to his plots. These describe believable if unusual lives, of people not wholly unlike us, which take them into places most of us would avoid, and into quarrels, commitments, obligations and  dangers which we would likewise do our best to stay out of.  Here we find out how it might have been had we not been so cautious, emollient and ready to compromise as most of us are, most of the time.  The outcome is often unpleasant, leading to personal grief, ostracism, imprisonment, violence and loneliness, not to mention abject poverty and squalor. One character descends by a series of unimaginable downward lurches, from fashionable authorship to living on tins of dogfood in a bare basement.  But of course it also contains its rewards and satisfactions, the pleasant warmth of unviolated integrity, the satisfaction of pure artistic achievement. It’s a  remarkable broad world, which introduces us to Picasso in pre-1939 Paris, places us in Weimar Berlin and McCarthy-era Hollywood,  and in intimate contact with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in their exile in the Bahamas. On re-reading , I can’t help noticing that two of his characters turn into dirty old men who watch women through binoculars, that there is an amazing amount of self-abuse in some of his books,  and that (again) two (perhaps three, I need to check)  characters have to leave the USA in a hurry, one because he has been cohabiting with an under-age girl, and one because a Japanese detective (called O’Hara) has misunderstood his instructions and murdered somebody on his behalf. Two of his characters end up in mysterious prisons in the middle of wars.

 

He evokes Africa beautifully, its comedy, its ludicrously misplaced optimism, its beauty and its sudden danger  (and you might say that he should, because he grew up there, but a lot of people who grew up there couldn’t evoke anything). In two of his books (‘Brazzaville Beach’ and ‘Restless’) his central character(written in the first person) is a woman. In both cases their femaleness seems believable to me, but I cannot say if women feel the same way.

 

But what is the purpose of all this writing? Why does it make me so sad?  I suppose it is because it is so good and so absorbing, yet so bleak.  It seems clear to me that Boyd believes that we are just tossed about on the waves of circumstance, that there is no  design or purpose to the cosmos and that therefore our choices are even more terrifyingly unpredictable than we think. I must add here that his description of violence among Chimpanzees, while they are being studied by Western scientists who believe them to be peaceful, is one of the most disturbing and engrossing passages of fiction I have ever read.

 

From time to time he lets slip the fact that he is obviously interested in, but baffled by the wonders of higher mathematics and physics, turbulence and climatology (one of his characters is driven mad by these immense puzzles, though he is also depicted as taking psychiatric medication. Was this episode drawn from some real experience? Sorry to drag in a concern of mine, but I’d be inclined to suspect the pills ,rather than the genius) .

 

What would I recommend? I daren’t. Perhaps begin, as many did, with ‘Restless’, and see if you like what you find. Nobody likes everything, and I can’t expect people to share my own tastes, but Boyd’s prose gives at least as much pleasure as the first taste of a freezing cold beer, consumed at dusk on a tropical terrace, at the end of a long hard day.  

Trident missiles are useless (unless we're prepared to point them at Brussels)

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

It would do us no end  of good to get rid of our Trident nuclear missiles. It is time we stopped pretending we were a great power.

I should say here that  I was a keen supporter of our nuclear deterrent in the  days when the communist Soviet Union menaced Western Europe with its enormous army.

That is exactly why I don’t support it now. We won that war, which was a colossal game of bluff. Modern Russia poses no military threat to us, and isn’t even very interested in  us. Nor is China, which has plenty to occupy her in Asia.

The real danger to this country comes from our supposed friends in the European Union and the USA, who have successfully subjugated and bullied us without a shot being fired.

The EU makes our laws, plunders our territorial seas and decides our foreign policy. The USA compelled us to surrender to a gang of armed criminals operating from the Belfast back streets and the hedgerows of South Armagh.

We are forbidden by Brussels to control our own borders, so opening them to socially and economically destabilising mass immigration. 

Meanwhile, our proper Armed Forces are sacked or scrapped – HMS Ark Royal lies this  week, a sheer hulk, in a Turkish scrapyard with her innards on display.

What use is a fleet of four super-expensive submarines, crammed with missiles we could never use anyway and which we almost certainly don’t control, against any of the real threats to this country? Precisely none.

If North Korea or Iran ever do become nuclear powers (which is open to doubt), why should they bother with us, a third-rate country thousands of miles away? It is a delusion of grandeur to imagine that they care. All these futile rockets do is soothe us into a false sense of safety, and spare our national leaders from having to think about what they are really supposed to be defending.

Trident keeps us, government and people, from realising just how urgently we need to reform ourselves if we are even to  survive as a country. Dump  Trident, and face the truth.

Last December I wrote these words about the pitiless killing of Alan Greaves in Sheffield: ‘A gentle, kindly man could not walk safely from his home to his church.

His wife’s casual goodbye to him turned out to be a final farewell. The horrible, diabolical injuries he suffered suggest that his assailant’s mind is in some way unhinged, quite possibly by the drugs which we have effectively legalised in our pursuit of pleasure at all costs.’
 

Well, the culprits of this killing are now known. Jonathan Bowling admitted murdering Mr Greaves. Ashley Foster was convicted of his manslaughter. Bowling used a pickaxe handle on Mr Greaves’s head. Both men then ran away laughing.

Both men were cannabis smokers, as I predicted. The liars and dupes who continue to defend the covert legalisation of this terrible drug, and to claim that it is ‘soft’ and peaceful, have much to answer for.

A perfect portrait of our rotten hospitals

When this was still a free society, it was run by independent-minded, well-educated, confident people who knew what they were doing, took decisions and accepted responsibility.

Now we are a cut-rate people’s republic, as full of regulators, snoopers and inspectors as the old East Germany. We despise good education as ‘elitism’, are scared of rigour in training, ceaselessly undermine the authority of professionals, and prefer rules to initiative.

That is why the NHS does not work. The excellent Left-wing journalist Jenni Russell, a capable person who you might have thought would be able to secure reasonable treatment, recently eloquently described the position. Admitted to hospital in an emergency, hoping she was at last in  good, firm hands, she found instead that she was in the  iron clutches of a moronic, bungling, obstructive robot.

‘Nothing in my life has made me feel as helpless and uncared for as the week I spent in an NHS hospital as  an emergency admission two summers ago’, she wrote. She was denied drugs she needed. She was not fed. She waited seven hours for a bed. Her blood test was – dangerously – mixed up with someone else’s.

‘Everything around me went wrong, consistently, so that having gone into hospital with a sense of tremendous relief – thank God, somebody is going to look after me now – I spent my days in a state of frightened hyper-vigilance, frequently in tears, as one muddle followed another.

‘The worst of it was that it was not just me who felt impotent in the face of an incompetent system. The hospital staff, many of them very well-meaning, told me they felt the same.

‘None of them, from nurses to sisters to consultants to managers, had the authority or understanding to cut through the errors and make the organisation work.’

All MPs, doctors, nurses and journalists should read her account. Yet it will change nothing, because nobody will admit that the Left-wing dogmas that have wrecked this country are wrong.

Don’t let Dave’s doll make a dummy out of you

This week we are told in simpering newspaper articles that it is Samantha Cameron’s soppy simple-minded view of foreign policy that is driving our mad desire to arm Syria’s cannibal rebels.

And a photographer is wonderfully on hand when Samantha’s husband steps out clutching a doll’s pushchair.

They do this sort of thing because they think you’re gullible and easily manipulated. You don’t have to fall for it.

A Commissar without a clue

As a former Trotskyist, I’m always amused to see Tory politicians actively pursuing the revolutionary policies I  and my comrades used to campaign for. Having no ideas of their own, these vacuous careerists have no idea that they are in the grip of Marxoid beliefs.

At least Labour politicians, many of them unrepentant if coy ex-Trots and  ex-communists, understand that they’re wrecking the country and why. But Maria Miller, Commissar for Culture and Equalities, plainly hasn’t a clue.

When she wrote to the BBC demanding further persecution of a sports presenter for uttering an unfashionable thought, she didn’t even know that she was committing a constitutional outrage.

How can anyone not know that governments in free countries don’t try to tell journalists and broadcasters what they can or cannot say? Still, the fault is also partly ours for submitting to having a ‘Minister of Culture’ in the first place.

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The Slow, Sad Death of Detroit

Two years ago I visited the great American city of Detroit, which today declared itself bankrupt. The article I reproduce below was criticised by some Detroit residents for concentrating on the bad things - a charge I reject, as I spent some time dealing with the attempt to regenerate through agriculture, which was new. I was also careful to mention the attempts at regeneration in the heart of the city.

Had I had more space I would have described the pleasant area around the marvellous art gallery (worth going to for the Rivera frescoes alone, but crammed with good things) , where I stayed in a former millionaire's house from the Edwardian era,  converted into an excellent bed-and-breakfast. And I would have dwelt on the bizarre but rather exhilarating walk I took several times, from this zone into the actual downtown, along an almost deserted broad highway which had obviously once echoed to the rumble of streetcars. In any other US city, the equivalent district would have been too dangerous for me to walk. In Detroit, it wasn't worth anyone's while to wait for pedestrians to rob, as they are so rare. In any case, the area around was almost completely deserted. the experience was eerie, thought-provoking and enjoyable. But I know that my tastes in travel are shared by few, and I couldn't really recommend it as a weekend getaway, except to the truly adventurous. Mind you, I intend to go back and take another look at the gallery one day.  

 

As it happens, I'd visited Detroit twice before, once in pursuit of Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, who went there to try to portray himself as a Civil Rights hero, and was (alas) allowed to appear alongside the great and courageous Rosa Parks, then living there. I still recall with a frisson of joy at the moment when I asked Mr Adams how he dared compare himself to her (as she belonged to a tradition that was wholly non-violent) and he gave the local TV stations and reporters the chance to record my question in detail by snapping 'Who said that?' and demanding that I repeat my query, which I happily did. The other time had been in pursuit of Dr Jack Kevorkian, known in the USA as 'Doctor Death' because of his enthusiasm for what is nowadays called assisted suicide. I liked it on every occasion, and I would hate anyone to think that I sought to denigrate this fascinating and unusual place. But I still can't see how it can survive, in the long term, as a functioning city.

 

This was once the capital city of capitalism, the great roaring furnace at the very centre of America’s rise to world power and greatness. Stalin wanted to copy it on the banks of the Volga, but found he couldn’t replicate its spirit – or its cars.

 

Aldous Huxley’s great prophetic novel Brave New World was written on the assumption that the ideas of its founder, Henry Ford, especially that ‘history is bunk’, would one day take over the planet. He may yet turn out to be right.

 

Certainly, Ford’s desire for a world of vast mass-production factories in which the workers were paid enough to keep the economy going by buying their own products seems to be coming true. But nowadays it is mainly coming true in China and South Korea, and failing in Detroit itself.

 

 

America’s fabled rise to world power and wealth may only have been an overture to China’s seizure of world dominance. 

 

The revolutionary artist Diego Rivera made a pilgrimage to Detroit to paint – in a gigantic, overpowering fresco – the very spirit of frenzied, unstoppable economic ferocity, ruthless, cold and majestic. Detroit’s original heart was crammed with some of the most exuberant and powerful buildings of the American mid-century: colossal, ornate theatres and cinemas, mighty hotels and department stores, all emphasising energy, movement, optimism and power.

 

In the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt christened the city the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ as it turned from making Cadillacs and Fords to producing 35 per cent of America’s war production: tanks, Jeeps and B-24 bombers by the tens of thousands. The wartime expansion drew in 200,000 immigrants, many of them blacks from the South. 

 

In the Sixties it produced its own art form, the thrilling, emotional music of Motown (now relocated to Los Angeles).

 

Its uneasy peace between business and unions, soothed by generous benefits and pensions, gave its name in 1950 to the so-called Treaty of Detroit, a national pact between capital and labour that lasted 30 years until Ronald Reagan broke it, and which many American workers look back on with nostalgia.

 

And it was one of the cities of the ‘Promised Land’, the new future sought by countless black Americans who left the bigoted, segregated American South in the hope of a new life, drawn by the high wages of the new factories, and found that the officially liberal American North was just as bigoted and segregated, just less frank about it than they were back in Dixieland.

 

 

It is a melodramatic place. How could it not be? It sits on the frontier of the United States, captured by us British in the war of 1812 and heavily fortified thereafter in case we came back (we never did, and certainly nobody would want it now). It is by common agreement the last eastern city before America opens out into the big skies of the Midwest. It was the last station on the ‘underground railroad’ by which fugitive slaves made their way to Canada and freedom before the Civil War.

 

Now, true to its past, Detroit is not just fading away gracefully, but noisily sick and dying, expiring as spectacularly as it once lived. Fifty years ago it was the fifth-largest city in the United States, with 1.85 million people. Now it is eleventh, with just over 700,000 people. It is likely to fall further behind as it shrinks, and as more Americans head for the Sun Belt and the flourishing South West, away from this blighted, dingy Rust Belt.

 

Each year at Halloween more of it is burned down in a mixture of wild destruction and insurance fraud. You can walk right through its majestic downtown in the middle of the morning and meet nobody at all. There is no danger of being mugged, as a mugger in this part of town might have to wait hours for a client.

 

Most of the great buildings are ghosts: hotels that haven’t seen a guest in years, department stores where the last customer left decades ago, abandoned dentists’ surgeries where the elaborate Forties chairs moulder in echoing solitude. Where there was optimism, there is now nothing but melancholy.

 

Sometimes the majestic hulks are brought down in giant explosions.

 

Sometimes they are brutally recycled, so that you can find the sad traces of a beautiful theatre’s ornate ceiling stranded madly in a multi-storey car park. But mostly they have just been left forlorn, the windows of their high floors sparkling misleadingly in the sun, but the grand doorways at street-level smeared with dust and firmly locked.

 

A little way out you can see the colossal wreck of the old Packard factory, a monument to the passing nature of commercial success. Once, Packard was as well-known and renowned as its rival, Cadillac. Now it is almost forgotten.

As is so common in America, with its endless space, the corpse of this enormous building has not been demolished. Why bother? Instead it has been left to decay, a dangerous wasteland of sagging roofs and jagged edges, frightening in its emptiness and silence. It is strangely moving to imagine that in my lifetime this place was a source of pride and (false) security to thousands of men. 

 

Brave efforts are made to keep life going in the middle of the city. A few excellent restaurants do surprisingly good business in the evenings, much of it from prosperous black families. A grand hotel has been reopened. There are some dispiriting casinos, those invariable signs of economic desperation. But real life, the sort that makes for crowded pavements, exhilarating noise, bright lights and business, has departed to the far fringes of the suburbs. You can find it, for instance, out in Dearborn, where America’s biggest Arab Muslim community is forming, in unspoken defiance of the post-September 11 belief that their way of life is incompatible with America’s.

 

But they seldom cross the border into Detroit, perhaps having a heightened sense of approaching danger. And it is a border. As you pass the city limits a blanket of gloom, neglect and cheapness descends. The buildings are shabbier, the paint is faded. The businesses, where they exist, are thrift shops and pawn shops or wretched groceries where the goods are old and tired. Finding somewhere to have breakfast, normally easy in any American city, involves a long hunt. ‘God bless Detroit’, says one billboard, just beside another offering the alternative solution: liquor.

 

 

Nobody actually wants Detroit to perish. Many clever people have spent billions of dollars trying to revive it. General Motors, no longer the power it once was, now occupies the aggressive new Renaissance Center which stares across the river to Canada. A monorail, that favourite toy of town planners who want to look ultra-modern, circles the riverfront zone, largely empty and going from nowhere to nowhere. 

 

Glowering over the main entrance to the city stands a tall and frowning structure, dark and dispiriting even in bright sunshine. This is the abandoned Michigan Central Railroad Station, rearing up like an enormous tombstone. It is impossible to see it without feeling a strange fear for the future. Is this how all the great cities of the mighty West will one day look?

 

Through here, in the lost boom years, came businessmen hastening to sign contracts, politicians looking for finance from business, unions or both, government contractors gearing up for war, Southern blacks and their families seeking a new life. Now it is a ruin, ringed by razor-wire, its windows broken, its superb arrivals hall a shadowy, chilly tomb, its many silent platforms invaded by weeds. The few remaining trains do not even come here any more. The neighbourhood is not safe after dark.

 

The main road that leads from here into the heart of Detroit is so worn that the asphalt has peeled away to reveal the Edwardian cobbles beneath. No doubt something can be rescued. But much has gone already. I have yet to get to the worst.

 

This is to be found near where Van Dyke Avenue intersects with Mack Avenue. Where prosperous, neat suburban homes once stood, pheasants flap and knee-high grass obscures the foundations of vanished homes.

 

Occasionally a half-ruined or half-burned house still stands to remind you that this used to be a cityscape. Pathetic, besieged knots of surviving homes remind you of what was once here. Sometimes amazing efforts have been made to keep them smart. More often, they haven’t.

 

Many bear menacing notices warning visitors to stay away. On the door of one, easy to imagine as a neat home with an iron-pillared porch where the head of the family must once have sat on summer evenings, are the words ‘Enter at ya own risk’ accompanied by a crude drawing of an angry face.

 

I ventured into a nearby ruin, smashed, charred and half-filled with garbage. You have no idea who or what might be lurking in these houses. I lacked the courage to go in any deeper than the front room, in case I plunged through a rotten floor or met somebody unpleasant. The towers of downtown, only a couple of miles away, are visible from the front porch.

 

 

But they, too, are mostly empty, and are not reassuring.

 

There are real perils. My photographer colleague, Brian Kersey, and I were investigating a particularly desolate street when two large and purposeful dogs, one a pit-bull, came pelting towards us. I have not run so fast since I was at school.

 

Not far away, the danger might well have been human. Much of Detroit is horribly dangerous for its own residents, who in many cases only stay because they have nowhere else to go. Property crime is double the American average, violent crime triple. The isolated, peeling homes, the flooded roads, the clunky, rusted old cars and the neglected front yards amid trees and groin-high grassland make you think you are in rural Alabama, not in one of the greatest industrial cities that ever existed.

 

Amazingly, only a short walk away, the remnants of a rich man’s quarter, the so-called Indian Village, still survive. Here the owners of spacious early 20th Century mansions keep up appearances by tending the empty houses next to them, making them look occupied, mowing the lawns and sweeping the leaves, in the hope that nobody will burn them down and spread the blight.

 

A journey eastwards along Mack Avenue is simply sad. The city is sinking back into the deep forests and grassy plains that were here before Europeans ever came to North America. What buildings are left are seldom used for their original purpose. A once-grand bank is a sweet shop. Sordid-looking bars sit alongside the chapels of obscure religious sects. There are whole schools with no children to attend them. Step out of the car at the petrol station and you are immediately accosted by pathetic wraith-like figures in grimy clothes, with the prematurely-aged faces of drug abusers. This is urban failure in all its shabby misery.

 

Maggie DeSantis, a community worker and one of the leading experts on Detroit’s decline, explains how it all went wrong. Her history is not the conventional one, of the city being ruined by a corrupt black mayor: the notorious Coleman Young. It is far, far more complicated than that.

 

Because Detroit was a city based on the motor car, it was different from the start. Henry Ford paid his workers enough to buy the cars they made. And they did. So houses were more spread out and built on more generous lots than in most cities. Detroit was designed for car owners, who wouldn’t dream of using public transport, which barely existed anyway.

 

Maggie explains: ‘Even if you had a crummy house, it was your crummy house: you owned your own home, and ran your own car. But the things that made Detroit strong, the sprawling streets and the dependence on cars, also made it weak.’

 

When trouble came, the city was too widespread, the people too far from each other, the lives too individual, the temptation to flee to the remote edge of town too strong. It was fine to live in such a place when you had a job and a car. But if you didn’t, you were trapped and alone, left with a debt-burdened property you couldn’t sell and couldn’t leave.

 

The first tremors of change came with the war, but they intensified in the Fifties when blacks began moving out of the ghetto in the old centre. This district was typical of America before Martin Luther King. Known as ‘The Black Bottom’ or more politely as ‘Paradise Valley’, it was a complete society, in which the son of a labourer could and did grow up next door to the son of a doctor or a lawyer, and go to the same school.

 

 

But when Detroit became the first American city to surrender to the motorway, it had an excuse to break up this vibrant but squalid enclave. Black Americans began moving into the Detroit suburbs.

DeSantis has no doubt the planners meant to destroy the ghetto. Blacks who had come from Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, enticed by high wages and hoping for a life free of prejudice, found a cold welcome in the rest of the city.

 

Detroit in those days was notorious for its thriving Ku Klux Klan and its bigoted police force. The city had suffered race riots as far back as 1943, caused by the crude segregation of hastily built and rare public housing.

 

The battles were so serious that in the midst of a war, thousands of troops were needed to restore order, 34 people died and hundreds were injured.

So, when thousands of displaced black families relocated, estate agents sought to profit by scaring white residents out. Then they bought their houses cheaply, and sold them at a heavy profit to black incomers. This cynical process was called ‘block-busting’, a technique of panicking people in entire districts into leaving, with coded warnings of black invasion.

DeSantis recalls: ‘I remember them using scare tactics. I remember in my Fifties neighbourhood, posters saying, “Sell for cash and get out while you can.” ’

 

Meanwhile, the city planners were encouraging still more blight. Because this was the City of Cars, rather than maintain or extend public transport, they built a web of motorways which encouraged more sprawl and broke up settled neighbourhoods. Better-off whites began to move beyond the city limits into new suburbs with lower taxes and superior schools.

 

Then in 1967 the city’s name was besmirched so badly it has never recovered. A second terrible race riot left 43 dead and nearly 500 injured. Federal troops, deployed under an anti-insurrection law dating back to 1807, eventually imposed a sullen peace.

 

Already, inch by inch, and largely thanks to whites moving out, Detroit was becoming a black majority city. The 1967 disaster speeded up the process. In 1974 it elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young. He would later become notorious as the man who helped kill Detroit. His election, fairly or unfairly, was a signal for faster white flight. DeSantis says Young has been unfairly blamed, and that the disaster had already begun to happen. Both versions probably have some truth in them.

 

But it was the 1973 Middle East war, and the ensuing oil price rise, which finally tipped Detroit over the edge and down the slope into unstoppable decline. From that moment, its big fat petrol-slurping monster cars were obsolete. The US car industry lost the confidence even of patriotic Americans, and has never fully regained it.

 

Meanwhile, the housing crisis grew and grew. There was already a stupid, state-encouraged mortgage boom, with the government lending to people who could never pay off their loans: an early version of the sub-prime crisis. The first crack cocaine made its appearance, sweeping through the listless, gap-toothed, jobless suburbs.

 

And the local politicians and businessmen floundered. As DeSantis puts it: ‘We could not get a grip on the fact that we were no longer in the top ten cities of the USA.’ They still cannot. It may take a while yet before Detroit can admit that it is probably just doomed to decline.

 

The most dramatic development in recent years is the idea that farming might return in the new ‘prairies’ where the city has died. But even this has met with scorn and opposition. The city fathers do not really want to see combine harvesters and barns, let alone pigs and chickens, in the middle of their proud and historic cityscape.

 

And yet, out among the derelict houses, a modest but determined effort is being made to turn the new badlands to good use. In a bleak corner of the city echoing to the hooters of freight trains, I found Mike Score, of Hantz Farms, cleaning up the site of some derelict houses. ‘I’ve just shifted 400 tyres, plus 200 cubic yards of garbage and waste,’ he said, happily.  Detroit has plenty of garbage and debris. But it also has plenty of land. House sites can be bought from the city for $300 (£190), each, which adds up to $3,000 an acre, exactly the price of good farmland outside the city limits.

 

Mike is going to block off one end of the street to stop the fly-tipping of yet more old tyres on this modest plot. Then he explains what comes next: ‘The city thought a farm meant a big red barn, with pigs and chickens. And they also thought red barns, pigs and chickens would be negative, a sign of defeat and failure. So we drew them a picture of what we meant: orchards, hardwood plantations, gardens, hydroponic greenhouses.’

 

He says it’s time Detroit had a new trademark, instead of the Renaissance Center, which everyone knows has not led to a renaissance. Why not civilised, cultivated green space where wilderness now is? He says with unfeigned enthusiasm: ‘I want this to be one of the landmarks of this city.’

 

He can see I’m disappointed by his modest ambitions, which really amount to a little bit of market gardening, not much more agricultural than an English allotment. ‘No, no corn, no sheep, no cattle’, he admits.

 

But if the city decides to encourage the plan, 40 out of its total area of 139 square miles are estimated to be vacant lots. With the true level of unemployment touching 50 per cent, there are plenty of people who might be interested in returning to the land.

 

The founder of the farming business, John Hantz, was the one who had the idea. Mike Score recalls: ‘He was driving to work past yet another closed business, yet another burnt out house. He realised that the city wouldn’t do anything about it. And eventually, he concluded that if he didn’t do anything, nobody would.’

 

It’s impossible to say if this will come to anything. My own guess is that the most likely crop to flourish on these sad fields will be cannabis, grown to satisfy a rising demand for ‘medical marijuana’, the cover under which the supposedly draconian United States is quietly legalising this drug in many states – including here in Michigan.

 

Another even more radical scheme for resurrecting the dead centre has come from Geoffrey Fieger, a Detroit lawyer who made his name defending the late Dr Jack Kevorkian or ‘Doctor Death’, the notorious local pioneer of assisted suicide. Having represented death, Fieger has now turned his attention to resurrection. He recently declared: ‘I could turn it (Detroit) around in five minutes.

 

‘I’d shovel the snow and I’d clean the streets and parks. Then, I’d tell the police department to leave marijuana alone and don’t spend one dime trying to enforce marijuana laws. I also would not enforce prostitution laws and I’d make us the new Amsterdam.We would attract young people. You make Detroit a fun city. A place they want to live and they would flock here.’

 

Since Fieger was the Democratic Party’s candidate for Governor of Michigan in 1998, he cannot be easily dismissed as a fringe wacko figure.

 

But if Detroit, once the mighty arsenal of democracy, is going to descend into being a patchwork Babylon of girly bars, brothels, casinos, druggy coffee shops, allotments and hydroponic cannabis farms, it is more likely to do it gradually and accidentally than as the result of a deliberate decision.

 

I came here soon after an equally unsettling visit to another empty city, Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia. There, the people are yet to come. Here they are going, and one day they may all have gone, leaving a strange green hole and some melancholy ruins where a mighty civilisation used to be.

Sincere and thoughtful men and women are doing all they can to save it from this fate. But that only makes the scene sadder and more dispiriting.

 

They have been trying to rescue Detroit for years, and for years Detroit has continued to be sucked back into the ground from which it was born.

 

Just as in China you can hear the roar and thunder of growth and ambition and the shouts of greed and triumph, in Detroit you can hear the whispers and sighs of decay and decline. For more than two centuries, America balanced on top of a wave of growth and power like a triumphant surf rider. Now she wallows in decline and the rest of us wait to see what that will bring. 

First published on 9th July 2011

An illustrated version of this article is available here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2012971/From-Motown-Ghost-town-How-mighty-Detroit-heading-long-slow-road-ruin.html

...but I would urge readers to comment here rather than there.