Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 266

Mr 'Bunker' says Something Interesting

Very occasionally, even our old friend Mr ‘Bunker’ manages to produce something which stands out from the buzz,  from the hum and tinkle of background noise  which he spends most of his time making.

 

Two days ago, he posted the following comment. I have interleaved some responses, marking them **

 

 

Mr ‘Bunker’ : ’Mr Hitchens said that if anyone asked him why he believed what he believed, he'd tell them. So I asked him. By sheer coincidence, Mr Hitchens now recalls an interview he gave "some weeks ago". Why does he reproduce it here? Because bits and pieces of it have turned up on the web! Can I be excused for thinking that this is in fact an indirect reply to my question? – ‘

 

PH***No, he can’t be excused.  Or I suppose he can , but he’s quite wrong and has an exaggerated idea of how large he looms in my consciousness. Generally a brief glance at his postings is enough to persuade me that I have something else to do. I reproduced it because I finally got access to it and was able to. I didn’t have Mr Bunker on my mind at the time. I’ve many times said that I chose to believe because I prefer to live in an ordered purposeful universe , rather than in a chaotic, purposeless one. That’s the answer. It doesn’t vary.

 

Mr ‘Bunker’ :  ‘Whatever, I'm grateful to Mr Hitchens for what I consider an excellent response to that question. And I'm so relieved, because the way Mr Hitchens returned to Christian belief is entirely understandable. Until now I'd thought he had "decided to choose" and then "wished" to believe in God again - and it had happened just like that.’

 

PH***He may have thought that it happened ‘just like that’, or that the decision came in some sort of flash or instant.  I’d never given him any reason to do so. And had he read my book, ‘The Rage Against God’ as I seem to recall urging him to do, he would know this wasn’t the case.

 

Mr Bunker ‘And I understood that he said I could do the same - if I wanted to.’

 

***PH : Again, he misunderstood. I certainly did take such a decision, just as I had, earlier in my life, taken the decision which Mr Bunker says he did not take, namely to believe that there is no God and that the universe is chaotic and purposeless, an admission dispiriting in itself, but useful in removing any deep significance from my own actions,  in abolishing (for a while, anyway) any guilt or regret I felt for them, and in reducing my conscience to a thing of no account.

 

But then, I did not take that decision on an instant. It just became my position, and then a day came when I was asked to state my position and I said that I was an atheist.  But I have no doubt that I had taken the decision a long time before I articulated it in a conversation. This, in my experience, is how people do decide things, especially changes of mind. They are aware of a battle of logic and desire in their minds. They will be persistently aware of doubts about certain positions they have held, perhaps out of habit or instinct or protective colouration. There are many different responses to those doubts, and one of the main ones is to suppress them, so hard that it is possible, most of the time, to act as if they don’t exist. This often takes the external form of anger or (more commonly)  contempt towards those who publicly express one’s own private doubts. Many people never formulate such decisions clearly at all, as they don’t discuss them with others and they feel no need to write them down or publish them in any other way. Even so, if asked, they would give the opinion they have formed. . As someone whose business is writing and debating, I’m bound to clarify my opinions into words, and probably think more verbally than most people and so am more aware of my own thought processes as they are taking place.

 

Mr Bunker: ‘But apparently that is not so. Look at this paragraph: "It was 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 can’t remember a specific moment. It was a very gradual, imperceptible thing and at some point it was necessary for me to acknowledge to myself and to other people that, that was the case." I can honestly say that if I were to become a believer in God, it would be by a similar process. A process in which new facts and evidence were to be forthcoming, or in which my perception of those facts and evidence changed - in such a way that I would have no other option than to believe that God exists.’

 

***And here again we catch Mr ‘Bunker’ in his invariable three-card trick, though I am rather touched that he has had the manners and generosity of spirit to provide God with his capital ‘Go’ on this occasion, and left out the usual ‘gods’ goblins and others whom he likes to drag into the discussion.

 

 You have to be quick to spot it, but there it is . He says that he would only become a believer if  he had ‘no other option’ than to believe that God exists. Once again, I had, have and will always have (this side of the grave) the option to believe, as Mr Bunker does, that God does not exist. On the balance of probabilities, I have chosen my measuring scale and find that the nature of the universe seems to me to be very strong evidence of the existence of God.  The nature of my decision (which was taken when I decided to use a measuring scale which would favour that outcome) , and my reasons for taking it (reasons which preceded the process, which led to the decision) become clear to me when I review it.

 

But, had I chosen a different measuring scale to start with, I could conclude that there was very little evidence, and so dismiss the possibility..  The choice of measuring scale was evidence of my decision, not evidence on one side or the other. The choice I made was not one of science or logic, which cannot really help me, the choice was a moral one. Mr Bunker has mistaken *how* I chose belief for *why* I did so.

 

 

But the confusion of how with why is no great surprise in a man who constantly uses the expression ‘I can’t’ when he means ‘I won’t’ (a formula well-known to most parents trying to persuade children to do new things ) .

 

And then of course there is the question of *why* I prefer to choose to live an ordered and purposeful universe, despite the very high price of admission to that universe . This I have always kept private, saying that it concerns matters which are simultaneously commonplace, verging on the banal, in general;  and deeply personal and private , in particular. I think any reasonably intelligent person can work out roughly what I mean.  It is when you realise that for one small but vital thing to be true and right, as you most powerfully desire it to be, your whole cosmos has to be reordered, that you see it most clearly. But I was always free to take that chocie, just as I am free now to go back on it.

 

  

An Interview with 'Relevant' Magazine

Here is an interview I gave (some weeks ago) to an American publication called ‘Relevant Magazine’ (www.relevantmagazine.com) . I’ve put it up here because various bits and pieces have started turning up in various corners of the Net, so I thought I’d make the whole thing available.  I’ve made a few minor alterations to the text (giving God his initial capital letter, mysteriously missing in the text,  bunging in a few extra punctuation marks, and a few words which I’m sure I said but which may nt have got on to the recording - and substituting ‘slowly’ for ‘lowly’ in the part describing my recitation of the words of a hymn) . I’ve also cut out one or two phrases that seemed to me to have survived from half-formed subordinate clauses or digressions, and subtracted from the meaning. One seldom talks as clearly as one writes, having no chance to go back over the words and cut such things out. I feel that, as I know what I think, and it’s an interview of me, I’m entitled to do such editing as long as I acknowledge that I have done so, and explain why. I believe non-subscribers can go to the ‘Relevant’ website and obtain access to the original if they wish.

 

As always with interviews ,  and especially with those done over the telephone, I’m slightly puzzled at some of the things I’m recorded as having said, not recognising them as forms of words that I would have used.  It’s not so much that I don’t recognise the thought, as that I don’t recognise the shape in which it’s expressed. But never mind.  One thing does strike me quite strongly, though,  which is my response to the question about Christians being ‘judgemental’. I must have misheard this as some other word, though I can’t think what.  Or possibly I just  rushed into the answer before the question ended, assuming that something pejorative was being endorsed by the poll. Or perhaps I just forgot what I was going to say. What I say about opinion surveys is perfectly sound, but it’s not the point I would have wished to make. I’m all in favour of being ‘judgemental’, though I tend to describe this process as ‘ maintaining and upholding an absolute  moral code’ . As for being ‘winsomely contrarian’ , or ‘come to that ‘blazingly intelligent and piercingly articulate’ , I personally could have coped with a more restrained endorsement.

Here it is anyway

 

‘In contemporary journalism, few figures have as compelling a backstory as Peter Hitchens. Raised in a conservative Christian environment, Peter and his older brother, Christopher, came to adopt a ferocious atheism. Blazingly intelligent and piercingly articulate, they gained notoriety for their winsomely contrarian styles.

 

But while Christopher would go on to become one of the modern age’s most famous atheists—or, to use his phrase, anti-theists—the younger Hitchens brother followed a different path. Peter left the Trotskyism of his teens and became one of England’s most noted conservative voices, winning the Orwell Prize for journalism in 2010, in which one of the judges called his writing “as firm, polished and potentially lethal as a guardsman’s boot.” More importantly, and perhaps more surprisingly, Hitchens returned to the faith of his younger years. He writes eloquently and forcefully about the need for Christian morality in the public sector.

 

Tragically, Christopher passed away in 2011 from esophageal cancer. But Peter continues to work as an author and journalist, with a regular column for the Mail on Sunday. He took a little time to talk with us about his journey back to faith, religion’s place in civilized society and what he sees ahead for the next generation.

 

Q: So, when did you first become a Christian?

 

A: I was brought up in an explicitly Christian society and taught by teachers whose assumption was that Christianity was the religion of my people,  that I held, and held before I came to school   ... Christianity was still, in my upbringing, what you might call the default position of the English person. So I don’t know if the word “become” really applies.

 

Q: Was there a definite moment when you decided you didn’t believe in God anymore?

 

A: Oh, there was definitely a moment when I decided it wasn’t true—in my early teens. I was never indifferent to [Christianity], nor was it ever not a force in my life and in my surroundings and in everything in England. From the architecture to the music, to the shape of the towns, to the language, to the songs that we sang, were all Christian in their nature. You couldn’t have escaped it if you wanted to. But what you could do, which I did do, was deny it and say you no longer believed in it. That was a definite moment, identifiable and clear.

 

 

“The fundamental proof of the goodness of our belief has to be the fruits of it.”

Q: Was there a moment where you reverted back?

 

A: No, no, nothing so identifiable. It was 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 can’t remember a specific moment. It was a very gradual, imperceptible thing and at some point it was necessary for me to acknowledge to myself and to other people that, that was the case.

 

Q: Do you feel that the time of places like the U.S. and the U.K. being Christian nations is completely a thing of the past?

 

A: I fear it is, yes. The only thing that’s holding up the recognition of that is the afterglow of Christianity. There is a continued assumption in people’s lives, even though they aren’t specifically and explicitly Christians themselves ... People are still governed by assumptions that are Christian, but they no longer acknowledge the roots from which they come. In the end, if you separate any plant from its roots, the plant will die. But there will be a period, depending on the size and age of the plant, during which it will appear to be still alive. But it has undoubtedly died at the roots. I think as the originally Christian societies of the world become less so, it’s going to be harder to believe. That will just be the case. And it will take considerably more courage than anyone in my generation ever had to face.

 

Q: Some people would say it might be a good thing if we stop being a Christian nation—that we can still hold to the truth, that we don’t have to legislate our own morals on a larger group that doesn’t necessarily hold to them. Do you agree?

 

A: I think society has to have a fundamental agreement about what its morals are and what the origins of those morals are. You can have a more or less chaotic and lawless arrangement, or you can have a sort of armed truce. But what you can’t have is a functioning, inventive, lively civilization unless it has pretty much agreed on a shared foundation for what it believes is good.

 

Q: So what do you say then to people who would say—and a good many of them do—“Who are you to tell me that your morality is more right than mine?”

 

A: I would say the source of morality is not me. I’m merely informing you of another authority that seems to have a good deal more force than I could ever command. But in the end, of course, the illusion of self-authority—which has been one of the major developments of the past 100 years—has persuaded people that they need no such thing. And not only that they don’t need the concept of the deity, but that they actively want there not to be such a thing, which is one of the reasons the new atheism is such a passionate, intolerant and in many cases, rather unpleasant phenomenon. The people who have adopted it actively want there not to be a God. They know that if there is a God then that God must be a source of authority. If a purposeful creator made the universe in which we live, it would be idle to imagine that you could ignore that creator’s desires as to how you should live.

 

I’ll put this very crudely: It’s like buying a very expensive piece of equipment and trying to work it by actually looking at the manual and doing the opposite of what it says. It won’t work. If you don’t acknowledge that there is a manual or that anybody else knows more about it than you do, all kinds of things will happen which you might even conceivably think are good but they wouldn’t be. You wouldn’t know that because you would have tossed aside the very concept of there being an absolute right or wrong way to use this incredibly complex, delicate, finely engineered piece of equipment.

 

Q: But many people will point at religion, particularly Christianity, and all the harm that’s been done in its name.

 

A: Ah, but this is sort of schoolboy stuff, isn’t it? One of the fundamental points about the Christian religion is that it asserts that man is himself fallen and, without aid, is bound to fail.

 

Q: But people will look at widespread corruption—like some of the abuse scandals that came out of the Catholic Church—and say religion is the common denominator to all that.

 

A: I find all of this rather tedious. It’s not a proper argument. If you want to dispute the claims of the Roman Catholic Church, by all means, do so. I dispute some of them myself. But dispute them on that basis. Don’t attempt to smear it by the actions of some of its officials, members or hierarchy, who have broken its own rules ... Any large organization is human, and again, you have the problem: We’re fallen creatures. If we are in charge of any large organization, even if its aims are fundamentally good, there will be failures. But this isn’t an argument against the institution.

 

Q: There was a survey taken here in the States stating that something like 90 percent of people outside the Church consider those inside it to be judgmental.

 

A: Opinion polls and devices generally are for influencing public opinion rather than measuring it ... I’d be interested to hear how the question was put. But it wouldn’t matter to me how many people said something was true if it weren’t true.

 

“It’s often the case what is right is not easy, and it’s always the broad primrose path that leads to destruction.”

 

Q: You would say that the public opinion isn’t so important as that what we’re doing is right in our own eyes.

 

A: I don’t see what is to be gained by being ashamed of what you believe because you’re afraid that some indoctrinated person - who has been a victim of conventional wisdom and received opinion - has been told to believe what you say is, in some way, wrong. The fundamental proof of the goodness of our belief has to be the fruits of it. Look at what the Roman Catholic Church does worldwide. The amount of good it does hugely outweighs the amount of evil that is done - in contradiction of its own principles - by some of its officials.

 

This is a period of great material wealth and the worship of economic growth - and the century of the self, in which religious belief is going to be in trouble. The best metaphor for the state of mind in which we find ourselves is:  this is the first generation of the human race which doesn’t generally see the stars at night. It has blotted them out with street lamps and car headlights and everything else. You simply can’t see the stars in most places where human beings are concentrated, and, in the same way, the triumph of consumerism and growth and the temporary joys of pleasure as a substitute for happiness,  have blotted out the metaphorical stars of religious faith. It’s very hard to expect people who can’t see the stars to examine the significance of the stars or see their beauty.

 

Q: There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to fix that.

 

A: Sometimes there is no easy way. There’s an English hymn which goes ... (slowly recites)

 

Father,  hear the prayer we offer; Not for ease our prayer shall be ... But the steep and rugged pathway May we tread rejoicingly ...

 

It’s often the case what is right is not easy, and it’s always the broad primrose path that leads to destruction. There’s nothing new about that. If it’s easy it’s probably wrong, if it’s difficult it may be wrong, but it’s also quite likely to be right.

 

 

A Review of 'The War We Never Fought'

*****NOTE (embarrassing for me)

IB Times have written to me to point out that they were of course the original publishers of this review( as discussed below)  back in October, and it can be seen in its original form here:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/396862/20121022/war-never-fought-peter-hitchens-review.htm.

 

 I was so pleased to see it that I forgot that I had seen it before. I'm happy to reproduce it anyway. After all the ignoral and absue, it is pleasant to recall a differnet experience. My apologies to IB Times for not realising.

 

I have mentioned here before that my recent book on the non-existent 'War on Drugs' was (with some important exceptions such as Chris Mullin in my own newspaper, and Peter Lilley MP in 'Prospect' Magazine) either denied reviews, or reviewed abusively, by people so hostile that they , er, failed to grasp its point. I have rebutted two of the more hostile reviews, in detail.

 

I mention this, as usual, not to complain about my treatment ( I am used to it. My only grief is over the fact that my careful research will fail to reach many who would benefuit from it if they only knew it existed, and so will not influence a national debate which is stultified by ignorance, posturing and slogans) but to state a fact about the world of books, which is more or less closed to certain people and ideas. Mostly they cannot get published at all. Where they can get published, the elaborate log-rolling and friendship networks - which ensure free advertising for the favoured author on air or in reviews - ignore or, on occasions, denounce them. Denunciation is obviously better, but both are a poor substtute for proepr reviews.

 

Anyway, by contrast, here is a review, published only on the webm, by someone who has taken the trouble to read what I said, rather than to assume he already knew.

 

 

http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/the-war-we-never-fought-by-peter-hitchens/

 

How Margaret Thatcher Saved the Labour Party - Part Two

I was amused by the extraordinary resistance which met my story that Margaret Thatcher saved the Labour Party 30 years ago, and was thus responsible for Blair, Brown and Ed Miliband too.  Some said Labour would have survived anyway, by some magic power, without any money.  Some denounced me (reasonably) for being a promise-breaker, though I think they would have been less censorious if the resulting revelation had been more to to their taste. Others just argued (on the basis of no knowledge of the circumstances, whereas I have total knowledge of them) about whether it was true, or said that the Thatcher union legislation was in fact tough in other areas, which I don't dispute. Or they said that money hadn't saved the Tories from defeat. So what? The truth is that the knowledge that Margaret Thatcher actually saved the Labour Party from oblivion, and is thus responsible for what that party did when it recovered,  is profoundly unwelcome to gullible tribalists of both sorts. To accept this as fact is to accept that their fond illusions are just that - fond illusions. Real politics is not what they think it is. Well, diddums.

 

The story is absolutely true. My source was both extremely well-informed and very well-placed, and I suspected at the time that he or she was faintly disgusted about what had happened. The information was delivered to me and two other journalists over a lunch-table on what are called ‘lobby terms’, that is to say, what is said cannot be attributed directly to its source, but in this case was hedged about with an extra restriction. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m still not sure, whether the source really wanted us to observe it or not. It certainly can't do her or him any harm for it to be revealed now.  It’s an odd thing for a senior politician to tell three journalists something that he or she wants kept secret. But I seem to recall that we all agreed to do so in the discussion that such groups always have after the guest has gone, in which they decide what (if anything) they will write about the encounter. What a collection of gentlemen we were. But were we supposed to be?

 

Several things persuaded me to break the confidence now. One, that both major figures involved , Margaret Thatcher and Jim Mortimer, have passed away. Two, that the event is now 30 years old, the point at which even Cabinet documents are released. Three,  that the chances of the source being identified are virtually non-existent, and it wouldn't hurt her or him if this happened. Four that it has a certain relevance to David Cameron’s frankly absurd attempt to suggest that Labour is uniquely in hock to its donors, which is unjustly winning him golden opinions and praise.

 

I notice that, as usual, a number of my critics wrote in as if I were defending the Tory Party . People still cannot grasp that it is possible, in British journalism and elsewhere, to be independent of all party machines. I suppose this is because so many journalists are party servants, though increasingly they are the servants of the ‘centre’ consensus, as discussed here a few weeks ago, and will back the Blairite elements of all three parties. The row over the Falkirk selection is actually a quarrel between the Blairites and the Brownites, with Mr Cameron leading the charge on behalf of the Blairites  (who, whether in the shape of Blair or Cameron, would take money from almost anyone).

 

It is amazing how few people can accept the fact that Mr Cameron meant what he said when he declared he was ‘the Heir to Blair’, and was expressing his own true feelings when he ordered his MPs to applaud the Blair creature on his departure from Downing Street. There is one political party in Parliament, and it is not a conservative one. The ‘Conservative’ MPs are, it is true,  allowed to play at being conservative from time to time. But it is play, not reality. There was a hilarious moment last week, when Mr Cameron (who for years derided his own party for ‘banging on’ about Europe’) walked into the lobby  with his ‘swivel-eyed’ backbenchers in support of an EU referendum,  which Mr Cameron has no intention of holding and (unless he has become unhinged) knows very well he will not be in a position to hold after May 2015.  As for the alleged ‘repatriation of powers’ on Home Affairs, I think we had better take a long, cool look at that later this week. It is not (how shall I say?),as big as it is being made to seem.

 

But back to the Labour Party. Perhaps the sharpest comment on my revelation came from Mr David Martin, who wrote : ‘The Trade Union Act 1984, which required trade unions to ballot their members on whether each union should continue to have a political fund, was intended to go further than changing opting out to opting in. To the dismay of Thatcherites, every ballot had a majority in support of political funds. There is no logic in asserting that without financial support from the unions Labour would have suffered political oblivion. Mr Hitchens appears to believe Labour would not have won the general elections of in 1997, 2001 and 2005 without money from the trade unions - but is it not the case that the Tory party has received even bigger donations from its supporters and has not won a general election since 1992?’.

 

Well, sort of, though I'm not sure about that 'dismay'.  Its not that Labour wouldn't have won in 1997, but that it would have efefctively ceased to exist by 1992, if its funding had been cut off as originally planned.  Everyone involved knew what a significant measure this was. In 1927, after the defeat of the General Strike, the Tory government passed the Trades Disputes Act which enforced ‘contracting in’ on the political funds of the Labour Party. This was a grave blow to Labour funds, even in the days when most organised working men were keen Labour supporters and actually elected to keep on contributing. The Attlee Government took pains to reverse it in 1947. Laws are only repealed when they are really, really contentious and important in their effect. The wording of the Tory manifesto in 1983 gave Mrs Thatcher a mandate (aftr some talks with the TUC which would almost certainly ahve stalled quite quickly)  to re-repeal, and go back to the state of affairs of 1927.

 

In 1983, with the Labour Party more or less prostrate, and public support for it, even among trade unionists, sagging to dismal levels, I am sure a return to 1927 would have finished Labour for good.  I wish it had. Mr Martin perhaps does not recall, as I do , that at this stage the Liberal-SDP Alliance was very close to supplanting Labour. It was my view then, and it is still is now, that the Labour Party should have died a natural death at that stage.  In 1980, during the ’Solidarity’ crisis in Poland, the British trade union movement had revealed itself as a nest of apologists for Soviet tyranny, refusing (with a couple of brave exceptions) to support the Gdansk shipyard workers against the Communist authorities. This was because a large number of important unions had been penetrated at very high levels by well-organised Communist and fellow-travelling factions, which ensured that their higher councils and their significant officials were dominated by fellow-travellers or leftist apologists, and that the political power of the unions in the Labour Party (which was considerable) was deployed to help the Left, in domestic and foreign policy. Much of the suicidal behaviour of the unions during this period also only makes sense if it is seen as part of a campaign of national destabilisation. Those taking part probably didn't have a clue they were being used. But I am sure someone was using them.

 

Because the actual British Commun*ist* Party was always a pygmy (kept alive for years by shopping-bags full of used fivers from the Soviet embassy, handed over at Baron’s Court Tube Station in London and stored in a Golders Green bungalow, details here

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/reuben-falber-480404.html ),

 people assumed that British Commun*ism* was also insignificant.  But in fact, as revealed for instance in Peter Hennessy’s ‘Secret State’, the CP often rejected promising recruits,  telling them they could be much more useful if they did not join. We will never know how many such people ended up in high positions in politics, the civil service, journalism, the academy, perhaps even the Church. But, as an industrial and labour correspondent in the 1980s, it was easy for me to see that such people were very influential indeed at the top level of the union movement, not least in its political links with Labour. In those days, Constituency Labour parties were also quite active ( I belonged to one that certainly was) and their activists were more or less indistinguishable from continental Communists in policies and outlook. Having given up revolutionary socialism myself, and having thought I ws joining a social democratic party, I was quite surprised to find that many members of the Labour Party were well to the left of where I had been when I was an International Socialist.

Many of the activists were men and women who, in France or Italy, would have been open Communists. The remannts of 'right wing' Labour, heirs of Bevin and Gaitskell, were the main victims of such people. The constituency Left carefully and successfully targeted socially conservative and patriotic Labour MPs for deselection in a very effective purge. By the time of the Gang of Four breakaway, the old Methodist and socially conservative Labour Party was dead forever. The attempt by people such as William Rodgers to turn it into a version of the German SPD,  during the CND rows of the early 1960s,  was comprehensively defeated.

(The famous 'Militant Tendency' , I should say here,  was wholly irrelevant in the left-wing takeover, an insignificant diversion, whose ostensible 'crushing' was wrongly taken to be the end of hard leftism in the Labour Party by Fleet Street's gullible, ill-informed 'political correspondents').

I think it is absurd that the well-organised and well-directed minority of real hard leftists, in  the constituency parties and among CP fellow-travellers in the unions,  should have been able to have such influence over British politics, so long after Communism had been utterly discredited (first in its own terms as a liberation movement of the masses -  by the Gulag, by the crushing of the East Berlin workers in 1953, of the Hungarian rising in 1956, and of the Prague Spring in 1968; second in general terms as a utopian panacea and alternative economic system, by the disastrous failure of its economies across the Soviet Empire and in Cuba) .

 

It was only the union political funds which allowed this to continue. Without them, the CP and the hard leftists could have played their games, but they would have had no major party machine to infiltrate and control.  A Prime Minister seriously concerned for the country (especially in the days when the USSR still menaced western Europe with its enormous conventional armed forces) would have taken the opportunity, in 1982, to destroy this menace to freedom and prosperity, even at the cost of her own party’s medium and long-term electoral position. I have little doubt that, deprived of the revenues created by the ‘opt-out’ system, the political levy would have shrivelled to a trickle in that period. Labour would have been destroyed by the Alliance in the election of 1988, and thereafter faded into non-existence. The Alliance might well have won in 1988. It’s my guess that, had this happened, British politics might have achieved the reform they so badly need, under which one party speaks more or less, for the views espoused by Polly Toynbee, and the other one speaks,  more or less, for the views I hold.  With the Alliance as their principal opponent, the Tories would have had to become more socially conservative and more opposed to the expansion of the EU. As it is, the current Tory front bench is rather confusingly dotted with SDP veterans.

 

A word about the ballots which were eventually held on the political fund. Tragically large numbers of union members don’t vote in most union ballots, even when the issue is quite significant. If they did, the outcomes would be much more conservative. This was proved, in a way, by the active intervention of several Fleet Street newspapers, including the Daily Express (in those days a major force with a big working-class readership), in union ballots in the 1970s and early 1980s. These interventions themselves followed the disclosure of severe ballot-rigging in the old Electrical Trades Union, a scandal partly exposed by traditional ‘right-wing’ Labour supporters disgusted by Communist subversion. By repeatedly and insistently urging their readers to vote for right-wing candidates in union elections, instead of leaving the voting papers to moulder on the mantelpiece, Fleet Street papers tipped the balance in several ballots, most notably in the Amalgamated Engineering Union, as it then was.

 

Of course several unions didn’t have much in the way of democracy, so it was harder to influence them.

 

But significantly,  I don’t recall there being any co-ordinated or major Fleet Street intervention in the political fund ballots of the late 1980s. This inaction, in my view,  ensured that the status quo prevailed, as the Left always had enough organisation and drive to get *their* vote out without alerting opponents to the importance of the poll. Had there been any co-ordinated Fleet Street action by the ‘Tory Press’ (which would have had to have been sanctioned personally by editors) , then I think Labour would have assumed that this was also sanctioned by the government, and considered it a breach of the Thatcher-Mortimer Pact.

 

I don’t deny that there were several significant pieces of union legislation at the time. How could I?  They are not the point. But I have always believed that the general collapse of manufacturing industry (for which I mainly blame the Thatcher government’s bungled economic policy in the early 1980s) was the real reason for the end of the wave of strikes which had been fouling up British industry since the 1960s.  The final Scargill miners’ strike was purely political in intention, and actually helped the government destroy coal-mining in this country. Since then the Union movement has been transformed by mergers and contractions, and is now largely a lobby for heavy spending on the public-sector lobby, and a fortress of ‘Equality and Diversity’, not to mention Warmism and sexual liberationism, the modern incarnations of leftist utopianism now that fellow-travellers have nobody to fellow-travel with any more.  And the political funds are still there, and operating.

 

A Sad Farewell

Alas and woe, I read that one of the most enthralling books in the world is to go out of print forever. Thomas Cook’s red ‘European’ railway timetable (still known to me as ‘Thomas Cook’s Continental Timetable’ its original more Edwardian, insular title) will come out for the last time next year. I am hoping, rather faintly, that its International sibling, a blue volume in which you can look up trains from Alice Springs to Adelaide, and Pyongyang to Peking,  will survive.

 

How can I explain its wonders? I first fell in love with it more than 30 years ago when, nervously, I first dared to explore the Continental railway network. I realised rather slowly that, beyond the boat trains to Paris that one caught rather nervously at Dieppe, Calais and Boulogne there were actual normal trains, more or less like ours but also wonderfully different, bigger, wider, built to go further and even to cross frontiers, and they could take you almost anywhere. (I still remember enjoying the multilingual signs urging you not to lean out of the windows, two of which sounded to me like the names of slightly seedy freelance journalists trying to make a living in straitened times 'E Pericoloso Sporgerse', the man to call on for a good mafia story in Reggio di Calabria; Nicht ('Nick') Hinauslehnen, the man to go to,  to chase up the neo-nazis in Essen).

 

But how to use these alarming, clangorous monsters with their odd names - Schnell-Zugen that weren't fast, Accelerati that rarely got above 20 mph? Which station did you get off at in Berlin, or Milan, or (most confusing of all) Warsaw?Somebody told me about Thomas Cook’s Timetable. You can still find it in most big public libraries, and I think it will grow on you, so that you, too, will never be content with a website. The maps and detailed timings unveil to you the astonishing journeys you can take. I have taken many of them now ( as I recount below) but there are plenty that I have done only in my mind's eye, sitting in an armchair with winter beating on the windows as my imaginary sleeper crawls towards Lisbon on a late spring morning, or trying to escape from the oppression of a humid summer’s day, by picturing myself sitting over my borschtch and black bread in an imaginary dining car somewhere in the bison-haunted forests of eastern Poland, or perhaps in the far north of Norway. Many of these journeys I have yet to take. Now, I fear that I will never get round to some of them at all.

But still, I have covered more of the Continental railway map than most people ( and incidentally travelled along most of the North American passenger network too). In my view all these journeys were far better before the arrival of the new super-fast trains, which seem to want to be  aircraft,  and which are bad at cross-border travel. Who needs high-speed rail, jammed up in a plastic air-conditioned tube?  Medium speed, with space, comfort and windows you can open, and hang out of when the train stops,  is better.

 

By 1974 I was fully ready to take the plunge into Europe’s immense rail network. For £80, I bought two returns from London Victoria to Roma Termini, break of journey allowed, different routes permitted. Red Book in hand, I realised that there was still an actual Rome Express, with through couchette carriages all the way from Calais. It was hard to believe. But I booked the couchettes, and was greatly comforted, after passing through French frontier control at Calais Maritime, to see the two grey Italian carriages, marked ‘FS’ (Ferrovie dello Stato, State railways) towards the front of the immense train. I had honestly had no idea, before that day, what the Italian Railways were even called.

 

At Paris, we were thrillingly but alarmingly uncoupled, and hauled brusquely round the flickering tunnels and occasional open sections of the ‘Petite Ceinture’, (the Little Belt) a Victorian circular railway linking all the Paris termini, which I think is now abandoned, and felt very much as if it soon would be, stinking of ancient soot. Then we were slammed on to the Rome train at the Gare de Lyon and – as promised by Thomas Cook– a dining car appeared. This was not one of the glorious Wagon-Lits blue cars I would later encounter and now wish I’d spent even more time in, but a ‘Gril-Express’, the old French railways’ ingenious compromise  between a buffet and a restaurant,  self-service but with proper food and tables, well-adapted to our low budget.

 

But I hope I shall never forget the evening journey southwards in the early September light, eating my Blanquette de Veau as we clattered across northern Burgundy, with the great tower of the Cathedral at Sens catching the last of the sunlight in the distance. For many years afterwards a glimpse of that tower, as often as possible from a railway restaurant car,  was the sure sign of an adventure beginning  (I have looked out in vain from the TGV for this sight, as moving as the distant prospect of Lincoln cathedral from the line between Newark and Doncaster. But then, the TGV has no restaurant car, either, a shameful fact). I have always intended to visit Sens itself, though the guidebooks are rather terse about it, and it might not live up to its promise. Should I leave it in my imagination?

 

We were sharing our compartment with some Italian-Glaswegians, who regarded the passage through France as an ordeal in a land of barbarians, utterly refused to see any similarity between the Italian and French languages, and were hugely grateful when I was able to explain to the sleeping-car attendant that we didn’t want to go to sleep till later, so could be please leave the seats down? We did sleep in the end. I couldn’t do so now on one of those hard, narrow shelves, but somehow, in the morning, we were running along the seashore near Genoa, and it really was Italy, the light and the coffee much stronger than in France, and that light-heartedness in the landscape and among the people which is always so exhilarating. The dining car, quietly swapped in the night,  was now Italian. I was so ignorant of the language that I was puzzled to see that we were repeatedly passing through a town called ‘Uscita’, until it dawned on me that this was Italian for ‘exit’.

 

And then, in the gathering heat, we grew nearer and nearer to Rome, a city I had longed to see since , aged six, glimpsing, in an encyclopaedia, a picture of St Peter’s . I had wept bitterly when I found that I would have to go abroad to do so. Abroad? Impossible! Frightening! And now I was there, in the same carriage that I had boarded in temperate, grey-blue Calais, among the hot colours, yelling and frenzy of the south.

 

Now, I can still turn to the relevant page of Thomas Cook, and, by tracing my finger down a line of figures, I can relive that journey, and also the long way back through Florence, Venice, Verona, Milan and Turin (an astonishing surprise, with its background of mountains and its elegance), by then so short of money that I still remember the triumph of catching out the restaurant car attendant in overcharging me (for two plates of rigatoni and a couple of glasses of rasping red wine) by 1,000 lire, even then less than a pound.

 

Or I can wake at midnight at Bourg-en-Bresse or see us trundling along the lakeshore at Annecy at dawn, or screeching into St Gervais-les-Bains and hauling our bags across the platform, perfumed with coffee, into the little red cog-wheel train that would take us up into the Alps near Chamonix. Or there was a strange winding journey to the faintly sinister volcanic city of le Puy, with its miasma of garlic and 19th-century Roman Catholicism and its enjoyably gloomy dark rock outcrops . Or stepping down on to the platform at Dijon on a hot night and finding the air full of the scent of blackcurrants. Or changing trains at Etang on the way to the lovely cathedral city of Autun,  and eating one the best French meals of my life at a plain workers’ café next to the station,  where they insisted on giving the foreigners stemmed glasses for our wine instead of the thick Duralex ones that everyone else was using, and which I would much have preferred.

 

Or the time we splashed out and took the last of the old Trans-Europ Expresses, perhaps the most comfortable trains ever built, the Mistral down the Rhone valley, watching from its airy, spacious bar through huge windows, as we rolled past a hundred famous vineyards, the Etendard up from Bordeaux to Paris in what was then an astonishingly short time, but isn’t now. Or riding the ancient, Third Republic train from the era of Leon Blum that took us down from Bordeaux to what was then the unspoiled, Edwardian resort of Arcachon.   

 

And not just France, but complex dog-legs into Switzerland and Germany, slipping across the Rhine at Strasbourg, on to Freiburg-im-Breisgau, or through the border forests , Saverne and Kaiserlsautern, to Mannheim,  Heidelberg and Nuremberg, and then through sleepy forests into Czechoslovakia and also (for Thomas Cook knew no frontiers) the Berlin-Warsaw ‘express’ that took all day without a morsel of food or a drop to drink, and stopped to give us a good view of the Red Army massing on the border,  in November 1980; Or the East German train that rambled down to Weimar from Berlin, though a landscape of faded neglect and shortages in the sad winter light, like a dream of wartime . Discovering the wonderful cathedral of Naumburg (unknown , I think, to most British people, yet containing some of the loveliest mediaeval sculpture still in existence)  because of a long gap between trains on the way back to East Berlin. And in all these places, stepping from the train straight into the  middle of a new place, with all its smells and  special noises. No long journey in, no need to park.

 

It was one of the oddest things about travelling in West Germany ( as it then was)  that you would often see the pale green coaches of the East German railways (Deutsche Reichsbahn, German Imperial railways) stuck on the end of the sleeker West German trains. They usually stank of a ferocious disinfectant, which no western manufacturer would have dared to sell. It was odd to think that the carriages could travel where the people couldn’t (spies hid messages in their lavatories) . They ran rather good restaurant cars into the West, to make hard currency.  It was also odd  that the ‘Workers’ and Peasant’s Republic’ called its railway ’Imperial’ . I’m told this was for legal reasons. Had they changed the name they might have lost access to West Berlin.

 

None of these journeys could have been done properly by road or by air.  The air traveller sees almost nothing.  The driver cannot really look at what he passes, for he usually is tempted to drive by the quickest route, and modern roads sweep  round the intimate scenes that railways unveil at close quarters. There was a special joy in simply setting off, with the crumpled red timetable to hand, unsure of where we might end up or when, yet with the whole continent spread out in front of us.

 

I shall still do it. The wonderful website ‘The man in Seat 61’ is a great introduction to foreign rail travel which never existed when I first began my explorations. But it will never quite have the same power over the imagination as the old red book.

A good Week for Hypocrisy and Humbug -plus, How Margaret Thatcher saved the Labour Party

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

 

This has been a great week for humbug and
hypocrisy. First we had David Cameron in Kazakhstan, a corrupt despotism
as weird as North Korea, but with oil and gas.

 

Mr Cameron was (quite reasonably) grovelling for
trade deals and for a safe exit-route by which to extract our costly
military equipment from Afghanistan.

 

But, as he sheepishly tagged along behind President
Nazarbayev’s goose-stepping ceremonial guard, did it occur to him that
he really ought to be calling for his host to be driven from power, as
he does with Syria’s President Assad?

 

Nazarbayev, like Assad, ‘kills his own people’. In
fact he shoots them in the back, most notably at Zhanaozen in December
2011, when armed police opened fire on unarmed strikers as they fled. At
least 16 died.

 

He’s sensitive, too.  A dissident newspaper’s
offices were mysteriously burned down in the night. The arsonists left a
headless dog hanging at the scene, and a terse note with the message
‘You won’t get another warning’.

 

Mr Cameron is said to have sat drinking whisky with
the President of this moral slum.  As I said, I don’t blame him. In our
weakened, insolvent state, this is the sort of thing we have to do.

 

But can he please now cease trying to drag Britain into ‘ethical’ attacks on other countries? 

 

Some hope. These people don’t learn by experience.
The comical collapse of the Egyptian experiment in democracy ought to
teach all such idealists a simple lesson. But the left-liberal mind
rejects all facts that won’t fit its dogma.

 

It was obvious to any educated person that
democracy in Egypt would lead to an Islamist government and that we were
better off with things as they were.

 

But our political and media elite went into spasms
of uncritical joy over the ‘Arab Spring’, urging it on and undermining
the old regime.

 

And now the same people find themselves greasily excusing an army putsch, which has put an end to this teenage nonsense.

 

I am called a cynic for pointing these things out.
But isn’t it much more cynical to encourage delusions which then lead to
tragedy?

 

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

 

I think it is time for the Tories to stop being so
hoity-toity about the trade union grip on Labour. The Tory Party has a
whopping great skeleton its cupboard which I am now going to pull out
and wave about.

 

I promised to keep quiet about it nearly 30 years
ago, and I’m still not naming my source. But Mr Cameron’s self-righteous
attack on Labour has persuaded me that it’s time to come clean.

 

The Tory manifesto in 1983 pledged to do something
about one of the worst scandals in British politics, the ‘political
levy’ by which the unions take money from their members to put into
their political funds. These funds are then used
to buy influence in the Labour Party.

 

If you belong to most British unions, you pay into
this unless you opt out. Many don’t even know they’re contributing.
Others are afraid of drawing attention to themselves by opting out. As a
result, millions of people give money to Labour
without wanting to, via union political funds. And so they maintain the
union stranglehold on British politics.

 

It needn’t be so. Margaret Thatcher’s 1983
manifesto promised to end this disgrace. If the unions wouldn’t sort it
out, it said, ‘The Government will be prepared to introduce measures to
guarantee the free and effective right of choice.’

 

She won with a huge majority. It was a mandate. So
what happened? The then general secretary of the Labour Party, the late
Jim Mortimer, approached the Tories through a special back-channel. Word
was sent to the late Margaret Thatcher that
she would be unwise to act on this pledge.

 

If she did, Mortimer warned, she might well destroy
Labour and so – unintentionally - ensure that the Tories were beaten at
the next election by the SDP-Liberal Alliance. 

 

He added that if by any chance Labour survived, and
came back to power, it would take a terrible revenge. It would pass
laws to stop the Tories raising funds from business.

 

The ‘Iron Lady’ buckled and collapsed. For the sake
of party advantage and short-term gain, the plan was dropped. A few
feeble ballots were held instead, which hardly anyone noticed.

 

So Margaret Thatcher and her Tories actually saved
the Labour Party from richly deserved oblivion. The disastrous 1997-2010
Blair-Brown government is their direct fault.

 

They also made sure that the unions would keep their thumb on the national windpipe for another 25 years and maybe much longer.

 

I am sorry if my source now feels betrayed, but I
feel increasingly that the nation was betrayed, and that is far more
important.

 

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

 

Funny, isn’t it, how BBC bias always happened in
the past but is never taking place now? A former director-general, Mark
Thompson, recently conceded that the Corporation (itals pse) had (off
itals) a ‘massive bias to the left’ 30 years
ago. But not now. Oh no.

 

Now another BBC Commissar, Helen Boaden, says it
was biased about immigration eight years ago. But not now. Oh no.  Ms
Boaden’s remarks form part of an unintentionally hilarious report by
Stuart Prebble, a nice, intelligent ‘liberal progressive’.

 

Mr Prebble invited me to come and tell him about
BBC bias. I did. I told him that the problem was that the BBC could
never understand that it was biased, just as a goldfish in a bowl does
not know he is a goldfish, or that he is in a bowl.

 

This is because BBC people have no friends who
disagree with them, and despise moral and social conservatives as
morally evil people.

 

He listened politely, though I do wonder what he
said about me after I’d gone. And then he produced a report saying the
BBC wasn’t biased. It would be funny if it didn’t matter.

**********

How long have the police been accepting people with
criminal records - sometimes quite severe records - as recruits?  My
colleague Martin Beckford tried to find out.  Nobody official seems to
know, but I am sure that it is a new development
and would guess it happened under the Blair regime. Do any proper
old-fashioned coppers know the answer?

 

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

 

Not only are the government deliberately ensuring
power cuts five years hence, by shutting down perfectly good coal-fired
power stations and replacing them with useless windmills. Much of the
electricity that’s left will be given free to
illegal cannabis farmers.

 

Cultivating dope in the attic, using stolen power,
is one of this country’s few growth industries, thanks to the covert
legalisation of the drug. And the electricity companies apparently do
far too little to detect this crime.

 

It sums everything up really, a stoned nation, intermittently powered by wind.

 

More on Tuesday's Immigration Debate

I have mentioned the debate on immigration in which I hope to take part in London on Tuesday, sponsored by the Spectator magazine. They asked me to jot down some thoughts on the subject, and you may read them here

 

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/peter-hitchens/2013/07/how-have-we-become-so-diffident-about-our-national-culture/

 

Those interested in this subject might also like to revisit this article   

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/04/how-i-am-partly-to-blame-for-mass-immigration.html

 

and this one

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/immigration/page/3/

 

 

 

Nostalgia, Progress and Virtue - a Response to Mr Charles

However many times I rebut the charge of nostalgia, people repeat it, when they cannot be bothered to argue with me properly. The latest such accusation comes from Mr Christopher Charles, who wrote as follows in response to my article on ‘The Lost Past of the Church of England’:

 

‘Underpinning so many of PH's posts lies the wish that at some point in the past - a forever shifting point - the world had stood still. That people had stopped thinking, stopped enquiring had stifled the human instinct to explore and instead become resigned to the way things are.

 

He has little time for human progress. Sadly for him progress isn’t that bothered.

He [or one of his myrmidons] will respond that it's been anything BUT progress. But every change brings both good and bad. It's in the nature of the human condition. The idea that the C of E could at some stage have stopped and said, 'I think this is as good as it's ever going to get, let's stop here and keep everything as it is' verges on the preposterous.

 

I share a lot of PH's sadness at what has been lost. I don't share his perpetual need to bang on about it. Life is only happening now. Engage with it, argue with it by all means. But fighting yesterday's battles is what elderly generals do over glasses of port. Better to engage with now.’

 

Let us take this lazy and rather ill-mannered intervention piece by piece. I cannot tell what my ‘myrmidons’ will do, and didn’t know I had any. ( I understand that they were a warlike people inhabiting ancient Thessaly when first mentioned in Homer, and no doubt I would rather have them on my side than against me).

 

1.  Mr Charles asserts : ‘Underpinning so many of PH's posts lies the wish that at some point in the past - a forever shifting point - the world had stood still. That people had stopped thinking, stopped enquiring had stifled the human instinct to explore and instead become resigned to the way things are.’

 

I reply: **On what written or spoken words of mine does he base this mighty assertion? Could it perhaps be based on my repeated statements,  here repeated yet again,  that I do not believe there was ever a golden age; that the past is dead and that we cannot return to it even if we wish; that my main concern is about the future, and about the fact that we are currently choosing the wrong future?

 

As for fixed points, I know only too well that virtue, unless constantly nurtured and encouraged, decays. In this world one has to run as fast as one can just to stay in the same place. Those beautiful cathedrals (to employ a metaphor)  have remained beautiful not through neglect or complacency but through constant loving and respectful renewal, based upon an understanding of, and a love for their original design and intent. Not a decade passes when they are not clothed in scaffolding.   Yet the virtues they proclaim have remained the same.

 

What is actually contained in this baseless assertion is Mr Charles’ s own implied belief that his opinions are the epitome of goodness and correctness, and that all developments tending towards them are axiomatically good.  This is implied so heavily in Mr Charles’s language that it is almost explicit. His view is that , for this country to have retained and renewed the Christian morals of circa 1955, people would have had to have ‘stopped thinking’ , ‘stopped enquiring’ , ‘stifled the human instinct to explore’ and ‘become resigned to the way things are’.

 

Does he really think that the proponents of lifelong monogamous marriage are unaware of the alternatives? Or that there is anything new about sexual licence? The whole of the 1549 marriage service, more or less identical to the 1662 service which is still valid in law, though largely despised and avoided by modern Anglican bishops and ministers  is in essence an argument against the worldly view on the matter. Any social historian, especially a liberal one, will go on at length about how the unmarried state was extremely common in pre-Edwardian England – and correctly so. The triumph of monogamy and virtue came only after the great evangelising campaigns of Wesley and others, which  formed the world we live in and are now losing, or - in my view - actively throwing away.

 

Mr Charles, in another breathtaking assumption that his view is somehow the only virtuous one, denigrates the opinion that  lifelong faithful marriage should be sustained against pressure for easy divorce. That  pressure, as he would know if he read my book as cited in the original article, was great and is now greater.  He states that to hold my opinion (in favour of lifelong monogamy) involves ceasing to think, and becoming ‘resigned’ to the way things are. Well,  this just prejudges the issue. To be ‘resigned’ is to accept reluctantly and unwillingly. I can see why people might initially be reluctant to accept lifelong monogamy, which places heavy loads on patience, self-control, cheerfulness in adversity, generosity and other human virtues which are all undoubtedly hard to maintain. But I can also see why, even so, it would be worth their while to do so. And I can, further, see why a rational morally-educated person might regard such virtue as one of the  glories of human existence.

 

 

2. Next, Mr Charles informs us : ‘He (me)has little time for human progress.’

**I have never understood how an otherwise intelligent person could deploy this non-argument without embarrassment. What is this ‘progress’ of which he speaks? What measuring device does he possess which can show objectively that the movement he observes is forwards or backwards?  Generally there will be a price paid for any ‘improvement’. Is it worth it? Are we even fully aware of the price we will pay at the time we accept the change? How – and when - do we judge?  Was the 20th century, for instance, an era of shining improvement or one of the darkest nights of human depravity? Both could be argued.  When and how will we be able to be sure which it was? It is clear, as soon as we consider this, that a different set of tools is necessary, one which divides good from bad and right from wrong.

 

And what we then find is that we are back at the old religious quarrel, which is itself an argument about whether man is basically good or basically sinful; and also about man’s sovereignty over himself, and whether (if it exists at all) it owes any duties to any higher law.  This measure will tell you whether mass legal abortion, for instance, is good or bad. It will tell you whether lifelong faithful marriage is a fortress of virtue or a repressive prison. These are not new things. Over the recorded centuries, men have taken different views of them. The passage of time has not decided which is right and which is wrong, nor can it.  That discovery will always lie elsewhere. For me, it is to be found in eternity. For my opponents it is to be found in immediate practicality.

 

3. Then Mr Charles attempts to be witty, giggling ‘ Sadly for him (me) progress isn’t that bothered.’

**Not funny. But even so, it is an interesting giveaway that Mr Charles gives ‘progress’ a personality. To many who hold his beliefs ‘Progress’  is a sort of deity, and I’m sure I’ve seen 19th-century sculptures trying to represent it, the usual clear-eyed, stern young woman on her plinth, eyes fixed on the golden future, torch in her upraised hand. Funny how those who seem actually to believe in such a golden future, and to justify their actions by asserting that they are done in the cause of ‘progress’  are always falsely accusing me of believing in a  golden past.

 

To which I might reply ‘How can you think that? It’s 2013 ,for goodness’ sake!’ .

 

Except that this statement, stripped of the tones of contempt in which it usually uttered, is completely meaningless. I could say it as scornfully as Mr Charles could. But it still wouldn’t alter the fact that I had not actually made any rational point at all.  The date has no bearing on whether an action is just or unjust. Its nature will persist throughout all time.

 

It is not ‘progress’ that dismisses my arguments with a sneer, but the moral, political and social left, which prefers to write off its opponents as babbling nostalgists, fossils and bigots than to argue with them. This is why leftist utopians, either socialist or racialist ones, so often end up killing those who oppose them. By opposing the ‘progressive’ (ie axiomatically good and correct) Left, we conservatives become axiomatically bad and incorrect people, not fully human. The modern use of the word ‘bigot’ (to mean ‘person who does not agree with the leftist agenda’)  seems to me to have this demoting dehumanising character. I fear it, and suspect it will one day put me in prison or even kill me, if I live long enough.

 

This view is often first expressed by the claim to be on the side of  ‘progress’, which is, I say it again, an arrogation of rightness. These people would be justifiably too embarrassed to say ‘I am right because I say I am right’. But they are not embarrassed to say  the same thing, in the formula : ‘I am on the side of progress’  or even ‘I am on the side of history’ . They can get away with this  partly because very few in the audience will realise what this statement really means, and how repellent, totalitarian and intolerant it is. We have discussed elsewhere the New Atheism and its growing tendency to characterise religious believers as ‘child abusers’ who do not deserve to be considered as fully human and so can safely be silenced and censored. It is the same thing.

 

 

Mr Charles continues : ‘He (me) [or one of his myrmidons] will respond that it's been anything BUT progress. But every change brings both good and bad. It's in the nature of the human condition. The idea that the C of E could at some stage have stopped and said, 'I think this is as good as it's ever going to get, let's stop here and keep everything as it is' verges on the preposterous.’

 

**No, I’m happy to cede the claims of progress to Mr Charles (who has blundered into an inconsistency here by conceding that change brings both good and bad, which if true rather explodes the concept of ‘progress). I don’t make any claims to be progressive.  I seek to discover the Good, and to pursue it in my own life. Where I engage in political activity, I seek mainly to deter the state from actively discouraging the Good, as it so often does, and actively encouraging the Bad, as it so often does. But I recognise as I do this that the former Christian consensus about what is Good and Bad has been destroyed. This is why this weblog is repeatedly thrown back into discussions of virtue, its nature and origins.

 

It’s also why I spend so much effort discussing the past  - where it is easier to make out what actually happened than it is when discussing the present.  Likewise it is why I devote so much space to literature, which has a huge moral effect on the reader and is often the scripture of our time.

 

One contributor recently complained that there was too much history and too much religion here and too little discussion of current affairs. But actually I find I have less and less to say about current affairs, because the debates on politics are conducted at such an ignorant,  unhistorical, ill-read level that one just turns away in despair. How can anyone take seriously the fake outrage of the Left against non-existent ‘cuts’ , and its claims of abject poverty in a country so rich? How can one be bothered even to mention the latest stunts and gimmicks in the world of state education, where the great issue of selection cannot even be discussed?  How can one even listen to the lies of the major parties about the European Union, immigration and crime? How can one stomach David Cameron’s attacks on Labour’s indebtedness to the unions, when his own party is wholly-owned by millionaire contributors, and its candidate selection is under the thumb of an unaccountable clique as bad as anything the unions can come up with ? And so on.

 

And then look at Egypt . What is missing from that country (and from most countries all over the world, with a very small number of exceptions)  is the level of private virtue and personal restraint and responsibility needed to sustain a free, law-governed society. So when liberty is granted it is swiftly squandered, and the country  (apparently willingly) places itself once again under the rule of generals. And they hold a firework display to celebrate this happy submission to the familiar yoke.

 

There is a lesson in this for us, but we are too busy enjoying ourselves to learn it , so that when we too, find we have sunk willingly under the rule of strong men, we will be too indebted, sated, drunk or drugged to care.

 

There are different opinions on virtue and restraint.  I am willing to accept (as was Whittaker Chambers long ago) that I am on the losing side in this era of human history. In that, though not ‘resigned’, I am certainly pessimistic. It saddens me to say so. But that does not make me wrong, and it doesn’t mean that the ideas of my opponents are correct, or that thought, enquiry and exploration lead inevitably and invariably to whatever Mr Charles happens to think this morning.   

On the Mongering of Scares

I mentioned in my Mail on Sunday column last week that roughly half the measles cases reported in the recent Swansea outbreak (now apparently coming to an end, I’m glad to say) were actually confirmed by laboratory tests.

 

Since Public Health Wales qualified this by stating that for each recorded case there was another that went unrecorded, I felt obliged to report this too, even though a casual reader might think this lessened the impact of what I was saying.

 

Not that anyone followed it up anyway, or even commented upon it here, though it took some effort and persistence to obtain.

 

This fact about unrecorded cases (which I believe is confirmed by research)  still seems to me to leave us with the conclusion that the outbreak was not as big as it at first seemed.  I reproduce PHW’s entire statement below (right at the bottom of this posting) so that readers can judge for themselves. I have not yet had time to check with Public Health England on the cases from the Swansea area which they tested.

 

I knew when I posted this that the final Inquest would soon report on the death of Gareth Colfer-Williams, may he rest in peace, a Swansea man, much loved by his family,  who sadly died at a very young age during the outbreak, apparently after contracting measles.

 

One of my critics on Twitter has already begun to squawk that I and others (who were sympathetic to parents worried about the MMR ) are in some way responsible for this regrettable death. I do not know, but will not be surprised, if certain journalists pursue the same 'scaremongering' line. I feel I am entitled and bound to defend myself against such attacks.

 

First, if we assume for the sake of argument that low MMR take-up can be blamed for the Swansea outbreak (a contention which cannot be discussed in the absence of comparisons and other facts) ; or that low MMR take-up in Swansea was caused in any way by media doubts about the safety of the injection (is there any actual evidence of this?) , I might say this:

I first wrote about the MMR in 2001, by which time Mr Colfer-Williams would have been 12 or 13 years old, so I could not have influenced his parents’ decision, whatever it may have been (see below). This was also a long time after the initial controversy, in which I played no part. From the start, I was concerned about the state of affairs in this country *after* the controversy had already gripped the public mind.

 

As for take-up in general, in Swansea or elsewhere,  I have never advised my readers to refuse the MMR, nor stated that it was unsafe. I have urged (and continue to urge) official sympathy for parents worried about it, and said  that they should have been allowed continued access to the single measles vaccine on their NHS for which they have paid in their taxes. I am persuaded that, had the authorities been more sympathetic, many more parents would have immunised their children against measles and so the danger of a measles outbreak in Swansea or anywhere else would have been much reduced.  Given the choice between MMR and nothing, many chose nothing. This is how free people behave when they are bullied by authority, and if blame is being sought, then it lies with the bullies.

 

I have criticised politicians for using public money to urge others to use the MMR, while refusing to reveal if they have given it to their own children. I have reported, sympathetically, the personal concerns of Heather Edwards, the mother of Joshua Edwards. Joshua developed severe symptoms after both his MMR immunisations. I have criticised what I regard as the hounding of Andrew Wakefield, who raised the initial concerns about the vaccine. And I have complained about the exaggerated propaganda about the dangers of measles (some of it directed against me personally, in the form of a rather sinister fake letter)  deployed by those who decry all doubt in this matter. Finally, while I do not in any way deny that measles can be dangerous in some circumstances, I  continue to maintain that this danger is moderate in the case of healthy well-nourished people in good housing in advanced countries. The relevance of all or some of this should become clear in the account which follows.

 

It is, alas, impossible to discuss this matter without revealing some facts about the case which are bound to be distressing to Mr Williams’s family, to whom I offer my own sympathy for their sad loss.  I very much regret the necessity, but do not see how I can defend myself otherwise. And I would point out that these facts have already been revealed in proper public proceedings in evidence, and have been published in newspapers in South Wales.  I’ll first of all point out that , when in the past I have investigated claims that measles is a very dangerous disease, I have found that the deaths attributed to it have often not been as simple as first suggested. In the Dublin outbreak, often cited, one of those who died was suffering (shockingly in these times)  from severe malnutrition. The other had a grave malformation of oesophagus and larynx. In the case of a more recent death in this country, the authorities refused to answer my questions on the deceased person’s general state of health, citing ‘confidentiality’ despite the fact that I had no interest in, not any intention of identifying him or her. There were strong unconfirmed suggestions that the deceased in that case was far from well before he contracted measles. I am simply unable to say if these were true or not, as the authorities at the time would not tell me, which I think is wrong in itself.

 

In this case, we have an inquest. The following facts emerged at this hearing, held in Swansea on Monday 1st July by the Coroner, Mr Philip Rogers. Mr Colfer-Williams is stated to have died from Giant Cell Pneumonia , a complication of measles, from which Mr Colfer-Williams was undoubtedly suffering when he died. The verdict was death from natural causes. While there is no evidence that Mr Colfer-Williams never received the MMR vaccine, that is of course not evidence that he did  *not* ever receive it. He was 25, and so would be unlikely to remember having received it. And medical records from that far back are often incomplete or hard to find.

 

Mr Williams was not in good health at the time that he contracted measles. At the age of 25, he was 5 feet 9 inches tall, but weighed only seven stone seven pounds (105 lbs), which the coroner, Philip Rogers, described as ‘very underweight’ .  A doctor has told me that a more normal weight for a man of this age and height would be eleven stone seven pounds  (161 lbs). He suffered, according ot the coroner,  from ‘alcohol problems’ or ‘addiction to alcohol’, for which he was undergoing ‘treatment’, said to have involved  ‘antidepressant’ medication.  The coroner said the drugs ‘were used to manage withdrawal and other symptoms’.

 

According to one account, (South Wales Evening Post 2nd July) , two weeks before his death he was ‘thought to have overdosed’ on Amitryptiline, a prescribed drug, an event which he survived, but which resulted in a hospital stay of some days.  {My note: Wikipedia describes Amitryptiline as a tricyclic antidepressant, with effects similar to that of SSRIs. It also says it has a high rate of fatality in overdose}. But in the same story, and also in the Western Mail account, published the same day, it is said that the pathologist Dr Maurizio Brotto, stated ‘there was no question of an overdose’ as all the drugs were in the normal therapeutic range.

 

As far as I can discover through my own inquiries, the apparent contradiction arises because there was no question of an overdose *at the time of Mr Williams’s death*. The overdose was on an earlier, separate occasion. There were  various prescription drugs in Mr Colfer-Williams's blood and urine at the time of death, but not in dangerous or non-therapeutic quantities.

 

After his earlier hospitalisation, Mr Williams was discharged with an alcohol detoxification programme, and it was after this that he went to his doctor complaining of an itchy rash (though this did not yet cover his whole body) together with cough and cold symptoms. 

 

The Coroner, Philip Rogers, said that ‘there was a query of measles but also a possible reaction to one of the alcohol drugs, which he was told to stop. He was told to go home and take Paracetamol’.

 

{My note. I have not yet been able to find out which drug he was advised to stop taking.}

 

Mr Rogers continued : ’On April 18, his partner reported he had a high temperature and a rash all over his body and was suffering from what were described as hallucinations’. Soon afterwards, he died.

 

 

The BBC, in its website coverage of the inquest here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-23135464

included the following statement from Dr Marion Lyons, Director of Health Protection at Public Health Wales. 

 

 

 

"We are aware of the death of a man from measles, confirmed by the Swansea Coroner today. My sympathies are with the family at such a tragic time.

 

"Measles is a potentially fatal disease and around one in every 1,000 people who contracts measles in developed countries will die.

 

"Those not fully vaccinated with two doses of MMR are still highly likely to catch measles if they come into contact with an infected person as it is an extremely contagious disease.

 

"Although the outbreak has slowed down considerably in recent weeks, anyone who has not had two doses of the MMR is still unprotected.

 

“Symptoms of measles include fever, cold-like symptoms, fatigue, conjunctivitis and a distinctive red-brown rash that appears a few days into the illness.

 

"Anyone who thinks they or their child may have measles should speak to their GP immediately.”’

 

The BBC report also stated (relevant to the facts displayed above) ‘The inquest heard that Mr Colfer-Williams had suffered from alcohol problems and just two weeks before his death he had gone into detox leaving his body vulnerable to infection.’

 

**

Here, as mentioned above,  is the official statement referred to above, about the level of confirmation of reported cases.

PRESS RELEASE (from Public Heath Wales, on confirmations of reported measles cases)

 

27 June 2013

Statement on laboratory testing in Swansea area measles outbreak

 

Between the beginning of March 2013 and 16 June 2013, the Public Health Wales microbiology laboratory in Cardiff tested 689 suspected measles cases from the outbreak area.

Of these, 318 were positive for measles, giving a positivity rate of 46 per cent for the whole of the period.  During the peak of the outbreak in March 2013, the positivity rate was 53 per cent.  This is in line with the expected positivity rate based on other measles outbreaks, where around 50 per cent of tested cases will be positive for measles. 

This figure is only for cases tested in Cardiff, and does not include measles cases from Wales tested at the Public Health England laboratory in London, which carries out all measles testing outside of outbreak periods.

Measles cases reported in the current outbreak are notified cases and not laboratory confirmed cases.   Notified cases are those reported to Public Health Wales by health professionals who are satisfied that a patient has the clinical symptoms of measles, and all suspected cases of measles must be reported to us by law as measles is a notifiable disease.

The notified cases figure for the outbreak area has now reached 1,202 between 1 November 2012 and 16 June 2013.  It is important to note that not all of these cases will have been laboratory tested as it is not normal procedure to test all possible cases that have strong links to other cases.  Cases that test negative will not be removed from the notified case total unless Public Health Wales believes it does not match the case definition used to determine what constitutes a case of measles linked to the outbreak.  Measles testing is not 100 per cent accurate and so cases that test negative cannot always be denotified because they have tested negative if there are other reasons to believe the patient has measles.

We know that for every patient with measles who seeks medical advice and tests positive for measles, there will be at least one other person in the community who has measles but does not see a health professional.  For that reason we can be confident that even if only half of our notified cases have tested positive for measles, the publicised number of notified cases still gives an accurate picture of the burden of measles in Wales during the outbreak.

It is important to note that Public Health Wales’s primary reason for collecting statistics on infectious disease is for purposes of surveillance – to know the burden of disease in Wales and to identify trends – and that it is impossible to accurately measure the precise number of patients with any infectious disease at any given time. 

ENDS’

The Lost Past of the Church of England, an Archaeological Discovery

Quietly recovering from my televised encounter last Sunday with the retired Bishop Of Hulme, whose version of Anglicanism did not much appeal to me, I was visiting a much-loved and powerfully beautiful country church, reassuringly unrestored and unmodernized, yet cared for by thoughtful hands  when I decided to copy out the notice which I reproduce below.

 

It has been there for years, and by my calculation is about 50 years old, probably the last expiring breath of serious Anglicanism as it once was. It is a useful reminder that the C of E has not always been the twittering social work organisation that it is now.

 

Michael Ramsey and Donald Coggan , whose signatures it bears, were Archbishops of Canterbury and York from 1961 to 1974, and the Church Assembly was (alas) replaced by the General Synod in 1970.  But the language used is really that of the 1940s, in its sobriety and sparseness, and its reference to marriage clearly pre-dates the flabby 1966 document ‘Putting Asunder’, in which the C of E surrendered to the easy divorce lobby.

 

I had thought this notice would be there forever,  slowly turning yellow, alongside a charming little plaque asking visitors to latch the door as they go in and out ‘lest a bird fly in‘  (I love that ‘lest’) . But on this occasion it was half-obscured by a poster for Christian Aid. This had never happened before in all the years I have been going there, and I was suddenly afraid that , like so many small reminders of the forgotten and now increasingly unknown, defamed  (and sometimes actively denied) past, it had attracted someone’s dislike, just as it had attracted my liking, and would be quietly gone before I came that way again.

 

It reminds me of the C of E’s reaction to Eirene White’s (failed) Divorce Bill of 1951, which foreshadowed the eventual Act of 1969 by suggesting automatic dissolution after a period of separation (in that case seven years). In  response to this,  the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher , said ‘It is of the first importance for the nation that this divine law [of marriage] should be upheld. Nothing but lifelong monogamous marriage can adequately establish home life; provide for the birth and nurture of training of a family of children over a period of years’.

 

In its document of that time,  ‘The Church and Marriage’, the C of E responded to critics who said its attitude would cause hardship to many thus : Whoever succeeded in raising the moral tone of any society without causing the frustration of some natural desires, and the hardship of having to forego them?’

 

(Note: These quotations and more on the same lines are to be found in the chapter on marriage (entitled ‘Difficulties with Girls’)  in my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, widely believed by my critics, who never read my books because they know they won’t like them, to be an attack on central heating. As you see, it ranges a bit wider than that).

 

It makes me think, when I look at it, of a country in which C.S.Lewis , rather than Stephen Fry, is a frequent and revered broadcaster on BBC radio, and in which self-restraint is not yet regarded as a sort of sickness, and , yes, I admit it, also a country of grammars schools and of railway branch lines, of deep rural peace and of visible starlight, uninvaded by the roar of traffic and the perpetual glow of artificial light.

 

Here it is anyway.

 

 

 

'A Short Guide to the Duties of Church members

 

Issued by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York at the request of the Church Assembly.

 

All baptized and confirmed members of the Church must play their full part in its life and witness. That you may fulfil this duty, we call upon you :

 

To follow the example of Christ in home and daily life, and to bear personal witness of Him.

 

To be regular in private prayer day by day

 

To read the Bible carefully

 

To come to Church every Sunday

 

To receive the Holy Communion faithfully and regularly

 

To give personal service to Church, neighbours and community

 

To give money for the work of parish and diocese and for the work of the Church at home and overseas.

 

To uphold the standard of marriage entrusted by Christ to His Church

 

To care that children are brought up to love and serve the Lord

 

Michael Cantuar

 

Donald Ebor'