Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 265
July 18, 2013
An Evening Wasted with the Hated Peter Hitchens
DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET
3.25 pm Thursday: Several readers have reported that this link is not working. A kind contributor (to whom many, many thanks) has, in the interim, offered his own recording (this was made in the hall, and is a bit boomy, but I think perfectly audible).
https://soundcloud.com/hshah-2/head2head-matthew-stadlen
Skilled Hitchensblog engineers are working deep in the tunnels beneath Hitchensblog headquarters, in an effort to fix the original problem. I am told it may take some time. As we are also unable to show you a short film of a potter's wheel, or play some harmless music to entertain you while you wait, you could read some of the other postings here on this unique indexed and archived blog.
I believe the link here will take you to a recording of ‘Head2Head’, in which I was interviewed by Matthew Stadlen, and answered audience questions, on the evening of Tuesday 16th July 2013, at The Tabernacle, in Powis Square, Notting Hill.
Striving Officiously to Keep Alive?
One or two readers seized on remarks I made in a recent posting to recruit me to various views on assisted dying, etc. Mr ‘R’, for instance, wrote (first quoting me) :’ “This, in my view , is because the NHS is a sort of Anti-Death League , which mainly intervenes in people’s bodies with scalpel or drug (or both) when they are already very ill, and is very much influenced by modern society’s unwillingness to accept that death is the natural end of life, which we must all undergo.” Which is exactly what the Liverpool Care Pathway prevents - unnecessary and invasive treatment to people who are dying. Unfortunately, this government as a result of a campaign by your sister paper is removing.’
I think the problem with the ‘care pathway’ is that a scheme with humane, benign intent, in the hands of a rigid, target-driven bureaucracy heavily (and terrifyingly) influenced by incentive payments, became in practice something quite different – hence (for example) the many episodes remarked upon (I think) by Lady Neuberger in which patients were wrongly denied water, a denial which is very close to torture when applied to a conscious person. Something had gone very seriously wrong, and I think the campaign by the Mail on Sunday's sister paper was entirely justified and will result in more kindness in the world, rather than less. This is generally a laudable objective in any moral system.
But I do concede that this business of keeping people alive is very complicated indeed, and I was interested to see one contributor quoting Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘The Latest Decalogue ‘ Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive officiously to keep alive’ in *support* of the idea that we might make less effort to keep the serioulsy ill from dying. I’m not at all sure that was what Clough himself (whose ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’ is one of my favourite poems) intended us to understand, though he was writing about very different times. By the way, I’d also recommend the same author’s ‘Through a Glass darkly’ as a thoughtful examination of the problems of religious belief.
The whole tone of the ‘Decalogue’ poem (there is more than one version, by the way) is a bitterly sarcastic attack on the dubious morals of his own hypocritical late 19th Century (Interesting question: was that era *worse* than our own because they knew that they were being hypocrites, or *better* than our own because they knew they were being hypocrites?)
One version runs
‘Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would tax himself to worship two?
God's image nowhere shalt thou see,
Save haply in the currency:
Swear not at all; since for thy curse
Thine enemy is not the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will help to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom promotion may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Adultery it is not fit
Or safe, for women, to commit:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When 'tis so lucrative to cheat:
False witness not to bear be strict;
And cautious, ere you contradict.
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Sanctions the keenest competition.’
Another version ends with this extra sneer:
‘The sum of all is, thou shalt love,
If any body, God above:
At any rate shall never labour
More than thyself to love thy neighbour.’
So I think we should be careful about using the rather tortured Mr Clough, that High Victorian apostle of doubt and sorrow, as a sort of scriptural warrant for switching off the life support machine. The modern problem of medicine which can keep the body alive long after it would have failed in any other age or civilisation, didn’t exist in Clough’s time, and he wasn’t referring to it.
The old Commandment from the original Decalogue (if you acknowledge any such) stands : ’Thou Shalt Do No Murder’ (Gospel According to St Matthew, 19th chapter, 18th verse, words of Christ himself, Authorised or , for Americans, ‘King James’ Version).
This plainly forbids us from killing an innocent human being. What it permits us to do is open to perpetual debate, as in the limits of Just War, and the activities which can be included in such a war, bot to emntion self-defence, or the defence of another under attack, or just punishment for a heinous act. My contention is (for instance) that the execution of some heinous murderers, by performing a redemptive, just and deterrent purpose, is justified in the constant war that ordered societies fight against lawless, selfish violence. I also think that prohibition against ‘murder’ rather than ‘killing’ leaves us with an alarming latitude.
What if (as happens to a character in William Boyd’s ‘The New Confessions’ ) a soldier is begged by another soldier to shoot him. In this case, the man doing the begging is drowning slowly in a shell-hole, and cannot be rescued, but similar, and worse, events are recorded in many memoirs of war. Shall we be forgiven for helping such people to a swift death? Do the morphine packs carried by soldiers in combat , perhaps, allow them to give an appallingly wounded man a dose from which he is unlikely to wake. Does this happen? I suspect so. Little good would be done by publicising these events. I am myself entirely against bereaved relatives being told that their sons, fathers, brothers or husbands have been killed in the appallingly misnamed incidents of ‘friendly fire’ that are so common in warfare. It does not do to think too much about this, nor about the modern ability to save the lives of soldiers terribly wounded on the battlefield, so allowing them to live on, terribly injured in body and sometimes mind.
I’ve always found it hard to be dogmatic about the hard cases which are frequently given large publicity by the BBC, in its endless campaign for weakening the laws on euthanasia. Have they never heard the old saying that ‘Hard Cases Make Bad Law’, a maxim which seems to me to be invariably true? Why is it that so much of the political and cultural left are so keen on weakening the laws on euthanasia? Why is this campaign so persistent and unending, if it is not intended to have a profound effect? And whose interests will it serve, if the old and ill can more easily be snuffed out without fear of investigation or prosecution?
My view has tended to be that ( as in the Aleck Bourne abortion case of 1938 (discussed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/safe-legal-and-.html), if people truly think that aiding someone’s death is an act of mercy, they should be ready to stand trial for those beliefs. I think it was right that Dr Bourne was acquitted. I admire Dr Bourne greatly. Yet I also believe, with great reluctance, that what he did was in fact morally wrong. The aborted baby had played no part in the appalling crime ( a gang rape by soldiers) which had impregnated the young woman, actually a girl of 14. The baby could have been adopted. I am well aware of the difficulties of this position, and do not know what Dr Bourne knew about the young woman involved, which led him to conclude with absolute firmness that her life was in danger, the only defence in law to the charge he faced. I strongly suspect that, had I been him I would have done what he did, and I don’t doubt that mercy is available in such dreadful circumstances. For what doth the Lord require of Thee but to do Justly, and to love Mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah (not Clarke), 6th chapter, 8th verse). But I think the existence of a firm law is crucial to protect *all* doctors from undue pressure to do things which are much, much more questionable. The abolition of such a law (as happened with the Abortion Act of 1967) has been shown in practice to lead to a general collapse of resolve. Technically, the 1967 Act contains safeguards. In fact, these safeguards are worthless in practice.
I am not interested in the sort of people who will seize immediately on my admission that my position has grave weaknesses. I admit them because they exist, and because moral judgment, in practice, is so often so very difficult, and because we so often fail to get it right. They are not interested in civilised or generous debate, and I am not writing this for them. I expose these weaknesses precisely because the problem is so difficult and often rends the heart. But I think that Dr Bourne’s action was wholly different from that of those doctors who now provide what is in effect abortion on demand, as a form of contraception. And my best witness for that is Dr Bourne himself, who became a founding member of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, refused to perform any further abortions for the rest of his life (he was often asked) and wrote, in 1963 : ’ Those who plead for an extensive relaxation of the law [against abortion] have no idea of the very many cases where a woman who, during the first three months, makes a most impassioned appeal for her pregnancy to be 'finished,' later, when the baby is born, is thankful indeed that it was not killed while still an embryo. During my long years in practice I have had many a letter of the deepest gratitude for refusing to accede to an early appeal.’
In the comparable problems of the care of the very old, or the very ill, or very badly injured, for whom life appears not to be worth living, who are in grave pain and distress, what is murder? In my view, I am afraid murder may be involved when the person’s life is ended for the benefit of others. I don’t just mean legacies and property, though these may be involved. I also mean when the person’s life is ended for the convenience of others.
Of course many difficulties are caused by the ‘advance’ of medical science. One example of this common problem is Pneumonia, which used to carry off many old people when they were ready to go, and now doesn’t because of antibiotics and other treatments. But once these treatments are available, isn’t it then a wilful act to withhold them? I think this is why the passage from Clough, about ‘officious striving’ has become so well-known, way out of its true context, in modern times.
Has medicine, in fact, taken a completely wrong turning? Has it become too concerned with combating disease, in the abstract, and too little concerned with preserving the health of the actual person, and with relieving actual pain? I was astonished, during the final illness of an elderly relative some years ago, how reluctant doctors were to allow sufficient pain relief, in one case on the grounds that the person involved, clearly dying, might become ‘addicted’. I began to wonder whether the people I was talking to were entirely sane, but it was probably just bureaucracy at work, as usual, that dreadful inadequate substitute for experience, skill, wisdom, initiative and thought.
The law, it seems to me, must remain in place. Hard cases cannot be used to abolish it. It is precisely when we are most vulnerable that we most need the law’s protection. Those who campaign against the existing law do so, doggedly, repeatedly, determinedly, because they wish to be free to behave differently, and they wish to free everyone else to behave differently too. Will the old be safer if they are so permitted? Of course not. I suspect that many old and ill people are already being quietly shuffled into the next world, as it is.
If the actions involved are genuinely selfless and compassionate, then let those who do them selflessly face the possibility of prosecution. It seems to me that if their arguments are as good as they claim, they will not face any serious risk of conviction.
July 17, 2013
Sigmund Freud, Propaganda, Smoking, Death, Health and the NHS
The heart sinks at yet another partisan shouting match about the Health Service. The public relations professionals, who appear to have taken over the government, seem to have decided to try to win Tory voters back from UKIP by staging as many tribal confrontations with Labour as possible, so recreating some of the Anti-Gordon Brown fervour which (alas) helped save the Tories from deserved oblivion in 2010. The fake outrage over Unite’s influence over Labour, and now the fake outrage over Labour’s stewardship of the NHS, are simply noisy attempts to pick public fights with the ancient enemy, which isn’t really an enemy at all. But for the Tories to survive, it needs to look as if it is.
The whole point of Prime Minister’s Questions these days is to give the fake impression of genuine combat between the two major parties. As it happens, the shouting and bad manners grow worse as the two parties converge.
This fake combat (I have referred to it in the past as being like all-in wrestling) is the only way in which Mr Cameron’s politically-correct, statist, pro-EU rabble can be made to look attractive to natural conservatives, and if the most recent polls are right it is working for now. If the media didn’t play along so readily with these games, they wouldn’t work . For instance, the huge coverage of the supposed Abu Qatada ‘victory’( he went of his own accord) was given far more prominence than was Theresa May’s craven surrender over the European Arrest Warrant, and the meaningless play-acting of the Tory vote for a referendum on the EU sometime in the 23rd century was also treated seriously by media outlets who really ought to have known better.
The designers of this strategy, I rather suspect, know that Australia’s Tories (more honestly called Liberals) were badly threatened by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party (very like UKIP) in the late 1990s. The reinvention of the Liberal leader, John Howard, as a supposedly tough right-winger rapidly deluded Liberal rebels into returning to their tribal loyalties, and Mrs Hanson and her party, who once scored 25% in some state polls, have now virtually disappeared. The allegations that John Howard was a right-winger were no more true in reality than the similar legend that the British liberal Tory Michael Howard is a right-wing toughie. It is amazing how these images, once established, survive any sort of examination.
It is distressing to see this sort of thing going on, but then universal suffrage democracy is a source of distress to any educated or thoughtful mind. How easy it is to engineer consent to all kinds of rubbish, and make the ill-informed enthusiastic about very little, or militantly hostile to some bogeyman or other.
The invention of modern propaganda, under the slippery name of ‘public relations’ was the great achievement of Edward Bernays, himself a nephew of another great manipulator, Sigmund Freud. Much of Freud’s work is now doubted or discredited, but Bernays ( who, for example, persuaded women that smoking cigarettes was a form of liberation, so helping to kill millions of them) continues to influence the modern world in dozens of disagreeable ways ( I discussed Vance Packard’s great work on manipulation 'The Hidden Persuaders' here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/11/the-hidden-persuaders-and-the-menace-of-tv.html
some months ago The fact that the fate of nations often hangs on such successful manipulation is , in a way, horrifying. As Bernays wrote in his 1928 book ‘Propaganda’
‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind’
Of course manipulation doesn’t always work. But it often does.Look at the NHS.
I feel I’ve dealt with the largely phoney row about party funding. All the parties have grubby secrets, and these stem from the fact that they are not very popular. The biggest scandal of all is the huge amount of state funding which all the parties receive at one time or another, and which the public know nothing of , together with the BBC broadcasting rules which favour the established parties and more or less choke any challengers with silence. This arrangement, of course, is worth untold millions to the major parties, who could never afford to buy the coverage they ceaselessly get, coverage which creates the impression that there is no other choice but them, and that the existing parties are still living, breathing organisms rather than corpses kept from decay by vast transfusions of other people’s money.
So let’s turn for a moment at the question of the NHS. My own experiences with this vast nationalised body have been mixed, including some excellent emergency treatment after a road accident, and a badly bungled mis-prescription which nearly led to me having a wholly unnecessary and painful operation. I know of other people’s experiences which contain a similar range of good, bad and indifferent. I have also seen birth and death in NHS hospitals, and once again there is a mixture of good and bad.
This is to be expected. Huge national bodies such as this must vary, over time and from place to place. The problem is that the bad is sometimes very bad indeed, well below the standards that ought to be acceptable in a civilised country, and preventable by better training and supervision. It’s my own strong impression that training and supervision have declined badly.
These problems run up against trade union power, which works to weaken supervision, EU power, which regulates to make systematic training difficult, and against the general decline in educational levels which must in the end mean that doctors are less knowledgeable than they used to be.
Then of course there is the invention of the ‘degree’ qualification for nurses, which puts off people well qualified to nurse, and encourages the recruitment of people who are not really interested in the hard, practical side of nursing, which is its most important aspect.
But these are just overtures to the main problem of the NHS, Here we are in a secular society in which death is a taboo, a horror to be shoved away, the moment when the feared pain does not go away, when the lump turns out to be cancerous, when there is no recovery. And yet we die.
As Philip Larkin didn’t put it, the NHS is in some way a political attempt to deny this fact - ‘A vast moth-eaten medical brocade, created to pretend we never die’ .
I think it is true that most of us will receive 95% of the care we ever get from the NHS in the last few weeks of our lives. I suspect that much of the money used in such care would be far better sent on setting up networks of hospices skilled in the palliative care of the dying, admitting that their patients are dying and that what they need are comfort, rest, peace, serenity and relief from pain. These are all too often in short supply in most NHS hospital wards. This, in my view , is because the NHS is a sort of Anti-Death League , which mainly intervenes in people’s bodies with scalpel or drug (or both) when they are already very ill, and is very much influenced by modern society’s unwillingness to accept that death is the natural end of life, which we must all undergo.
We want to push it away, we don’t want to witness it, we don’t like to think about it and we have, in many cases, no source of comfort when it approaches.
Of course, there are plenty of diseases which strike without cause or explanation. And there are accidents and injuries which can happen to anyone. But there are also many ailments which we encourage by our way of life. Oddly enough, while fearing death as a terrible bogeyman, because we are so unfamiliar with it and because almost all of us now view it as the end of everything, we also live lives which hasten death, driving instead of walking, eating, drinking and smoking things which are guaranteed to make us ill and old before our time, and then hoping that surgery or pills will stave off the problems we have invited.
I am always grimly amused that my nearest teaching hospital is approached through two concentric rings , one of smokers (both patients, some of them actually attached to drips, and staff) expelled from the hospital grounds and so hanging around in yellow-stained knots at the entrances; and then one of cars, the other clearly identifiable elective threat to health which we have as a society enthusiastically embraced. These cars are crammed in garishly coloured ranks into vast and ever-expanding car parks which have, over the past 20 years gradually eaten up much of the pleasant parkland which once surrounded the hospital. What makes me smile, sourly, is that nobody appears to see the connection between these cars and the heart disease and back problems which have brought so many to the hospital in pain and woe..
If we were more religious (or, as our atheist contributors would say, more superstitious), we might be able to be more rational about how to run a Health Service. We might come up with a better way of treating the dying than ‘care pathways’ in noisy, cheerless wards. We might not keep people technically alive, but in ghastly pain and with no possibility of ever regaining their health, in some kind of struggle against death, for no other purpose than to stave off death.
We might concentrate upon what we *can* do, create many more hospices for the dying, make people more responsible for their own health so as to concentrate limited resources on those who really do need mercy. I cannot contain my anger that people are allowed to use the NHS to remove self-inflicted tattoos, or that healthy children are drugged because they are bored by bad schools, or that countless millions are spent on ‘antidepressant’ medication whose prescription is based upon a wholly unproven theory, or that people are led into needless heart disease by living in cities designed around the motor car.
And yet at the same time people in real need are deprived of drugs or treatments that would help them. We might also stop thinking that the only two types of health service are ours or the American system(both of which are full of faults), let alone that our NHS is the envy of the world. It isn’t. Lots of other countries do as well or better, the NHS is not a religion, but a big unwieldy nationalised industry, which probably *ought* to be nationalised but doesn’t need to be the way it is.
On the other hand, many of its faults are our faults, the faults of poor education, weak self-discipline and general cultural and moral decay. And if we can’t cure them, we certainly can’t cure the NHS.
July 15, 2013
A Public Appearance in London on Tuesday 16th July
Just a reminder of an event in London tomorrow, in which the BBC’s Matthew Stadlen, who interviewed me for his ‘Five minutes with…’ programme last year, is interviewing me for rather longer than five minutes on stage in a West London auditorium. There will also be an opportunity for audience questions. For those who are always moaning that I never publicise my appearances, the details are here
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=404851006287671&l=f5a20ff67b
or
http://www.tabernaclew11.com/whats-on/eventdetails/16-jul-13-head2head-tabernacle/
Here also is an audio version of the Spectator debate on immigration, in which I took part last week (scroll down the page for the link)
Paradox, Privatisation, Political Delusion and Emigration
I know from sad experience that a lot of left-wing people (and a lot of right-wing people) still think that socialism equals nationalisation equals socialism, and that Thatcherism equals conservatism. Oddly enough, their views are matched by a lot of golf-club Tories who thought that Anthony Blair was ‘The Best Tory Prime Minister We’ve Ever Had’. They really did say that. I remember the despair I felt when I heard it, just as I still feel despair when left-wingers moan moronically that New Labour never did anything for them. They even think that their ‘principles’ entitle them to be morally opposed to globalist anti-sovereignty wars like the Iraq invasion, which was always a left-wing war. Most wars these days are left-wing. Nobody’s keener on getting the bombers out.
It was largely to combat this absurd misunderstanding that I wrote my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ back in 1998, and I have struggled ever since to get anyone to read it. My later ‘The Cameron Delusion’ was another effort in the same direction. I couldn’t even get anyone to review that.
I fear that lot of the copies of my books that have actually been sold have been more in the nature of relics and souvenirs, as British conservatives are not great readers and I often find that people who say they are great supporters of mine are still stuck in the political categories of 1955, or 1915 come to that. I am quite sure that almost none of my political foes or critics has read any of my books, as it is very easy to tell from the ignorant attacks which they make on me. Only this week, a contributor here has hilariously accused me of being ‘Pro-Tory’, presumably because I attacked the Labour Party; and a left-wing ‘comedian’ has insinuated on Twitter that I am some sort of racial bigot (he has, to his credit, now apologised). I have (reluctantly) forgiven him, according to the rules by which I must abide, and have been chided on Twitter for my reluctance. To which I say, if forgiving were easy and painless, we wouldn’t need God to make us do it. I have also followed Brigadier Gerard’s old rule, that before forgiving one’s enemies, it is only fair to give those enemies something to forgive you for.
But I digress. Like all truly crazed and gigantic delusions, the idea that the Left has not changed its aims and methods since 1945 is much harder to combat with facts and logic than more minor deviations from the truth, which are generally easy to acknowledge. Most people, however proud, can eventually be persuaded that they have taken a wrong turning, misread a map or got an answer wrong in a quiz. But it is more or less impossible to get anyone to abandon a tribal political loyalty. Even UKIP is really the Tory party in exile rather than a true alternative (one of the reasons it is doomed to fall to earth at about the time the first stage separates from the main rocket).
What is the deep reason behind the fact, known to propagandists since Hitler , that a big lie is more likely to be believed than a small one? Hitler’s explanation in Mein Kampf was that the masses would themselves be ashamed to lie on such a large scale as their leaders do, and so cannot believe that their leaders are doing so.
There’s obviously something in that, though in the 1920s, when there was a good deal more deference towards politicians than there is now, it probably made more sense. It is the common currency of the masses, nowadays, that politicians are liars by trade. And yes, even as we say this, we vote for them (Or you do. I don’t).
My explanation is that most people do not think about big things at all, or see them clearly. They experience government, and policy, and even war, in small intense brushes and scuffles, from which they get strong and often mistaken impressions. The edifice of power it is so big that it cannot be examined without a great deal of cool detachment. Try taking a photograph of one of the huge Pyramids just south of Cairo. Unless you stand a long way back, your entire lens will be filled with dusty masonry. It does not begin to make sense, or reveal its true shape and nature, until you have moved far from it. Most of us get used to the presence in our minds of certain ideas, and never examine them. We are surrounded by mental pyramids, looming in our path. In trying to navigate among them, we seldom look at any of them as a whole. Once you have barked your shin on one, that will be your main experience of it.
Habits of mind and conventional wisdom about the world, once acquired from parents, teachers or church, are now acquired from TV and from teen peer groups, so that those who would once have been vaguely and ignorantly conservative are now vaguely and ignorantly leftist. Hence neither group understands why it believes what it believes, or much wants to think about it. Both groups will respond much more readily to tribal appeals than to reason or facts.
That, I think, is why what I do must , so far at least, be regarded as an almost total failure. I comfort myself that I have helped speed the inevitable collapse of the Tory Party, and that I may have slowed down the legalisation of cannabis. I like to think that the case for grammar schools has grown stronger and better-understood thanks to me. I played a small part in the fight to stop us joining the Euro, to prevent the betrayal of Gibraltar and in holding off the campaign to force us on to Berlin Time. But in general my impact on national life, given the tremendous pulpit I possess, is rather disappointing.
My main defeat is my failure to get across the simple fact that the Left’s chief aims are now moral, cultural and sexual, nothing to do with state ownership and very little to do with trade unions or the working class, which has more or less ceased to exist in the advanced countries.
Even quite smart people can get these things hopelessly backwards. And even those who grope towards the truth sometimes balk at it when they find it. Sir Simon Jenkins (who is gravely wrong about drugs, for reasons I can’t really understand, but is otherwise one of the smartest commentators in the business) had the most astonishing near miss a few years ago when he described J.Major, A.Blair and G.Brown as Mrs Thatcher’s progeny in a book called ‘Thatcher and Sons’.
Sir Simon had earlier helped deconstruct the Iron Lady myth of the Falklands and had annoyed a lot of Tories by pointing to Lady Thatcher’s penchant for nationalising things, especially local government and education. I might add that, with Arthur Scargill’s help, she also pretty much nationalised the police, though Roy Jenkins had begun that process with his forced mergers.
It only took one small step to reach the appalling truth.
If Major, Blair, Brown (and now D.Cameron and N.Clegg) were Thatcher’s sons, then she was their mother. And if she was Blair and Brown’s mother, then can she possibly have been the right-wing monster of legend?
Of course she wasn’t. She inherited much of the legacy of the Wilson and Heath governments (and remember, she was in the Heath government, not unwillingly) and left much of it essentially untouched. Her government was heavily statist. It taxed and spent heavily, drove Britain deeper into globalist and international and supranational bodies and alliances, weakened national laws and useable armed forces, declined to protect strategic industries form foreign ownership, centralised wildly and substituted regulation and exhortation for civil society.
Of course the hopeless ‘national curriculum’ for English schools is one of the best examples of this. No proper conservative could support such a monstrous idea, on principle. Schools should be independent bodies, institutions with their own self-government, staffed by properly-qualified and educated teachers with minds of their own, helped by the state to flourish and subject to external examinations. The idea that Monsieur le Ministre can tell them in detail what to teach is, well, Continental, not British.
And , given that it was instantly hijacked by the cultural revolutionaries who run British schools, and used to further their purposes, it was even worse.
Then there were ’grant-maintained’ schools. The fascinating way in which these schools were financed – a national, centralised body – was seldom if ever mentioned in public. But there it was, a nationalised state school system – now much swollen in the ‘Academy’ programme, which has now scooped up quite a lot of grammar schools and has even begun to swallow private schools (why are they joining? What do they think will happen to them when the government, into whose hands they have delivered themselves, is not just passively pro-comprehensive, but once again actively so?) .
Then of course there’s the nationalisation – expanded by every government for 45-odd years – of parenthood, with more and more mothers married to the state rather than a husband, and more and more children acknowledging the state, rather than an absent father, as chief provider. Not to mention the state encouragement of wage-slave motherhood at the expense of full-time mothers, and the resultant nationalisation of child-raising (so that nursery places are subsidised by the taxpayer, whereas full-time mothers are not). This leaves the natural parents, themselves exhausted, to put the poor mites to bed after long hours in day-orphanages with paid strangers. Wouldn’t it be simpler to go the whole way into Brave New World, and cut out the parents completely. They’d spend more on consumer goods if they weren’t stuck at home trying to do quality time with exhausted infants, doing their homework for them, or vainly trying to compete with the attractions of computer games, Facebook and the rest.
Old age, too, is becoming a state-sponsored experience for more and more people, and a very expensive and labour-intensive part of the nationalised sector it is too, which is perhaps why new ways are constantly being sought to shuffle the old off into the next world.
As for claiming that the state sector shrank in the Thatcher era, do those people who claim this not count the NHS and the local authorities, and endless, amoeba-like replicating quangoes, as being part of the state sector? The shifting of workers from direct to indirect state employment, kept going by the taxpayer but evading parliamentary accountability, was a masterstroke of Thatcherism.
The difference between the new nationalisation and the old is this .The new one does things that were far better done by individuals, small local institutions or even private bodies. The old one did things that were in many cases better done by national corporations, and have not in general been better done by private ones. Or it tried to rescue industries that had already been destroyed by incompetent government economic policies, and got the blame for their failure.
BT’s main advantage over the old Post Office telephones comes purely from the fact that its foundation coincided with the general availability of some fine new technology. But if the nationalised body had been able to introduce that technology, most people would have associated these ‘improvements’ with the nationalised corporation.
AS for the railways, often discussed here, a very useful corrective to the smug pro-privatisation propaganda of the neo-liberals can be found in this document from Manchester University’s Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC)
From this it is clear that the change is not a true privatisation at all, but a taxpayer-funded pretence at private railways, which costs far more (and is less efficient and much more heavily subsidised) than the nationalised BR it replaced. Nothing except a desire to follow neo-liberal dogma at all costs justifies its existence, but without the state discreetly holding it up, it would collapse. The current situation, in which the East Coast line is being run directly by the state and is certainly doing no worse than any of the ‘private’ train operating companies, is extremely interesting. If this is so, why do we need these train operating companies at all? Also fascinating is CRESC’s discovery of a huge secret subsidy to the train operating companies, engineered via Network Rail’s low track access charges, and the indefensible arrangements which govern the rolling stock leasing companies. Without the taxpayer to guarantee it , the whole thing would fall down in a heap. I cannot see what is conservative about this, or why conservatives should support it. But I can see that the New Left, anxious for state power to pursued its real agenda of globalisation and cultural revolution, would be willing to continue with such phantasms for pragmatic purposes. Because the globalisation and cultural revolution are what the Left really care about, so they are quite willing to sacrifice the railways for that cause.
Precisely because the left used to be in favour of nationalisation, it is now debarred from renationalising the railways, even though it would be the best course of action. Chesterton’s Law of the Truthful Paradox operates once again. The most ridiculous and unlikely things are often true, for a perfectly good reason that most people have not noticed.
Meanwhile the neo-liberals, who by claiming to be ‘Conservatives’ maintain the loyalty of their tribe, are happy to connive at the destruction of one of Britain’s greatest treasures( one which it invented and gave to the world and which would be a source of patriotic pride to any proper conservative) because by doing so they can persuade the deluded masses that they are in fact conservative. That’s also Chestertonian. Precisely by doing something profoundly unconservative, a group of people who are not conservative persuade another group of people (who really are conservative) that they (the fake conservatives) are real conservatives.
The facts, when stated, are so ludicrous as to be unbelievable. The truth is too big and too blatant to be seen, except by those who stand afar off. And so, when I advise the young to emigrate, my readers and listeners always think I am joking.
I’m not, you know. I really, really mean it.
July 14, 2013
Would you be surprised to learn that I fund Labour? Well I do... and so do you
Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column
What would happen if the Tories, Labour or the Lib Dems went out on to the streets with collection boxes?
I’d be surprised if they got more than a few washers and quite a lot of rude expressions they hadn’t heard before.
Nobody likes them. Nobody wants them. They speak for no one and they have helped wreck this country for 50 years.
So why do they survive at all?
The world has just woken up to the secret tax on trade union members
(the ‘political levy’) which keeps Labour going long after most
reasonable people stopped being socialists.
Ed
Miliband says he’s going to get rid of it, but I think seeing will be
believing in this case as, if he does as he says, it’s curtains for
Labour.
But how many
customers and shareholders of various corporations know how much of
their cash is being quietly siphoned off to keep the Tory corpse alive?
Much more important, we keep them all going through taxation.
This is via the so-called ‘Short Money’ subsidy to Opposition parties, paid out since 1975.
Political leaders say they’re against state funding of parties. They’re lying. There is huge state funding.
While they privatised gas, power, telephones and the railways, and now Royal Mail, they were nationalising politics.
‘Short Money’ isn’t short. In 2009, Nick Clegg’s party got £1,749,385 a year and the Tories (in Opposition) nearly £5 million.
Labour is now receiving more than £6.5 million a year. From you. Were you asked? I don’t recall.
So, win an Election and you’re surrounded by dodgy millionaires pressing cheques on you, expecting something in return.
Lose and the taxpayer is robbed on your behalf by HM Revenue & Customs.
If you object to this, they say: ‘Why don’t you stand for Parliament yourself?’
To which I reply that MPs are not elected by votes but by money, and that as a result we have the best parliament money can buy.
This
is going to continue and it will take a political earthquake of fury to
change it. There’s no chance of that when you continue to vote for the
very people who rob and despise you. Stop it.
The dark side of the Flower Pot Men - coming soon from Hollywood
When I leaf through my ancient Letts
Schoolboy Diaries from the 1950s and early 1960s, I am appalled to see
how much tripe my parents let me watch on television.
It rolled over me in a great wave of drivel as I lolled, slack-jawed before the ‘miracle of TV’, as we then thought it was.
Just imagine, if I hadn’t suffered all
that brain damage in my tender years, I might be an intellectual now
and allowed to present programmes on the BBC.
I have some memory of the Lone
Ranger, and Tonto, though I mainly recall the music and wondering
crossly how that mask could possibly stop anyone recognising him.
Now,
like Superman, Flash Gordon and Batman, this piffle has been taken up
by Hollywood and turned into a portentous pseudo-mythical yawnerama
‘containing moderate violence and injury detail’, which certainly wasn’t
allowed in my young day.
Tonto
also now has a dead bird glued to his head, which makes him look like
Kaiser Wilhelm II on a bad day. Next – Hollywood examines the dark side
of The Flower Pot Men, with ‘moderate violence and injury detail’.
'Tough' Theresa heroically tackles the wrong enemy
The Home Secretary, Mrs Theresa May, has a tremendous spin doctor.
I know, I’ve met her, and she’s great at her job.
I’ve also met Mrs May. Oh dear. But the spin whirls on and on.
Last week she was garlanded for removing Abu Qatada from this country. That’s spin. She didn’t.
He agreed to go, voluntarily, once Jordan had changed its law to suit him.
And judging by the wolfish grin on his furry face as he arrived in Amman, he wasn’t that troubled by events.
Far
from standing up for our interests, Mrs May also last week voluntarily
submitted everyone in this country to the outrageous European Arrest
Warrant, when she could have kept us out.
Its
alleged advantages (most already available through ordinary extradition
treaties) are not worth the price demanded – allowing foreign courts to
order and enforce the arrest of British subjects.
So much for Mrs May’s triumph. I’d rather have Abu Qatada here and no European Arrest Warrant, given the choice.
But spin doctors are good at flagging up empty victories, and hiding substantial defeats.
They're right, jail is too cruel for murderers
The death penalty is far more humane than a long prison sentence. That is one of the best reasons for bringing it back.
I’m
sorry to say that the Court of Human Rights is correct in condemning
our policy of locking up heinous murderers without hope of release and
for so long they forget what they have done.
It’s incredibly cruel.
My solution, of hanging them by the neck until dead, probably wouldn’t appeal to them either.
But
penal liberals should study the appalling suicide figures in our
horrible warehouse prisons, which are full of crime and dope and
increasingly used to house those made insane by their own unchecked drug
abuse.
In the last ten years 724 prisoners have taken their own lives, 90 of them serving life terms for murder.
In
my view, these 90 were killed by penal liberals who didn’t have the
guts to execute them but were happy to let them die of despair. Is that
supposed to be civilised?
Optimists
who reckon we are having an economic recovery might like to consider
this fact. Roughly half the containers leaving the port of Felixstowe
each year are empty.
Why? Because we have no solid exports to match the imports sucked in by the cheap credit that keeps Britain alive.
A
significant share of those containers that are full contain scrap for
recycling. So this country hopes to survive in a harsh world by
exporting air and rubbish. Good luck with that.
I'm told it’s not true that if you boil a frog slowly it will sit there waiting for its doom.
But
if you debauch and demoralise a country bit by bit, you can certainly
persuade it to accept things against which it would once have revolted.
If
Labour had said in 1964 they were planning to have 180,000 legal
abortions a year – many of them repeat patients – and that their
policies would mean half of all babies would be born out of wedlock
within 60 years, would anyone have voted for them?
July 11, 2013
Does Unity Flow Only One Way in the EU?
Thanks to the New York Times, I’ve found out about a very strange new fact about the Euro, the supposed single currency of the nascent state of Euroland. Actually, it turns out that the Euro is not a single currency at all. The Cyprus version of the Euro is only a partial member of the Euro. It has all the disadvantages – the fixed exchange rate, set to suit others, the total lack of national control. But it lacks some of the alleged advantages. Its currency is not truly compatible with, or equal to, those of stronger members of the Euro zone. Would the US dollar be a national currency if you couldn’t transfer large sums out of, say, Louisiana, to any other state? Would the Pound Sterling be a national currency if there were restrictions on how much you could send or carry from Glasgow to Plymouth?
And I wonder if the rules now in place in Cyprus will be much more widely applied within the next five years . Here’s the NYT account, also published in the International Herald Tribune. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/world/europe/currency-controls-in-cyprus-increase-worry-about-euro-system.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
There are many interesting aspects to this, especially since it’s clear that the Eurofanatics have by no means abandoned their hopes that Britain will one day surrender its own currency and join the Euro (don’t rule this out. The economic and political decline of the coming decade, mainly severe inflation, will make all kinds of unthinkable things thinkable).
Cyprus (and Greece and some other countries) are still in the Euro because of political imperatives. The EU project could not be seen to be retreating. They are not in it for economic reasons, as continued membership is deeply damaging to their economies and societies.
I wonder if that other totem of Euroland, the Schengen agreement which abolishes borders, has a similar one-way capability. Will it be the case that people travelling from the core countries will be able to cross freely into the outer Eurozone, and settle there, while those in the outer zone won’t be able to settle in Germany and France?
And what about the huge problem of illegal migrants into the EU, crossing into Greece and Bulgaria from Turkey, into Italy from Albania, or into Spain via its African enclaves at Ceuta and Melilla, or arriving as boat people, from North Africa to Lampedusa and Malta, or directly into Italy? I see that Malta has a grave crisis of migration once again, having been told by the EU Commission that it cannot send boat people back to Libya, in which case I rather suspect that the migrants will be informed by someone or other that there is no border between Malta and Italy. In fact there is no border (apart from the sea) between Malta and Brussels. Only recalcitrant Britain ( joined, of necessity, by Ireland, which I suspect would like to sign up to Schengen, but can’t if we won’t) still maintains border controls within the EU. And, as we know, those controls are a good deal weaker than they should be. Although we can still check passports, we are absolutely obliged to allow the holders of EU passports to enter our territory, for they have as much right here as we do. But will the Northern European founders of the EU be limitlessly willing to accommodate these migrants? And if not, what then will happen to Schengen?
I myself think the Schengen Treaty is a bigger and more revolutionary enterprise even than the Euro, and I still gulp with amazement at such locations as the Brenner pass, that ancient boundary between north and south, when I go from Austria to Italy without so much as a pause, or at the footbridge over the Rhine between Strasbourg and Kehl, which can be crossed without a passport, as if I were crossing the Cherwell from North Oxford to East Oxford (yes, this is how geography works in Alice in Wonderland's home town) , or when I rattle in the Prague Express down the lovely Elbe Valley south of Dresden, and suddenly I am in the Czech republic without so much as an application of the brakes, only able to tell which country I am in by the signboards on the shops and bars.
Abolishing borders isn’t quite like abolishing gravity. If you don’t have passport checks and customs, then people can physically cross them (I note that on those sleeper trains I used to take, that I wrote about here a little while back, you’d have to give your passport to the attendant the night before, and sometimes you’d be woken anyway, and if you were travelling eastwards, they’d wake you for sure at Warsaw Pact frontiers) . But it *is* like abolishing history, pretending that things are true which are not true, and that things are not true which are true.
After all, a simple reading of the history of World War Two, the supposedly virtuous war, begins (does it not?), with the violation of borders, first of Czechoslovakia, then of Poland, then of Belgium and Holland and France. So presumably it was fought by us and our allies to restore these borders, not to render them permanently obsolete? In which case why have they now vanished? I might add, for those who keep telling me that we were obliged to go to war in 1914 to guarantee the integrity of Belgium, that if the German Army decided to go to Brussels or Liege today, on their way to Paris, all they’d need to do would be to get on the train and go there. So where did they put that integrity?
Ah, reply the EU supporters, but Schengen did not result from invasion, but an agreement between equals. Maybe so. I think you would have to study, in some detail, the mathematics of each border to work out if the countries on either side of it really were equals. Which way do trade, and money and people flow? Which way does power flow? Which country’s foreign policy is subject to which? In easy times, these things aren’t tested, though EU membership has devastated – for instance – coal mining and farming in Poland, deep-sea fishing in this country, and is I think about to do grave damage to agriculture in newly-joined Croatia. In difficult times, of unemployment and mass immigration, they are tested. I suspect we’ll see more and more of the sort of one-way unity they are suffering in Cyprus.
Out of the Bunker?
In the new Eirenic spirit that has grown up between me and Mr ‘Bunker’, I thought I’d explore his response, posted on Thursday morning. I have edited his words quite a bit, leaving out some large chunks of what I regard as boilerplate. The original, for those who desire the unabridged Word of Bunker, can still be found on the previous thread. As before, my answers are marked **
Mr ‘Bunker’ :’ Mr Hitchens is correct in saying that I (say I) never took the decision to believe in God. I was born without any belief in God, I have never started to believe in God. Nothing has changed, and I remain without any belief in God – i.e. the same natural state in which I was born.’
PH responds ***Another contributor (Chris Doyle) has I think pointed out eloquently that absence of belief in a baby or a child is of no significance in this argument. Belief only develops as we develop a need to explain the world about us. Mr Doyle said : ‘As a young child, Mr Bunker probably gave very little thought into where things came from. If he wanted food or drink, it was “magically” produced for him. If he wanted warmth and shelter, it was magically provided for him. He had no idea where he himself came from, let alone anyone or anything else. It’s as if they appeared… by “magic”. Flick a switch, and there was light. Press the button, and there was television. Turn the tap, and there was water. All magical occurrences as far as the young D Bunker was concerned. As he grew up, he learned that functionally specified complex things don’t just magically appear or make themselves by accident. He learned that someone, or something, had to produce these things on purpose. Therefore, without this learning, if he was still walking around today in “the same natural state in which (he) was born” with respect to any aspect of the world, he would certainly need to justify such notions as food just magically appearing in front of him whenever he wants it… or be dismissed as a poor, deluded fool.’
PH**I strongly disagree with Mr Doyle’s conclusion that the atheistic view should be ‘derided’, as I shall explain in a moment. It should be conditionally respected, the condition being that it acknowledges that it is a belief. Otherwise, his argument is sound. In the case of the material experiences described by Mr Doyle, the growing child learns the reasons for these things and the explanations of their working. But when he comes to the far greater question of how the universe came to be, how life began etc, there is a lot of *description*, on which he can rely because it has been thoroughly tested by observation, experiment and predictive power, but no settled *explanation* of how these things came to be in the first place, let alone why they came to be. One contributor here amusingly claims to know for certain (how?) that the whole thing is an accident, but doesn’t cite his authority.
I think Mr Doyle should understand that the theist position is much stronger if the theist admits he lacks certainty, and challenges the atheist to adopt the same modest posture. A personally-held certainty is no use to man or beast, if you cannot communicate it to an opponent, and persuade him of it. And one thing is quite clear about this argument. The certainty merchants of both sides can never persuade each other. This is simply not so in limited, tested areas of real hard science, such as the theory of flight, or the predictable operation of the law of gravity, where doubters can be vanquished by repeated experiment. That is why attempts to persuade the other side of one’s rightness, in the theist-atheist controversy, are as dull as repeatedly hitting a large damp sponge with a sledgehammer. Even the heaviest blows leave no lasting impression.
This brings us rapidly to the real point of the argument which is ,was, always has been and always will be a moral one. And we theists can then have a good laugh at the way the atheists (as one might expect them to do, given their view of the cosmos) deceitfully refuse to admit that their belief, a blatant charter for selfishness, deviousness, crime and deceit, is even a belief. Oooh no, they drone yet again, it’s not possible for an intelligent person to believe anything else. Well, of course it is, as so many highly intelligent believers in some sort of theistic being demonstrate, and so we go round again. We do this because atheists so very much do not wat to discuss their motives. And they invariably avoid this by pretending they haven't any motives.
Thus when Mr ‘Bunker’ declares ‘ I have no need to justify this [his belief in No God].’, he convinces nobody but himself and his co-non-religionists.
But when Mr ‘Bunker’ says ‘ Those who have started to believe in God are the ones who must give their reasons for doing so – if they wish to argue about it, I mean. Otherwise it is entirely their private affair. This is the point at which the argument becomes interesting. How and why did those who believe in God ….do so?’ , PH ***I must acknowledge it as a legitimate question.
****PH I have said that the ultimate reasons for my choice of belief over unbelief are personal and private. Even were I happy to reveal them on my own account, they concern intimate details of the lives of others, as well as my own, and I’m not prepared to do confessional journalism.
So let me, for the sake of argument, invent a fictional set of circumstances, definitely never my own, or remotely resembling my own, which might lead to the same conclusion. The central character in this story , let us call him ‘Frank’, has an elderly widowed parent. That elderly parent has become ill and can no longer live alone. Frank has a young family, a reasonably successful career, a modest but not spacious home. Frank’s wife goes out to work. Frank knows that, if he takes his parent into his home, it will be cramped, often stressful, and costly in time and material comfort for himself, his wife and his children. All his instincts are to see if he can get his parent into some sort of state-funded institution. His friends encourage him in this, saying that there’s nothing to be gained by encumbering himself and his family in this irksome way. The elderly parent, when asked for an opinion, insists he shouldn’t worry. The institution will be just fine. The authorities are, as it happens, very willing to help, though the place they offer to provide is (inevitably) pretty unattractive. Yet Frank's conscience, an authority he has little time for, nags at him. Out of some deep place, he feels prompted to take the parent into his home. He does so.
There are, as he knew there would be, many immediate material disadvantages. Many of his friends rather obviously and humiliatingly, pity him. His social life dwindles. He is often embarrassed to admit his circumstances to colleagues, and he often has a strong feeling of being trapped by circumstances he has not chosen, and of having sacrificed his own will (he has, though in a curious way his servitude is also a new form of freedom).Yet he also has a very strong conviction that what he has done is absolutely and unquestionably right. He needs this conviction to carry on doing it, and to persuade the other members of his family that it is right. As it happens, in the following years he (and they) will gain a great deal of unexpected joy and reward from the decision, which they would have been denied had he put the parent in an institution, though he does not yet know this and will not know it for some time, so it can be discounted from the conclusions which follow next.
As he reflects on this, it seems to him that the same measurement, applied to many of his past actions, shows them up as unquestionably, irrevocably wrong. If what he has now done is right, and to continue living he *must* believe that it is right, then this is inescapable. The excuses he offered to himself for his previous selfish actions now look tawdry and contrived (they were). That raises important questions about forgiveness and how it is to be obtained, which will eventually take him beyond mere theism.
But the power of the choice also stretches outwards and forwards, without limit. If actions cannot be judged only by their immediate effects, if there is a just law which on occasion overrides the selfish impulse, if conscience is real rather than the misunderstood operation of a grumbling liver or the exaggerated effect of a sleepless night, then the crude material world of immediate bargains and simple caaue and effect is not as it first seemed. To validate the rightness of his moral decision, to enable him to stand by it under pressure and to continue with it when it seems futile and is causing him discomfort and unhappiness ( as it sometimes does) , and inconvenience and self-restraint, as it does almost all the time, it is a great strength to him to believe that he is obeying a cosmic, unchanging law which supports him. In this case, as he is human, he is also sometimes helped by feeling that, if he fails in his duty, he may eventually face justice.
I don’t offer this hypothetical description to try to *persuade* anybody, least of all Mr ‘Bunker’. I offer it in an attempt to show how the theistic explanation of the universe might help someone to do a fairy commonplace and accessible just action, but also how someone might be persuaded of the theistic explanation by doing a right action, and needing to continue to do it.
The description above is a hypothetical description, contrived to aid understanding. That is all. It contains no assumption (of which I shall immediately and tediously be accused) that such a right action could not be done by an atheist, or could only be done by a believer. As it happens, my imaginary ‘Frank’ would, in this story, have described himself as an atheist at the start of the story, but not at the end of it. I am quite sure atheists do such things, though I would say that their belief that such actions are right derives from a theist conception of the universe which (though unacknowledged) is still very much present in our de-Christianised culture, literature, drama and daily converse.
Mr ‘Bunker’ asks : ‘Can a belief be induced by deciding, wishing and choosing?’
**I reply. Yes it can, once the would-be believer understands that he or she has a choice. Any experienced minister of religion, confronted by a person (usually a habitual believer brought up in faith since childhood) with doubts about faith, knows that the best advice is ‘continue to behave at all times as if you believe’. I offer the same advice to those who have never believed. It is indistinguishable from belief, in my view, since belief is worthless if it does not influence the believer's behaviour.
Most will be pushed into the choice of belief or unbelief by circumstances. All of us, unless we remain forever children, are sooner or later pushed into circumstances where we must decide whether to act as if the universe is a cosmic car-crash, in which our actions have no significance beyond their observable effects, or an ordered and purposeful whole, in which our actions continue to echo and reverberate down all eternity.
The more alarming and frightening the circumstances, the starker the choice. Most of us learn, very early on, how easy it is, in ordinary daily life, to appear kind and generous while concealing our selfish deeds and thoughts, and so it is quite easy to avoid serious moral choice for most of the time. In a society based only upon the second-rate morality of the ‘Golden Rule’, ‘ do as you would be done by’ actually means ‘appear to do as you would be done by’.
Secret selfishness, secretly harming others, secretly letting others down, are all perfectly normal forms of behaviour (office politics is a good example of the old problem of the ‘smiler with a knife’ who is everybody’s friend in public but secretly whispers against his ‘friends’ for personal advantage) . And how many of us have been pleasant to neighbours, colleagues or acquaintances solely in the hope of making use of them? How many of us are polite and submissive to those with power over us, and dismissive and overbearing to those over whom we have power, or who have no power over us? And people (who are unperturbed by ubiquitous surveillance cameras) wonder why the concepts of an all-seeing God and an implanted conscience might be desirable.
But in the crises of life, love death, war, sickness, we sometimes surprise ourselves and others. Appearances are deceptive. The apparently good fail in courage, patience or generosity. The despised rise to the occasion. I suppose that, just as we cannot see the stars or hear the wind in the trees in this materialist society, it may now be possible to live an entire life without a true test of conscience, and so our lives are insulated from the decisions which might force us to choose which sort of universe we wish to live in. In fact I often wonder how many of the changes we now seek are subconsciously designed to spare us such choices, of which our consciences are afraid, Atheism , or rather a blank dismissal of the need for God, is a good deal easier in an electrified, plumbed, wired, contracepted, euthanized, televised, vaccinated streetlit, welfare, pensioned, medicated, anaesthetised society than it was 150 years ago. But there are still gaps, and we still meet them.
Mr ‘Bunker’ writes ‘And when I read how Mr Hitchens came to believe, it is clear that deciding, wishing and choosing may have played a role, may indeed have been decisive, but there were not in themselves sufficient to produce a genuine belief. What Mr Hitchens needed, and what he found, was „sufficient data“ Mr Hitchens puts it nicely. It is „a battle between logic and desire“. He says it is „a process so gradual that the moment at which I might have been said to be a believer again cannot be clearly distinguished from the moment when I didn’t believe.“ - I think that is entirely understandable. But then Mr Hitchens adds, „ ... and at some point it was necessary for me to acknowledge to myself and to other people that, that was the case“. „Necessary“? - Well, apparently he had no other option! Something forced him to acknowledge his belief.’
**PH . Absolutely not. This is typical ‘Bunker’ sleight of hand, changing the meaning of what other people have said to suit his own case. ‘Necessity’ or ‘need’ do not in any case equal compulsion. I still had (and still have) the power to choose. But the power to choose the belief was and is wrapped up with the power to accept or reject (or postpone)the actions . But , more importantly, the need I refer to was the need to acknowledge my change of view. At some point in adopting a different system of thought, it becomes necessary to articulate it, usually first to oneself, then those with whom one is most intimate, and then to all those with whom we have to have moral dealings.
In my own experience, which may not be everybody’s, a thought can only get so far without being spoken, and is much enhanced by being written down. And to enter a new moral universe is to need to explore it, which cannot be done without thought and debate. It’s also the case that, if one decides that the universe is created, the expression of gratitude, and the confession of wrongdoing, need to be done out loud to be effective. So Mr ‘Bunker’ is incorrect to equate this with his claim that some mysterious power, a power in whose existence he cannot consistently believe, ‘forced’ him to choose unbelief.
Mr Bunker asks :’And what was this force?’
**PH: Well, as I have not suggested the existence of any such force, there is no answer to that.
MR ‘Bunker’ continues ‘ Sufficient data, I presume. Which, logically, leads us to the question: What is sufficient data? How is it that for some „data“ may be credible which for others is not credible?’
***As I said during my discussions here with Professor Millican, the decision on what counts as evidence (or data) is taken (by both sides) before they consider it. The supposed ‘evidence’ is therefore not a common currency between the two sides. And so it cannot be used equally by believers and unbelievers. This very simple and obvious point merely underlines my point that we choose first and believe afterwards. The data merely leave us free to choose. For me, the universe is evidence for the existence of God, whereas the problems of pain and unjust disease and death are evidence against. For Mr ‘Bunker’, there is no evidence for God at all. He has ruled Him out before considering the matter. That is why our positions are not equivalents. His belief, an unshakeable certainty immune from doubt, has a different character from my belief, a choice beset by doubt. He should stop trying to claim that we are equivalent.
Mr ‘Bunker’ says : ’I have no wish to criticize Mr Hitchens' most intimate beliefs.’
**PH: Then all he needs to do is to accept that they are as legitimate as his.
But he won’t.
Mr ‘Bunker’ says: ‘I only wish that my own lack of belief, my atheism, should be equally respected.’
PH**: But it is. I keep telling him. I regard his belief as a valid choice given the evidence, or lack of it, just as mine is. Alas, he refuses to accept this concession, indeed he rather brusquely thrusts it away, as he says his belief isn’t a belief, whereas he (rightly) points out that my belief is a belief. The sticking point is on his side of the door.
Mr Bunker says :’ My measuring scale has produced different results from his. What Mr Hitchens writes is confirmation of what I have always maintained – each person comes to his own conclusion because of the way he perceives the evidence. Some rationally, some not, in a process (measuring scale) which makes one option „necessary“ (to use Mr Hitchens' own word) and rules out the alternative. Therefore at the end of the process there is no choice.’
PH **: Mr Bunker’s final statement is contradictory and incoherent, as it begins with an apparent admission that belief is a consequence of perception, and then abruptly denies its own logic by saying there is no choice. Mr Bunker only needs to grasp that a man can choose ‘the way he perceives the evidence’ (which of course he can) , and he will be there. As George Herbert wrote so rightly, so long ago: ‘A man that looks on glass, on it may stay his eye/ Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, and then the heavens espy’.
July 10, 2013
Westminster Bubble versus British Reality
In the world of ‘political journalism’, the Tories are having a good week. The Prime Minister, speaking from atop a hill of banknotes supplied by millionaire donors, their sisters and their cousins and their aunts (have a good laugh at the details revealed here http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/08/party-funding-scandal-david-cameron-conservatives),
sneers at Labour for being in the pockets of the unions.
Once upon a time, when I myself fell into the partisan trap that grips Westminster reporters, I wouldn’t have been able to write the above sentence. If you work in Westminster reporting you have to join a gang as surely as if you grow up in one of fatherless desert estates of South London. If you don’t, you may not be knifed or gunned down but you will face professional death. Contacts will not feed you stories. Newspapers will be baffled by your refusal to adopt to the standard storyline.
To explain part of this problem, a courageous and honest essay about the way in which ‘news’ gets in the way of truth, by the estimable Peter Oborne, is reproduced in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ , or you may read it here
It is only part of the story. Traditionally, British newspapers have been partisan, and the more popular they are the more partisan they are. So that, even in the modern era, when the traditional Left long ago despaired of New Labour (being too thick to realise that New Labour is in fact a subtle and camouflaged fulfilment of their dreams) and the traditional right have just begun to realise that the Tory Party is not in fact conservative at all, a whiff of partisan conflict can quickly bring both sides back into line.
Thus. Theresa May’s supposed ‘triumph’ in ‘securing’ the deportation of Abu Qatada (whose lawyer announced in May that he would go voluntarily as soon as Jordan had complied with the ECHR ruling, and who arrived at Amman with a whopping great grin on his bearded visage) the attack on Mr Miliband for his union funds, which seemed to me to turn a bit sour on Mr Cameron during Prime Minister's Questions this week, and may well end in that horror of all horrors, state funding for political parties) and the laughable Tories-only vote for a ‘jam-tomorrow’ referendum on the EU , four years hence, are cited as reasons why the Tories have a ‘spring in their step’, in newspapers and of course on the BBC.
And then the decision by the European Human Rights Court to allow some heinous murders to petition for release before death is another opportunity for the Tories to rage against ‘Human Rights’ and ‘foreign courts’, as if they didn’t like them. Actually they do, but they also rejoice in the excuse they provide for enacting laws they know will be unpopular. It’s all the fault of those foreign judges! They made us do it! (Don’t mention the fact that we could, in a matter of minutes, end their jurisdiction over us) NB, Mrs May also this week agreed to place us back under the jurisdiction of the European Arrest Warrant, ultimately guaranteed by the other European Court, the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, an oppressive loss of sovereignty which means no British subject( as we are no longer) is safe from arrests ordered by foreign magistrates. This announcement, in one of those lovely coincidences that make our political system such fun, was made on the same day of the Strasbourg judgement on murderers serving whole-life sentences.
The reason for this partisan, thoughtless stuff, in which bogeymen are slain and straw men hacked to pieces, is that the Tories’ right flank is crumbling , and that Mr Cameron and his press friends hope to shore it up by appealing to tribal instincts and blowing hard on every dog whistle that comes to hand. The depth of the Tory crisis is great. Small and non-prominent mention of the following survey could be found by assiduous readers of the press or listeners to the BBC. But because it wasn’t commissioned or spun by any party or newspaper, it was little-noticed.
It is a very large survey of Tory Party members conducted by some highly reputable academics. Its principal revelations are that 42% of those members think their leaders do not respect them very much, that fewer than one in five believe their party can win the next election, and that a large number of Tory *members* are actively considering voting for UKIP at a general election. You can find the whole thing here :
http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/07/08/conservative-member-survey-paints-rather-gloomy-pi/
The important thing to bear in mind here is that these rare actual party members, not voters. The very core of the Tory party’s supporters is seething with mutiny and mistrust. Are these people going to be convinced by Mr Cameron’s Doomsday referendum of Mrs May’s skilfully spun fake toughness? They’re certainly meant to be, and I suppose it’s possible, but I suspect not. On the old principle ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’ these tough, excessively loyal old buzzards have had about enough of being strung along and they now know exactly where and how to take revenge. Watch out for the Euro elections. But the body of men and women known to Kenneth Clarke as ‘Her Majesty’s Press’ simply has yet to adapt to this new world.
How to Turn Anecdotes into Evidence - Take Them Seriously
Some of you may recall the story of a 32-year-old Sheffield man called Scott Hobson who, on the morning of May 18 last year, killed his own 59-year-old mother, Margaret. The manner of her death is horrible, and in my view such injuries could only have been inflicted by a person who had entirely lost his reason. The fact that they were perpetrated by a son on his mother suggests that the man’s mind was wholly overthrown by some external factor.
To add to the wretchedness of the crime, Mrs Hobson had only just completed a course of chemotherapy for cancer and was awaiting a scan for the results. Sheffield Crown Court heard that Margaret Hobson was found dead just after 7.00am by a neighbour and, before being arrested by the police, Scott Hobson was seen in the street by passers-by with blood-covered clothes and mumbling and staring vacantly. The killer was a former soldier who had served in Kosovo with the Territorial Army and according to the court report had suffered previous depressive episodes and also drank heavily. He was referred to in court as an out-of-work cannabis addict with "tortured psychotic thinking", was a "long-standing user of cannabis which may have contributed to his schizophrenia".
The story was covered in the Daily Mail here
The judge said there was a "clear risk" of Hobson committing more offences but he was satisfied that he was suffering from a mental disorder which is capable of medical treatment and therefore ordered Hobson to be treated indefinitely at Wathwood Hospital, Wath-up-on-Dearne, and only to be released with the Home Secretary's permission. In a report, a psychiatrist, Dr John Kent, said "This was a brutal and bizarre killing, with features which cannot easily be explained, other than they are likely to have formed part of some tortured psychotic thinking". Dr Kent also said that Hobson had "relapsing severe mental illness which may well have links to the misuse of illegal drugs". Two days before the killing on May 16 patrons in a local pub had noticed him 'laughing manically to himself for no apparent reason' and next morning began 'swearing, shouting and crying uncontrollably' when he took his three-year-old daughter to her playgroup In the early morning on the day of the killing, Hobson had been behaving strangely and his father anticipated a measure of aggression from him, but obviously no one expected the horrific and tragic events that were to follow.
Readers here will know that I am dubious about the value of expressions such as ‘psychotic’ or even ‘schizophrenia’, which suggest more precision and objectivity than they deliver. I was contacted by someone who had known someone close to Scott Hobson. From her own background knowledge she is strongly of the opinion that it was Scott Hobson’s cannabis use that caused him to lose his mind. She said :’ ‘The disturbing thing in this whole case is that on the few occasions I met this young man, including when he took us in his car on a day trip to the coast, he seemed quite rational and could hold an intelligent conversation on a variety of subjects. Obviously the change in his character occurred at a later date when he started using cannabis
‘My opinion is like your own as I firmly believe that the use of cannabis is to blame for turning many people into psychotic killers, and it makes me very angry that the government and the establishment as a whole seem to shy away from admitting the dangers of cannabis which like other hard drugs is causing crime, violence, murders, and destroying people’s lives.’
(NB, once again, a court report used the word ‘depression’ , but no effort seems to have been made by the court to establish whether the defendant was also taking ‘antidepressant’ pills. There really should be a rule about this in all cases of violence or suicide, so we could see if there was a pattern).
The organised pro-cannabis Comment Warriors who will circulate this posting among themselves and descend on this weblog ( as they always do) like a cloud of bluebottles clustering round a dead dog, will shout (among other things) that there is no proof of a connection, that the culprit also drank heavily and so on. I don’t in fact dispute any of that (though I would be surprised if alcohol, even in great quantities, could alone have rendered anyone so unhinged).
Could they for once address the actual point being made here – that such crimes are matters of public concern, that there is at the very least a possibility that cannabis may have contributed to this one and that
a) While this is unresolved, campaigns to relax the cannabis laws are surely wrong and b) a serious impartial scientific study into the correlation between cannabis use and mental illness is needed. To do this, ‘mental illness’ needs to be quite broadly defined (Before I am accused of inconsistency here, please remember that this is not to provide a pretext for medication, but to establish whether a drug has certain common effects and what they are), and the families, colleagues, fellow-students, teachers (where involved) and friends of those being studied need to be asked if they have observed changes in behaviour. At the same time all these convicted of violent offences should in future be questioned in detail about their past use of illegal drugs, including cannabis. What possible argument can there be against this? I mention these ‘anecdotes’ precisely because I want to get at the truth. Don’t they? I suspect not. I suspect they fear that the truth will lead not to the relaxing of the cannabis laws, but to their strengthening. That is why they are so angry with me. I threaten their selfish pleasure with a plea for the common good, and on grounds that make them feel guilty. They know the truth about the drug they defend. They just don’t want anyone else to know it.
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