Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 270

My (repeated) Challenge to Damian Thompson

On 10th May I posted the following:

'Damian Thompson, the Daily Telegraph columnist, has stated on Twitter: ‘Peter Hitchens's record on MMR is shameful. Even now he seems chiefly concerned (as ever) w[ith] protecting his own reputation.’

 

This follows the publication of a letter from me in today’s Daily Telegraph, in which I say : ‘SIR – Damian Thompson (May 4) calls me a ‘scaremonger’ on the subject of the MMR vaccine.  I believe he is mistaken. The article he attacks was published nearly three years after the launch of the Wakefield study which began the controversy, which was taken seriously by many different parts of the media, and had not yet been discredited at the time.   It stated unequivocally ‘There is no proof that MMR causes or has ever caused autism, or the severe bowel disorder Crohn's disease’. It was mainly a plea for the availability on the NHS of the single measles vaccine to ensure continuing widespread immunity, a policy I still believe would have been wise. I might add that I may not ‘play down’ my influence, but I have never made any great claims for it either.

 

I have invited Mr Thompson (also via Twitter) to justify his assertion, and offered him the hospitality of this site to do so. I repeat this offer here. '

 

Mr Thompson has in today's Daily Telegraph and his blog (15th June)  repeated without moderation or qualification, his assertion that I 'scared' parents over the MMR long after it was established that there were no risks from this injection, which he calls a 'disgrace' . Unsurprisingly, I reject the charge.

I repeat my offer to him.

I will publish here his detailed charges against me. I will then attempt to rebut them, and continue to offer him space to reply to me until we have argued each other to a standstill, or the issue is settled (I can see now that there might be some fundamental disagreement about interpretation of terms, but the discussion will be held, as it were, before a jury of our peers).

 

Is Suicide being Accurately Recorded in the United Kingdom?

What follows is another aspect of our long debate on 'antidepressant' pills.

 

On an earlier thread I have been having an interesting discussion with ‘HM’ on the suicide figures. HM says that the trend is down, and has educated me considerably. From him or her, I have discovered that the number of suicides is adjusted upwards by the Office of National Statistics, to take account of the fact that some open verdicts might in fact conceal suicide. (He or she is of course welcome to respond at length to this posting).

 

HM referred me to a learned article entitled  ‘“Suicide in England and Wales 1861 – 2007: a time-trends analysis” which is available in full online, and explains the way in which suicide statistics are now compiles. This method is used in the official UK figures.

 

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/39/6/1464.full

 

 

‘HM’  directed me to a graph  (figure 1, which is on page 4 of the article) . And he urged me to read ‘the paragraph headed “Strengths and limitations” on page 9, which discusses the data and its reliability.’

 

Referring to an article by Professor David Healy(to which I link below) ‘HM’ said : ‘David Healy believes that SSRIs cause suicide and campaigns against them on that basis. He has a strong motive for dismissing the official statistics because they do not support his case. Healy’s article is difficult to respond to because it is a little unclear and based on biased assumptions. However, as I understand it, narrative verdicts are included in suicide statistics if the coroner has given some indication that harm (injury or poisoning) was inflicted intentionally, otherwise they are not.’

 

(My note: it seems to me from some material below that this assumption by ‘HM’ may be mistaken.)

 

HM also said :’  If Peter Hitchens wants to know more about the recording of narrative verdicts, I recommend that he read the ONS bulletin “Suicides in the United Kingdom, 2011”, especially the section on narrative verdicts (pages 11 to 17). It is available online. The answer his other question is yes. The fall in suicide has been reasonably consistent. It did not fall every year, but it did fall in most, so that the figure for 2011 is significantly lower than that for 1987.’

 

HM  also caught me out in an arithmetical error on the measurement of proportions, which I confess and apologise for. He or she has also rightly pointed to a downward trend in suicides in recent years, roughly since the introduction of SSRI antidepressants. The implication here is that the drop may be connected, and that my fear that SSRIs may be the *cause* of some suicides (a fear shared by some pathologists and psychiatrists) is therefore of necessity baseless.

 

To this I counter with several points. The first is a study by Professor David Gunnell, on so-called ‘narrative verdicts’ in coroners’ courts, a new development which has only been in widespread use for a few years. This article from the BMJ can easily be found on the web:

 

‘Oct 2011

BMJ

Concern over accuracy of suicide rates in England and Wales

Editorial: Coroners’ verdicts and suicide statistics in England and Wales

The increasing use of “narrative verdicts” by coroners in England and Wales may be leading to greater underestimation of suicide rates, warn experts on bmj.com today, based on ongoing research part funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

Professor David Gunnell at the University of Bristol and colleagues from the Universities of Oxford and Manchester say changes are needed urgently to ensure the future reliability of national suicide statistics.

 

Suicide accounted for 4,648 deaths in England and Wales in 2009. Official statistics produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are currently based on suicide and open verdict deaths (known as “short form” verdicts) given by coroners after inquests into unnatural or unexpected deaths.

However, since 2001, a growing number of coroners have summarised their inquest findings with a “narrative verdict” – which records, in several sentences, how, and in what circumstances, the death occurred – rather than giving a short form verdict.

 

Narrative verdicts have some advantages. But, because they often do not mention intent, narrative verdicts can be difficult for the ONS to code, explain the authors – when suicide intent is unclear such deaths are classified as accidental.

 

The numbers of narrative verdicts increased from 111 in 2001 to 3,012 (more than 10 per cent of all inquests) in 2009, and figures for 2010 indicate that numbers continue to rise.

 

The ONS estimates that if all deaths from hanging and poisoning given narrative verdicts by coroners and coded as accidents were, in fact, suicides, the 2009 suicide rate would have been underestimated by 6 per cent - a difference equivalent to almost a third of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy’s 20 per cent reduction target.

 

This may be a conservative assessment because the ONS’s analysis did not include all common methods of suicide.

 

As the number of narrative verdicts rises, so too may the underestimation of suicide, they warn. The consequences of this could be incorrect rate estimates, misleading evaluations of national and local prevention activity, and masking of the effects of the current economic crisis on suicide.

The ONS is currently reviewing its coding of narrative verdicts and the Coroners’ Society of England and Wales is investigating how it can improve the current situation.

 

However, Gunnell and colleagues warn that suicide statistics for the years when narrative verdicts increased “should be treated with caution.”

 

Reliable statistics are crucial to public health surveillance, they say. Changes are needed urgently, but the current Government’s proposed abolition of the post of chief coroner “is likely to delay the implementation of recommended improvements and the development of consistent practice across the country.” ‘

 

Equally interesting is the newspaper coverage of the Gunnell study.

 

The Guardian (7th October 2011) said :’ Coroner verdicts may have led to underestimate of suicides      

 

Changes in the way coroners record verdicts for unnatural or unexpected deaths may have led to an underestimation of suicide rates in England and Wales, according to researchers, making it hard to judge whether suicide prevention strategies are working and potentially hiding "the effects of the economic crisis on suicide". They have warned of increasing diffi-culty in getting precise figures on those killing themselves each year as coroners give more "narrative verdicts", which often do not determine the intent of those of died. More than 3,000 narrative verdicts were recorded in 2009, compared with 111 in 2001. Coroners insisted they must not face "pressure from statisticians" in reaching their verdicts.

 

Researchers from Bristol and Manchester universities and the Warneford hospital, Oxford, wrote an editorial in the online medical journal bmj.com pressing for urgent changes to ensure the reliability of figures issued by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The lead author, Bristol epidemiology professor David Gunnell, said this might include asking coroners to separately categorise which deaths they considered suicides, accidents and other causes. But André Rebello, secretary of the Coroners' Society, said suicide statistics might have overestimated the numbers, since they included open verdicts, where the intent was unclear, as well as suicide verdicts. Rebello, the Liverpool coroner, said coroners, as part of the judiciary, needed high degrees of proof as to what constituted suicide and must not face "pressure from the executive or arms of the executive such as statisticians". Since 2001, coroners have sharply increased the number of narrative verdicts, which record in greater detail the circumstances around a death. They are often used where coroners wish to raise issues of public importance and now account for more than 10% of all inquest verdicts. But where suicidal intent is not clear, the ONS classifies the death as accidental.

 

The editorial said: "As the use of narrative verdicts rises, so too may the underestimation of suicide. The consequences of this could be incorrect rate estimates, misleading evaluations of national and local prevention activity, and masking of the effects of the current economic crisis on suicide." ‘

 

Note the words of Mr Rebello..

 

The Daily Telegraph of the same date said ‘Coroners 'mask true number of suicides'      

 

THE true number of people who take their own lives is being masked by coroners, academics have warned.

 

Many more inquests are ending in "narrative verdicts" rather than a ruling that someone killed themselves, often because of caution over their intention.

 

But it is feared that this may mean up to six per cent of suicides being wrongly classified as accidents, which could be "masking the effects of the economic crisis on suicide".

 

In an editorial published in the British Medical Journal, Prof David Gunnell and colleagues at the University of Bristol said: "This increased use of narrative verdicts has important effects on the estimation of national suicide rates because these verdicts present coding difficulties for the Office for National Statistics – when suicide intent is unclear such deaths are coded as accidents." Official figures show there were 4,648 suicides in England and Wales in 2009, based on the verdicts given by coroners after inquests into unexpected deaths.

 

But many hangings, overdoses and poisonings are being treated as possible accidents, with coroners ending inquests in narrative verdicts that give an account of how the death occurred in a few sentences.

 

The number of narrative verdicts has risen from just 111 in 2001 to 3,012 – more than one in 10 inquests – in 2009.

 

This is despite the fact that suicide is sometimes strongly implied in the verdict, with phrases used such as "deceased took his own life with an accidental overdose", according to the study.

 

But Prof Louis Appleby, chairman of the Government's National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group, said: "There is no reason to doubt the fall in suicide in England in the last decade, though of course we should continue to examine how narrative verdicts are used."

 

And note the words of Professor Appleby.

 

I find it interesting that there is or can be such a thing as a ‘national suicide prevention strategy’, the act of self-slaughter being so notoriously difficult to predict or explain.  But I suppose the paternal state had, sooner or later, to turn its mind to this. And of course such a ‘strategy’ means that the statistics become politically important – which as we all know, often has certain effects.

 

I would also draw readers’ attention to the following, which suggests that the downward trend may not be continuing:

 

It is an article from ‘the Guardian ‘ for 22nd January this year:

Alarm at rise in UK suicide rate• Suicide rate among 45-59-year-old men highest since 1986

• Government to fund new research into suicide prevention

 James Meikle

 

 

Ministers expressed concern at a significant rise in the UK suicide rate, as the government in Westminster prepared to announce new contracts for research into how mental health services might prevent people from taking their own life. The Welsh assembly government effectively blamed the faltering economy for the increase.

 

The male suicide rate in 2011 was the highest since 2002, and among 45-59-year-old men the highest since 1986, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). In all, 6,045 suicides were recorded in the UK among people aged 15 and over. The suicide rate was 11.8 deaths per 100,000 people, the highest since 2004.

 

For men, the suicide rate was 18.2 per 100,000 population. The rate was highest among males aged 30 to 44, at 23.5 per 100,000. Among 45-59-year-old men the figure was 22.2 per 100,000.

 

Female suicides rose to 1,493, or 5.6 per 100,000. Suicides among 15- to 29-year-old females rose from 2.9 per 100,000 in 2007 to 4.2 per 100,000.

 

In England, the suicide rate was 10.4 deaths per 100,000; highest in the north-east, at 12.9, and lowest in London, at 8.9. In Wales, the suicide rate was 13.9, up from 10.7 in 2009.

 

Norman Lamb, the care services minister in England, said the increases must be tackled head on. "Even one life taken by suicide is one too many," he said.

 

Next month, his department will award research contracts worth £1.5m to develop new initiatives as part of a "refreshed" suicide prevention strategy.

 

The Welsh assembly, which has its own action plan, said: "It had always been feared rates might rise owing to the economic downturn and increases in the rate of unemployment. Sadly, this prediction proved correct, despite action to try to mitigate the effects."

 

Welsh suicide rates were generally comparable with north-east and north-west England, and slightly lower than in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the Cardiff government said.

 

Stephen Platt, a trustee for the Samaritans and professor of health policy research at Edinburgh University, said: "Samaritans research shows that disadvantaged men in midlife today are facing a perfect storm of challenges: unemployment, deprivation, social isolation, changing definitions of what it is to be a man, alcohol misuse, labour market and demographic changes that have had a dramatic effect on their work, relationships and very identity."

 

Roger Kingerlee, a clinical psychologist at the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS foundation trust, said men might not have the "emotional repertoire" to deal with crises. "There is some evidence that after a life event like separation or divorce, men are more likely to be at risk of suicidal ideation or suicide."

 

Many men were not fully aware about "really good help available", Kingerlee said. "We know that medication can help. We know that talking therapies can be really helpful and effective with guys." Men's social networks were often less supportive, he said.

 

The ONS accepts that some increases could be down to changes in statistical recording and death registration. Coroners in England and Wales are now giving more narrative verdicts, making causes of death more difficult to identify. Other changes in Scotland have made statisticians cautious about comparisons.

 

In 2011, there were 889 suicides under the new rules and 772 under the old ones. In Northern Ireland, there were 289 suicides in 2011, down from 313 in 2010.’

 

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/22/alarm-rise-uk-suicide-rate)

 

And I would also urge readers to study this article by Professor David Healy . I have not copied it as it is quite long, but it is easy to reach here:

 

http://davidhealy.org/left-hanging-suicide-in-bridgend/

 

It is quite true that Professor Healy, like me, has an interest in this matter. What the interest of ‘HM’ may be, we do not know, as we do not know who he or she is. In the case of Dr Healy, it is a strong desire to get at the truth, a desire which has cost him an appointment to a major academic position in North America, thanks to his open criticisms of much pill-based modern psychiatry.

Do you still need proof our rulers are lying to us? Just take a train

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Once you have resigned yourself to the fact that this is now a mad country with a mad Government, you can – as I do these days – enjoy the comedy.
You can also understand how it works. Last week, for instance, the railways were told that they had to survive on less money, and be more punctual.
Actually, the privatised railways are a huge scandal, under which taxpayers have for years lined the pockets of railway operators in return for a worse service that costs far more than the old British Rail.

But I’m not going to bother you with the woes of the sad minority who travel by train.
The point is quite different. The rail regulator’s decrees will be obeyed. The trains will get worse, and yet they will get more punctual.
How can this be? Well, just as one of this country’s main solid exports these days is containers full of rubbish, its most successful activity is the production of optimistic statistics. You’ll have noticed that things get worse. But at the same time the official figures get better.
And it was while travelling by train that I discovered the principle that governs this activity. I noticed that my train would tear through the countryside at great speed, and then stop, sometimes for ten minutes or more, at all the stations. When I looked at the departure indicators, I saw that this was not a delay caused by the theft of the signal cables or the failure of the engine. It was planned.
The train was sitting there because it was not yet timetabled to leave. The timetable had been padded. Such a long time was allowed for the train to get from station to station that it would almost never be late – at least as far as the statistics were concerned. In this way, the train companies do not have to pay compensation to passengers.
For example, 25 years ago, the fastest train on a route I know well took 45 minutes to complete its journey. Now, the same train does the same run in 60 minutes. So, by the standards of 1988, all the trains are late. But the official figures trumpet a steadily rising standard of punctuality. And they are true. But they are also a lie. It doesn’t take much of a mental jump to see how the same thing has been done with A-levels and GCSEs.
Crime, as I have discussed here, is manipulated by simply reclassifying wrongdoing so that millions of actions simply cease to be crimes, and are not pursued or recorded. Crime down. Misery up. Job done, as Mr Blair might have said. Unemployment falls because people are cleverly no longer listed as unemployed, even though they would like to work and haven’t got jobs.
The arithmetical magic by which the Government claims to be cutting public spending while increasing it, and cutting borrowing while borrowing more, doubtless has some similar fiddle behind it. But the really astonishing thing about this Wonderland of Blatant Lies is that so many people believe what they’re told.
My advice is to keep an eye on the value of the pound sterling abroad, and on the price of gold.
People elsewhere in the world are beginning to realise what sort of country this is, and some figures cannot be fiddled.
 
The Great War - our greatest mistake
The First World War was the most important event of modern history, rightly compared to the fall of the Roman Empire in its significance.
And this country’s entry into that war was the biggest mistake ever made by British politicians, which is saying something. Of course, all serious historians know that Germany started it, but the really puzzling question is, why did we join in?
It was absurd to think we could stop Germany dominating Europe. In an effort to obstruct the inevitable, we sent our best young men to die, squandered our wealth and foreign investments, and lost both our naval supremacy and our empire.
If Germany had won quickly in 1914, there would have been no Hitler, no Bolshevik Revolution, no Lenin, no Stalin, no Mussolini.
As it happens, the ‘September Programme’ for a united Europe, drawn up by Berlin when they thought they had won in autumn 1914, looks suspiciously like the modern European Union. Except that the September Programme did not envisage Britain as a subject province, whereas we are one now.
So, after two immense wars and incredible amounts of death and destruction, we are worse off than we would have been in September 1914, had we stayed out. No doubt we would have had to adapt to a German-dominated continent, but with our navy and empire intact, we would in my view have kept far more independence than we have now.
The only things that remain the same, after 100 years, are the pitiful calibre of our politicians and their crazed enthusiasm for foreign wars whose ends they cannot know, and do not seem to care about.
 
British power on the scrap heap
And so HMS Ark Royal ends her days in a Turkish scrapyard. The death of a great ship is always a sad thing, but this is also a national milestone. Power like this, once lost, is gone for good.

*****

I’m sure I should be worried about all this surveillance by the Americans and GCHQ, but I’m inured to it by my years as a correspondent in Moscow.
As I travelled to the Soviet capital by train, I was approached in the dining car by a mysterious and attractive older woman, who offered to work for me (years later she confessed to me she had at the time been the mistress of a KGB general). She quickly supplied me with a cleaner and driver, who had full access to my flat and knew where I was at all times.
When my brand new imported Volvo was laughably forced to undergo a safety inspection by the Soviet traffic police, it came back with the driving mirror loose, because they had put a microphone behind it but couldn’t work out how to screw the mirror back in.
Every few days, my phone would stop working, and I would have to go round to the exchange, where I would hammer on the door and shout up the number to laughing girls who leaned out of the  window and told me it would be fixed by the time I got home. It was. We all knew why it had stopped.
I am far more worried by the power of the modern British state, not to watch me but to slowly reclassify what was once normal into thought-crime.

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So Much for 'Father's Day' - in a Country Where Fatherhood is Dying Out

By the end of his or her childhood, a British boy or girl is much more likely to have a TV set in the bedroom than a father at home.

 

Our 45-year national war against traditional family life has been so successful that almost 50% of 15-year-olds no longer live with both their parents. At the same time we have indulged our neglected and abandoned young with electronics, so that 79% of children aged between 5 and 16 have bedroom TVs.

 

And as we soppily mark ‘Father’s Day’ with cards, socks, sentimentality and meals out, we should remember that in almost all cases the absent parent is the father.

 

There is no doubt about the facts here. Let me list some of them. The cost of our wild, unprecedented national experiment in fatherlessness is now £49 billion each year, more than the defence budget. This figure, currently costing each taxpayer £1,541 per year, is rising all the time, and has gone up by almost a quarter since 2009.

 

The money partly goes on handouts and housing which an old-fashioned family with a working father would not have needed. Partly it goes on trying to cope with the crime, disorder, truancy, educational failure, physical and mental illness and general misery which are so much more common among the fatherless than in those from stable homes.

 

And there is more to come. One in three marriages ends in divorce, while many who would once have married never even bother.  Roughly 300,000 families of all kinds separate every year. There are now three million children growing up in fatherless homes.  Another 58 fatherless families are launched every day.  And be in no doubt that it is the fathers who are, overwhelmingly, absent in these new-style modern households. Only 8% of single-parent homes are headed by a lone father.

 

Four in ten children being brought up by their mothers – nearly 1.2 million - have no contact with their fathers at all.

 

Another 67,000 (In England alone) dwell in the organised despair and neglect which are cruelly misnamed ‘care’.

 

In the last 40 years the proportion of adults who are married has sunk from 70% to fewer than half.  The number of single adults has hugely increased (up 50%). A quarter of a million people each year spend Christmas alone. One in six adults now cohabits, compared to one in 50 in the 1960s.  Cohabiting households, which have doubled in number since 1996, are the fastest-growing type of family arrangement in the United Kingdom.

 

By 2015, there will be two million lone parents (up 120,000 since 2010); more than 24% of children will be in lone-parent households.

 

It matters. Young people from fractured homes are statistically twice as likely to have behaviour problems as those from stable households. They are more likely to be depressed, to abuse drugs or alcohol, to do badly at school, and end up living in relative poverty.

 

Girls with absent fathers (according to studies in the USA and New Zealand) have teenage pregnancy rates seven or eight times as high as those whose fathers have stayed in meaningful touch with them.

 

By contrast, the link between marriage and good health is so strong that one study showed the health gain achieved by marrying was as great as that received from giving up smoking.

 

In all these dismal statistics of marriage decline and failure, the United Kingdom is one of the worst afflicted among advanced nations.  And in many of the poorest and most desolate parts of the country, the problem is concentrated into certain areas where fathers in the home are an endangered species.

 

From Gosport in Hampshire, to Cardiff, Liverpool, Easington in County Durham, Inner London, Bristol, Birmingham and Sheffield, there are whole city wards where at least 60% of the households are headed by a lone parent.      

 

And it is in such circumstances that a procession of serial boyfriends, a type of domestic arrangement closely associated with physical and sexual abuse of children, is most likely to exist.

 

This great fleet of hard truths is known in general to those who govern the country, and in hard detail to millions who suffer from their consequences.

 

How, as a country and a people can we manage to be so indifferent to them, when we claim to set fatherhood and fathers at the centre of our culture? The fundamental prayer of the Christian church begins with the words ‘Our Father’. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’. The father has since human society began been protector, provider, source of authority, bound by honour and fidelity to defend his hearth.

 

If he is gone, who takes his place ? Of all people, D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote of a man and his wife as ‘a king and queen with one or two subjects and a few square yards of territory of their own…true freedom because it is a true fulfilment for man, woman and children.’

 

But he warned of a great danger if marriage, which makes fatherhood what it is,  fell. ‘Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which existed before the Christian era’.

 

And now we see his prophecy fulfilled. The state spends billions, and intervenes incessantly, to try to replace the lost force of fatherhood, and it fails.

 

I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which on Friday published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’.

 

The CSJ is very close to the Tory party, to the government and to Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary. So it is startling to find that the report is coldly savage in its dismissal of the Cameron government’s efforts to fix this problem.

 

‘Conservatives say they would have been more radical on family policy had it not been for their Liberal Democrat colleagues, but even those commitments made in the Programme for Government have been ignored so far.

 

‘So for all of the promises the Conservatives made in Opposition, for all of the gimmick giveaways politicians have unveiled for middle-class families, and for all of the safe ‘families come in all shapes and sizes’ rhetoric ministers have used for decades, hardly anything has been done to resist the tsunami of family breakdown battering the United Kingdom’.

 

The authors continue: ‘Saying that family form is irrelevant is inaccurate and ultimately counter-productive…’ This is true. Someone ought to speak up for marriage. But is it entirely true to say that ‘Backing commitment and setting a goal of reducing instability does not equate to criticising or stigmatising lone parents.’? Doesn’t approval of the one inevitably stigmatise the other? And if you aren’t prepared to do that, will you get anywhere?

 

They also assert that ‘marriage is not a right-wing obsession’, though, speaking as a right-winger I rather think it is. It certainly isn’t a left-wing priority.  They argue : ‘People throughout society want to marry, but the cultural and financial barriers faced by those in the poorest communities thwart their aspirations’.

 

It is certainly true that some benefits actively discourage couples from being or staying married.

 

But it is the ‘cultural’ barriers I want to talk about here. Anyone who dares to discuss this subject is quickly accused of ‘hating’ or wishing to persecute ‘single mothers’. Any article on the subject is supposed (maybe it is an EU regulation?) to contain a disclaimer saying that many single mothers do a great job.

 

 

Well, I neither hate single mothers nor wish to persecute them, and I am perfectly prepared to believe that many of them do a great job. But it isn’t the point. The main problem with single mothers is that they are acting rationally, in a society which actively encourages them with money and approval. Who can blame them?

 

There is a lot of piety about this. Suggest that anyone deliberately gets pregnant (or rather, in this age of morning-after pills and abortion on demand, deliberately stays pregnant) to get a house and a handout, and you are angrily dismissed as some kind of snobbish hate-figure.

 

Well, mightn’t it be true? As far as I know, nobody has ever researched the motives of the young women who accept this sparse arrangement. I wish they would. But is it unreasonable to suggest that if you reward certain types of behaviour with money and housing, and with social approval, then that behaviour will increase?

 

It’s not just me. Adele Adkins once recalled ‘The ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the Government’, adding: ‘That ain’t cool.’ Perhaps successful singing stars can get away with saying what others only think.  

 

I don’t myself see that it is a particularly harsh view to hold. A baby is a wonderful thing, and many young women long to be mothers, and good luck to them. Many modern males are a pretty unattractive proposition, so why marry one, if the state will give you a home and an income on your own?

 

Meanwhile men have learned enough about the divorce courts to know that marriage is a big risk. If it goes wrong, they are the ones who have to move out, and yet they will still have to pay.

 

Why not take advantage of the fact that the state - which once demanded the father’s name when any baby was registered, so he could be made to pay for his child - now happily allows us to leave this space blank? 

 

My guess is that doing anything really radical about this scares all politicians too much. For the War on Fatherhood is protected by a great taboo.

 

In every family, every workplace, every school, every pub, every weekend football or cricket team, every political party, every church congregation, there are now large numbers of people who signed up for the Great Cultural and Moral Revolution which was launched in the 1960s and swept through the land like a mighty rushing wind in the 1970s.

 

The fiery heart of this was the Divorce Law Reform Act of 1969.  This change was very popular.  It is interesting to note that, just before it began its way through Parliament, Engelbert Humperdinck’s hymn for would-be divorcees, ‘Release Me’, pushed the Beatles off the top of the music charts for weeks on end.

 

The new law pretty much embodied the song’s plea ‘Please release me, let me go/For I don't love you any more/To waste our lives would be a sin/Release me and let me love again.’

Portrayed at the time as a kindness to those trapped in loveless marriages, the new law made it much easier to end a troubled union than to fight to save it.

 

And once this had become general, marriage changed with amazing speed from a lifelong commitment into a lifestyle choice. And from a lifestyle choice it changed into a risky and often inconvenient contract. Divorce wasn’t shameful or embarrassing any more. The country was littered with male divorcees complaining about the division of the property and the child support payments. 

 

Men began to calculate that marriage wasn’t worth it. And the Pill and easy abortion (other parts of the 1960s revolution) put an end to shotgun weddings.

 

Who, in such a society, could condemn the pregnant teenager without hypocrisy? Hardly anyone, especially rackety politicians and flexible churchmen.  The middle classes had abandoned lifelong marriage with a sigh of relief. The aristocracy had never cared for it much. Even the Royal Family was riddled with divorce.

 

The housing-estate poor were simply following the same moral code as those who posed as their betters, and weren’t actually better at all. And the adults of the era have all had a lot of fun as a result. But everyone, throughout this great period of release and revolt, forgot one small thing. What was to become of the children?

 

Now we are finding out. And a generation which has never known fathers, or family life, or fidelity or constancy, is now busy begetting children of its own. What will become of them? How will boys who have never seen a father learn to be fathers?

 

I’d have a moral panic at this stage, if I thought it would do any good. But perhaps it will be the victims of this selfish generation, our children and grandchildren, who – having suffered its effects - will re-establish stable family life in our country.

Grammar Schools - the Campaign to restore them grows in strength, but still their opponents will not argue seriously or honestly

Here and elsewhere I often run into people who want to quibble about the grammar school issue, rather than actually address the problem of  how we select children for proper academic education.  I have to assume that all intelligent people think that the academically talented ought to be encouraged, and that they flourish in schools where their talents are valued and nourished, and I really have no common ground with those who would resist such a view.

 

But once we’re past that. almost all these quibbles  are diversions, beginning ‘What about…?’ First of all there’s ‘ What about the secondary moderns?’ (similar to the nuisance-making, and unserious ‘Wot abaht alcohol and tobacco’ quibbles I get in the drugs discussion).

 

Well, what about them? If you think they weren’t very good, then I agree with you, though as I often point out some of them managed to do quite well. But nobody has ever explained to me how abolishing grammar schools made life better for secondary modern children – though in fact there is one way in which it *did* make life better for *some* secondary modern children. But I would be surprised if anyone is prepared to say this particular improvement is one they desire, or which justifies the destruction of hundreds of fine schools, many of them with long histories and traditions going back centuries.

 

The one case of ‘improvement’ for a minority of secondary modern pupils was this. It ensured that people who had money, but whose children had insufficient talent to qualify for a grammar education, could get their children into the better comprehensives, by buying houses in the right area. These ‘better comprehensives’ by the way, aren’t a patch on the old grammar schools, which is why O levels have had to be abolished and A levels diluted.  So the talented children who do go to them do not get anything like as much of a good schooling as they would have done had the hated privilege of selection been maintained. But who cares about that? Britain is prosperous and well-run anyway, isn’t it, whatever happens in the state schools? [SARCASM WARNING: The preceding passage may have contained sarcasm]

But they are better than the average or bog-standard comprehensives, which are like the secondary moderns only bigger and more undisciplined.  I will be told that modern children get many more ‘qualifications’. Indeed they do, but what, exactly, do they qualify them for? How can people seriously suggest that the quantity of pieces of paper is an indication of the quality of the schooling? Yet they do.

 

Every education system has a problem with children who are neither academic or vocationally gifted (the comprehensive system certainly does, hence its very high rates of truancy and ‘exclusion’), and I have no solution to it, except perhaps a more flexible leaving age and better primary schooling. But I am not saying that I do. By advocating grammar schools, I am saying we should make better use of our national resources of talent, by allocating them on the basis of ability rather than wealth. That is all.

 

Then there’s all the stuff about how the tiny number of remaining grammars are besieged by parents who spend money on prep schools and private tutors to get their children through the exams . Well of course they do. How would you stop them? Success in this ploy means they can win an education which would cost them at least £100,000 in post-tax income, if they went private. And a fair number of the remaining grammars , especially in Buckinghamshire and Kent, are within reach of the London commuter belt.

 

Can’t people grasp that this is a distortion caused by the hopeless shortage of grammars, which are desirable, rather than by the existence of grammars, which wouldn’t face these pressures if there were more of them? Private education and private tuition are virtually unknown in Northern Ireland and in Germany, both places with fully selective state secondary schools. That is because they have enough of them.  And it doesn’t it also make the point that this form of school, even in modern Britain, retains an edge in its ability to educate which is worth a great deal of effort to attain?

 

What I don’t hear (because in fact there isn’t one) is any argument that comprehensive schools are *educationally* superior to grammars. They just aren’t. And I don’t hear this argument because the idea’s supporters, unlike its pioneers, are very coy about the ultimately political purpose of the comprehensive project.

 

What you do get is stuff about ‘creaming’ (perhaps they teach it in PSHE classes). ‘Creaming’ is a complaint that schools ‘x’  and ‘y’ in Bennville suffer worse overall exam results because the Bennville grammar school has ‘creamed off’ its talented pupils.

 

But schools don’t exist for themselves. They aren’t maintained so that they can score high in league tables or at Ofsted. They are maintained to educate their pupils. And school ‘x’ and school ‘y’ will not educate *any* of their pupils better because they contain a larger number of talented pupils. What will happen,  if the logic of the ‘creaming’ argument is followed is that those talented pupils will all do worse, because the Bennville Grammar School is close and merged with school ‘y’. And nobody will do better. Why would anyone desire that? (See above for answer. It’s political). I might add that those who want the classes to mix on equal terms should surely be glad that in grammar schools they do just that . But that is not, in fact, what the class warriors want. They want the middle classes to be compelled to lower their expectations and culture to the level of the non-middle classes. They don’t want Joan Bakewell taking elocution lessons. They want Samantha Cameron dropping her aitches.

 

Another diversion is to say that some (unspecified) way should be found to improve the comprehensives, and that they should be 'given a chance' to work. How absurd. They have been given 48 years to work ( I date their real national beginning from Anthony Crosland's 1965 circular, though some places had comprehensive systems much earlier) . If a way to make them work could have been found, it would have been by now. The 1944 tripartite system, by contrast, was given 21 years before it was smashed - and no serious effort was made to provide the planned technical schools, or (in my view) to build an even spread of grammar schools.

 

By the way, after what must be at least 15 years of campaigning for the return of grammar schools (at the start of which I was told that the cause was long dead, doomed, hopeless, politically unrealistic etc), I was gratified this morning to see that two newspapers supported their return in leading articles.

 

The first, perhaps less unexpected, came in the Daily Mail, sister paper of my own ‘Mail on Sunday’. It said:

 

 ‘Bring back grammars

 

 

THE Ofsted findings could hardly have been more devastating or depressing. Inspectors found that, at England's nonselective secondary schools, 'low expectations' are causing tens of thousands of pupils to miss out on the top grades their intelligence deserves.

 

Shamefully, some staff did not even know who their most able pupils were.

 

Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw sensibly suggests that schools should return to streaming pupils, to stop staff from 'teaching to the middle'.

 

But, with social mobility so tragically stalled, isn't the case for re-introducing grammar schools now overwhelming? By opening a large school in every town, and allowing pupils to enter at any age post-11, the criticisms of grammars - that they favour the wealthy through catchment areas, and that they shut out late developers - can be overcome.

 

Michael Gove deserves huge credit for his efforts to restore rigour to the nation's failing education system.

 

But, for the sake of Britain's children, he must now go further by overturning David Cameron's bewildering opposition to grammars which, for years, encouraged far more social mobility than exists today.

 

 

But under the headline ‘Academic Excellence – without the 11-plus’, the left-liberal ‘Independent’ also came very close to the position I advocate here. Its leader writer said :

 

‘Educational surveys have a habit of focusing on the more obvious failings of our state schools: the drop-out rate, truancy, the proportion of pupils who leave with no qualifications, the poor standards of numeracy and literacy that place our school-leavers at a disadvantage when compared with better-educated East Europeans. And it is right that so much attention is paid to the chances of those at the bottom. It is they who, most clearly and urgently, need help.

 

This does not mean, however, that everything is rosy, or even satisfactory, elsewhere. In a report with a self-explanatory title – “The most able students: are they doing as well as they should in our non-selective secondary schools?” – the education inspectorate, Ofsted, trained its lens on the other end of the school spectrum and answered its question with a loud “No”.

 

It found that in 40 per cent of state secondary schools, the brightest children, as identified by primary-school scores, were not reaching the standard they were capable of, and that two-thirds of those who did best in English and maths at primary school failed to achieve A* or A grades at GCSE. It spoke of thousands of bright children being “systematically failed”, and said that many of those who had excelled at primary school became “used” to performing at lower levels.

 

Regrettably, such findings chime with criticisms made periodically since they came to government by both the Prime Minister and by his Education Secretary, to the effect that many apparently good schools were “coasting”. No less regrettably, they also confirm the concerns of many parents with children at state and private schools that many state schools entrench low expectations and fail to “stretch” the brightest – a defect reinforced by an exam system that demands too little.

 

The laxness of the exam system is now being addressed – in the face of fierce hostility from the teaching establishment – though provision for those of a less academic bent will remain neglected. And if there is anything more depressing than the findings of this latest Ofsted report, it is the defensiveness, even denials, that at once poured forth from teachers and their leaders.

 

They began by challenging the inspectors’ methods, complaining that Level 5 achievers at primary school formed too wide a band to be considered the brightest, or necessarily capable of an A at GCSE. They continued by insisting on the excellence of most schools (and, of course, most teachers) and they blamed league tables for distorting incentives. Of these excuses only the last, a reference to the pressure to lift pupils from a D grade to a C, holds water.

 

One proposal is that secondary schools should “set” or “stream” pupils by ability from the start. Another is for closer parental scrutiny of comparative performance, which will not necessarily improve relations with teachers. But an obvious solution – allowing schools to select by ability – remains taboo, even though such a system produced some of the greatest social mobility this country has known.

 

There is no need to reintroduce the dreaded 11-plus. Sats give primary schools a good grasp of their pupils’ ability. Nor need 11 be the age of selection. The rigidity of admission to grammar schools was one of their biggest downsides. Standards and facilities in schools catering to the less academic must be far better than they were then. But to reject academic selection on ideological grounds alone is to fail many of our most promising pupils just as surely as many of the most disadvantaged are also failed ‘.

 

A third newspaper, 'The Daily Telegraph' also published a leader sympathetic to some sort of selection.

 

I begin to think that we might perhaps be getting there. By the way, can anyone tell me when UKIP discovered the grammar school issue? Someone annoyed me the other day by suggesting that I was supporting UKIP by campaigning for grammars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drugs and Personal Responsiblity , a Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma

I have hesitated before publishing what follows, as it deals with a number of rather sensitive subjects. I would ask those who comment upon it to be thoughtful in their responses.

 

I think I may now know why Damian Thompson, the Daily Telegraph writer, has picked quarrels with me and made severely disparaging remarks about my position on the MMR vaccine. (By the way, my offer to him to make his case here in detail still stands, should he choose to do so).

 

I suspect that the reason for Mr Thompson’s passion is that he very much wishes to believe that the medical profession are pretty much infallible, which of course my attitude to the MMR strongly implies that they are not.  He rightly sees my attitude towards the MMR , and my attitude towards modern psychiatry and the prescription of antidepressants as being parts of the same sceptical view of what we might call the assertion of Medical Infallibility. Under the circumstances, his strong feelings are understandable, though of course that does not necessarily make him right.

 

For Mr Thompson has, quite courageously,  made it public that he himself takes ‘antidepressant’ pills. I had no idea. While I am sure that many people in public life do in fact take such pills, and I am equally sure that this greatly influences their attitude to many things, I can only guess at who might be affected in this way.  And, while puzzled by aspects of Mr Thompson’s behaviour towards me, I certainly never attributed them to this factor. And, now that I do, I am not saying that Mr Thompson’s pills have made him argumentative, but that his faith in them has made him hostile to scoffers against medical orthodoxy, such as I am.

 

In a recent column, Mr Thompson discussed the revelation by Stephen Fry that he (Stephen Fry) had made an attempt to take his own life . As Mr Thompson puts it  (partially quoting Mr Fry’s own account) ‘…he (Mr Fry) took “a huge number of pills” washed down with vodka, and convulsed so badly that he broke four ribs. If he hadn’t been discovered by a producer he’d be dead. This wasn’t a “cry for help”: it was a resolute attempt to kill himself that almost succeeded.’

 

 

If anyone is expecting me to sneer here, I am glad to disappoint them. Suicide, or attempted suicide, is actually a very complicated and serious issue. I am no friend of Stephen Fry, nor he of me. But I grieve that anyone should be so miserable that he behaves like this. Whatever you believe about death and eternity, seeking to bring about your own death is a particularly dreadful thing. Who could not sympathise with a person who does such a  thing, and who could not be sorrowful? 

 

Even so, if Mr Fry’s action was his own choice, then I still have to regard it as a wrong action.  Suicide, or attempted suicide, is an action which hurts many people, including the suicide or would-be suicide - and who can doubt that? Of course, if the person involved is in the hands of torturers or in some other way subjected to conditions of horror and despair, these doubts recede. Which of us can say he would not bite the cyanide pill once the Gestapo or the NKVD got to work? Not I, for certain. But this was not the case.

 

There’s another issue. Can one speak freely of and to a person in this state of mind? Mr Fry is not all that restrained in letting fly at people and things he doesn’t like ( he did so once at me, rather clumsily, and also famously spent an evening being rude about the Roman Catholic Church in a debate in Westminster) .  Naturally, It has seemed reasonable to me to reply equally vigorously. I have mocked him in public places, though my favourite jibe (which I won’t repeat)  is really an attack on his fawning battalions of admirers, rather than on him.

 

I don’t suppose he set out along life’s road actively wanting to be besieged by hundreds of thousands of slurping sycophants who seem to think he’s a combination of Einstein, Wittgenstein, Laurence Olivier, P.G.Wodehouse, F.R.Leavis and Oscar Wilde.  But if he’s so unhappy that he tries to end his life, should we all just shut up, let him be rude to us and scornful of what we love, from his many platforms?  The answer ought to be easy. But in fact I find it difficult.  I want to answer - and if possible defeat - my opponents, but not to trample them under my heel. On the contrary, I cherish the good relations I now have with many people I’ve clashed with in the past (though I don’t expect or seek to have good relations with Mr Fry).  And I certainly don’t want to add to anyone’s personal unhappiness. Could a little light mockery, and some robust exchanges,  do that? Perhaps, in some cases, it could. Very well, I’ll restrain myself from now on. No debating point is worth such a risk. But what a strange position we have now arrived at, when this is necessary. And yet, what else can the civilised human being do?

 

And what about the problem (relevant here) of ‘antidepressants’ and suicide? I often point out, and urge investigation of, the apparent correlation between the taking of such pills and suicide. Some of these pills are acknowledged by medical science as being capable of promoting involuntary suicidal thoughts in those who take them.

 

How powerful these thoughts are, we cannot know unless we have experienced them. But there seems to be an alarming number of people who take their lives after being prescribed such pills (though withdrawal from them can, it must be stressed, also be followed by distressing side-effects, and nobody should so without seeking medical advice). Are they fully in control of their own actions?

 

It is a series of riddles within riddles, all to do with the real nature of human responsibility, made harder by the fact  that nobody really knows what effect SSRI pills do have on the human brain and body, and harder still by the fact that so many influential people have completely bought the ‘antidepressant’ theory (and taken the pills)  and so cannot really accept the case that such drugs might be dangerous.  Where does responsibility lie, when dealing with the actions of a person who is taking or has taken such drugs?

 

Does such a person cease to be responsible for what he does while under the influence of such drugs?

 

I’m not sure. Some cases are clearer than others. If such a person knowingly takes an *illegal* psychotropic drug, knowing it is illegal and that it is mind-altering, then it’s my view that his responsibility for what he does under its influence is total. This is also true for those who take the legal drug alcohol, in quantities known to have an effect upon judgement.

 

But if a person takes legal prescription pills, under the impression that they are a genuine treatment for a genuine illness, having been advised to do so by a qualified doctor, then can he be considered fully responsible for any wrong actions he takes under their influence? Obviously not.

 

But if that person is intelligent and informed , and aware of the controversy about ‘antidepressants’, and consciously rejects the doubts about them, that person is surely more responsible for anything that happens after he  takes such pills, than he would be if he did not know. Or he would be, if he accepted the validity of the controversy and took the criticisms seriously.  This may be why any doubts or criticisms expressed about ‘antidepressants’ are met with such strong objections, sometimes actual abuse, or are coldly ignored. I suspect that many prominent people in public life have taken, or are taking such pills. They want to believe in them. Even to treat criticism as reasonable is to undermine their faith.

 

 

What (by the way) about people who take illegal drugs and later become mentally ill? They are of course responsible for their illness, as it is hardly surprising that mind-altering drugs damage the mind (though it is far better-known that this danger exists than it was).  But it would be an absurd stretch to say they were then responsible for insane acts they later did, as a result of stupid or criminal actions they took when they were still sane. If they had become permanently mentally ill, then they would have, by definition, lost responsibility for their own actions. It would then have been up to others, including the state, to protect them from themselves, and us from them.  A society that lets mentally ill people wander unsupervised would, (and in my view does)  bear more responsibility for that than the individual involved.

 

Let me recap here on what do we actually *know* about SSRI ‘antidepressants’.  Double-blind placebo tests throw grave doubt on their efficaciousness, to put it mildly.  We also know that the theory on which their prescription is based, that ‘clinical depression’ is a physical illness caused by a Serotonin deficiency, is scientifically baseless.  Therefore if the pills do, as claimed,  ‘work’, then they either do so through a placebo effect, or through effects not understood by, predictable by, or measurable by scientific methods.

 

And what we also know is that many of these drugs are known (by recorded experience, not through supposition or baseless claims)  to have side-effects, which may – as it happens – be their only actual measurably objective effects. Many who take them have noted what might be described as a  general numbness in which all emotions, from grief to joy, are dulled by a grey fog of chemically-induced indifference. But that is hardly a precise or measurable effect, nor would it seem to be a condition that anyone would desire to experience, in and of itself.

 

So the really interesting thing about Mr Thompson’s article – and, as I say,  perhaps the key to his behaviour towards me is here:  ‘..where do we start, and stop, in the prescription of drugs to control moods whose instability is made worse by our environment?

 

‘I don’t know. But I can tell you that crawling out of bed today was made easier by 60mg of duloxetine, an anti-depressant that, so far as I can tell, suppresses the feelings of despair and meaninglessness that start in the pit of my stomach and colonise my whole body. That’s what depression means to me. I don’t have it badly, I could probably ditch the pills, but, to put it bluntly, life would suck. So, like many people I know – and, I suspect, a frighteningly large percentage of future generations – I’ll keep taking the tablets.’

 

 

I simply can’t argue with Mr Thompson about this. The nature of the problem is such that nothing I could say about it could be considered purely as a statement of fact and logic. Though he has bravely made it public, and though his doing so might be said to have involved the taking of a position, it is also far too personal to be debated in public with strangers.   It is, in the strictest sense, none of my business.  Mr Thompson is not a relative or a friend. He hasn’t asked my advice. I am distressed that he should feel the despair and meaninglessness that he speaks of, and hope that he soon becomes free of this burden. But I hope that all who read this, whether they agree with me or not, see the immense difficulties which arise from the prescription of ‘antidepressant’ medication by doctors, and the way in which increasing resort to such things is changing and will change our whole society.

Conversation - Mr Cameron's Mortgage, Grammar Schools and Secondary Moderns, Randolph Churchill's Benign Tumour

I’ll take this chance to respond to some of the postings over the weekend..

 

The first is quite straightforward, from Edward Willhoft: He wrote :  ‘If you're going to reduce an allegation of an "immense mortgage" held by Cameron and which is paid for from the public purse, to hearsay by avoiding its quantification then it's easily denied by the perpetrator and further undermined as inaccurate as guestimates are presumed by your readers. Any reason why you avoided a factual quantification?’

 

None at all, except perhaps that I’d done it  before and didn’t feel the need to drag the details out again. First of all, here are Mr Cameron’s own words (with my interpolations)  from a bizarre meeting he held in his constituency in May 2009, at the height of the Parliamentary expenses frenzy. He himself calls it a ‘very large mortgage’ .  It’s certainly far. far larger than the biggest mortgage I ever had, and I am well-paid by most standards - though I only have one house. Please note while reading this that these figures concern a second home, within 70 miles of his far-from-poky main home in London:

 

Mr Cameron said ‘From 2001 to 2007 the only thing I really claimed for in respect of my second home was the interest on a mortgage, not the repayments but the interest. It was a very large mortgage, it was £350,000 worth of mortgage, it was about £1,700 a month that I was claiming. That was quite close to the maximum you could claim at the time but I did not at that stage claim for anything else...’

 

(My comment: To me, £350,000 seems to be a colossal mortgage, especially for someone on a Parliamentary salary, as he was when he first took it on, or even the Leader of the Opposition's salary, which he is now drawing. We do not know whether this sum paid in full for the Camerons' country home. I would suspect that it probably didn't, since large properties in pleasant Oxfordshire villages generally went, even eight years ago, for rather more than that. Several questions arise. Could he have paid for the property out of his own resources? Did he need such a large house? Did he, before the current scandal, assume that he was bound to benefit in the long term from the likely increase in the price of the house during what promised to be a long political career? Now, of course, this is ruled out, but was it then? And £1,700 a month, tax free, is a lot of money, more than the total that comes into quite a few households. How urgent would the need be to justify this?).

 

Mr Cameron continued:  ‘....In 2007 I was able to pay down the mortgage a little bit, so it was a £250,000 mortgage, paying about £1,000 in mortgage interest every month, and so I also claimed for what I would call some pretty straightforward household bills, council tax, oil, gas, erm, and other utility type bills and insurance on the property. And that has been the case from the beginning of 2007 right through to now. I now claim less than the maximum allowed, I don't claim all of those utility bills, I claim a percentage of them, because I think that's right and fair.’

 

(My comment: He 'paid down' the mortgage' a 'little bit'. That 'little bit' turns out to be £100,000, once again a very large sum by most people's standards. And also, if you choose to run a second home, shouldn't you accept that it's up to you to insure it, pay the fuel bills and council tax on it? And wouldn't it be prudent to choose such a home on the basis that you would want to keep such bills low, rather than expect others to defray them?)

 

The whole account can be found in the archives of this blog here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/05/how-to-hold-an-open-meeting-in-private.html

 

I am still quite shocked that this story, though the startling facts are undisputed, remains largely uncovered by the mainstream media and almost entirely unknown to the public as a whole. Mr Willhoft’s reluctance to accept my word makes my point, that what could, in other circumstances, have been a colossal media storm, has passed most people by. I hope this makes people think about future media storms – why this one, why not something else? For once you start asking this question, you are on the trail to understanding what news is, and what history is, come to that.

 

 

 

Now we get on to grammar schools.

 

Doreen McCormack writes:  ‘I was a victim of the system that segregated 70% of children from the other 30%.

It was a blight throughout my career, particularly when filling in application forms. It would be surprising if grammar schools, creaming off the 30% brightest children did not realise good results. In areas were grammar schools still exist parents love them until their offspring do not get a grammar place. Then panic sets in at the realisation of the alternative! Personally, I would get rid of all the remaining grammars and put more funding into the comprehensive system. The only true and fair education system.’

 

I can’t and won’t dispute her own personal experiences, though she doesn’t give more detail about how her life in fact turned out. But I would say once again that this is not an argument against selection or against grammar schools. I had to make this point on Twitter to my fellow York Graduate Linda Grant,  who so far as I know attended a direct grant grammar school (an interesting and valuable type of semi-private school open free of charge to 11-plus successes, but also taking fee-paying children,  abolished in a fit of spite by the 1974 Labour government).

 

(I have often dealt with this argument by telling the story of how Evelyn Waugh was told that his old friend and adversary, Randolph Churchill, had been taken to hospital for the removal of a non-malignant tumour. ‘How typical,’, remarked Waugh, ‘that the medical profession should rummage through the entire large body of Randolph Churchill, find the only non-malignant thing in it, and remove it’ The point being that the critics of the pre-1965 British state school system found the only part of it that was working well, and destroyed it –  believing for some reason that smashing the grammar schools would help those who didn’t go to them. It  didn’t, of course).

 

The failings of the Secondary Moderns, and the absence (for the most part) of the technical schools intended under the 1944 Education Act, were not caused by the existence of grammar schools. Nor were they eased by destroying grammar schools. The criterion of selection was simply shifted, from ability to money.

 

What could (and should) have been done instead by a rational government?

 

The undoubted shortage of grammar school places in many areas , especially for girls, could have been put right by the building of more grammar schools, especially for girls. Abolishing grammar schools seems an odd solution to a shortage of them. I have many times said that I don’t support the rigidity of the eleven-plus, and believe selection should be by assessment and mutual agreement, with those on the margins given a chance at a grammar school education if they think they can handle it, and plenty of points at which late transfers can be made.  Not all children are anything like fully developed at 11. But once again, these are arguments for a reformed system of selection, not arguments for a comprehensive system.

 

Good technical schools would have been, and would still be, a huge asset to this country and would be very welcome to the many children who have no great academic aptitude, but who desire strong vocational training. But once you have compulsory secondary schooling, which has been the aim since the Hadow report in the 1920s, then there will always be a problem in dealing with those children who are neither particularly academic nor particularly technically talented.  I am not a utopian and have no solution to this, but a good straightforward curriculum aimed at literacy, numeracy and a reasonable background of general knowledge seem to me to be worthwhile and attainable objectives for such schools. But why children should be compelled to stay in them long after the point when they can learn anything useful beats me.  

 

As the compulsory school-leaving age has crept upwards (for reasons not entirely clear to me) children who would probably be better off out at work are confined in classrooms, and have to be given exams to aim for, which they can pass.

 

What I really can’t accept in Ms McCormack’s contribution is the claim that comprehensives are fair. How can any informed person make this claim? It is now I think generally acknowledged by all informed people that there are many different sorts of comprehensive school, and that those in poor urban areas are strikingly worse than those in pleasant market towns or affluent suburbs. It is also accepted, as Sir Peter Lampl (who has researched this a lot)  states in my article, that admission to the better schools is generally determined by income. What sort of person calls such an arrangement ‘fair’? I can only assume that Ms McCormack isn’t paying attention. Half of this argument could be resolved if only the tribal supporters of comprehensive education would think about what they were saying.

 

I’m relieved that at least we’ve been  spared the other hackneyed non-argument, about how the few remaining grammars are dominated by the children of pushy well-off parents from many miles around. Of course they are. Large numbers of them are accessible to commuters into London, who know that if they can buy into these areas, their school-fee problems are solved form the age of 11 onwards. So they spend on houses, prep-schools and tutors. This distortion is caused not by the *existence*of the schools, nor by the *nature* of the schools, nor by the fact that they are selective. It is caused by the *shortage* of such schools and the very high demand for good state education, not in any way fulfilled by the comprehensive system which determines the nature of 95% of state schools in England, and all of them in Wales and Scotland.

 

 

A person calling himself ‘Oportoman’ opines :’Peter's world, almost everything was so much better in the 40s and 50s, irrespective of any evidence to the contrary.’

 

**This is flatly untrue. I have never expressed any such view for the simple reason that I do not hold it.  This twisted misrepresentation is typical of my less scrupulous opponents who are unable or unwilling to engage me on what I actually say. My concern is with the present and the future. The past is a) irrecoverable and b) contained many bad things. But as we cannot return to it and cannot alter it, our interest in it must be to gain experience. The alternative - to ignore the past because you believe nothing at all that was good ever happened in the past, and that things are automatically better because they are new, is pitiable.

 

Mr Oportoman’ continues ‘As a result, his rose-tinted view of that period ignores some inconvenient truths about grammar schools. First, it was a minority of children who went to grammar schools and the remainder went to schools (secondary moderns) from which the majority left without any qualifications.’

 

**I don’t ignore it at all. I write about it quite often, as the index will show. It is in the nature of selective schools that a minority will attend them. We can’t all live in Lake Wobegon, where ‘all the children are above average’. Such a belief would involve not just rose-tinted glasses, but a wholly skewed idea of reality. What kind of person regards it as a criticism that selective schools select? This sort of thing fuels my increasing belief that my opponents, who love to call me ‘bonkers’ are in fact themselves gravely out of touch with reality. Their other actions (repeated bloody, expensive wars which damage this country, the closure of badly-needed, modern and viable power stations, incessant official lying about economic statistics and crime) tend to confirm this.

 

Mr Oportoman continues :’As a result the levels of illiteracy were far higher then than now.’

 

**That is an interesting assertion. Can he please produce figures which confirm it? In the Britain of my childhood and teens, popular mass market newspapers a) sold far more copies than they do now and b) contained far denser, more literate material than they do now. How strange that this should have been so in a less literate country. In any case, as another contributor points out, reading and writing are not taught in secondary schools.

 

Mr ‘Oportoman’ continues: ‘Secondly, it has always been a popular deception that grammar schools were egalitarian, in that the children of poor and illiterate parents were able to get the same education as those from more privileged backgrounds. Only a tiny minority fell into that category. Most of those who went to grammar schools came from backgrounds where money may have been tight, but they were not poor or working class.

 

**This is a matter of definition. Of course schools cannot overcome all the disadvantages of homes where learning is not respected. Of course the grammars did not find or lift out of ignorance every child who deserved to be found and lifted, though I believe many dedicated primary school teachers did what they could to help where they could.  I would suspect that many of those who benefited belonged to such groups as the lower middle class and the skilled working class, the very groups who are now often palmed off with bog standard comprehensives and have no possibility of buying their way out of them. But I still stick with my contention that there was far more opportunity for bright children in poor homes than there is now.

 

Mr Oportoman’ continues : ‘Furthermore, even then, private tuition was vital for all but the most brilliant.’

 

***Really? Can he provide any sort of evidence of this? His own experience ( ‘I should know, I only passed my eleven plus as a result of the private tuition I received’) does not really reveal a general situation. There is certainly a lot of private tuition going on now, often among the children of left-wing public figures who dare not send their children to private or openly selective schools, but still want them to get into Oxbridge.

 

He then says :  ‘What is needed is not a return to the days of yore, but a thorough and honest appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the education system we have now. Sadly, this will not happen all the while that Michael Gove and Peter Hitchens promulgate the lie that we are falling behind in the imaginary league table of world education.’

 

***Well, Mr Gove and I don’t agree about education policy and though I am his friend I am not his ally. Mr Gove is as opposed in practice to grammar schools as Mr ‘Oportoman’ is in theory. While I have no doubt that this country’s state education system is one of the worst in the advanced world, I don’t rely on the supposed measures of this, as I agree with Mr ‘Oportoman’ that ‘The statistics upon which such bogus claims are based are not fit for purpose.’. The PISA measurements don’t properly compare like with like and have many other faults. However, it is quite plain (from visiting either country and from the economic and social situations of these countries compared with ours) that Germany’s young people, and Switzerland’s,  are incomparably better-educated than ours, and the only thing that keeps our standards up is the existence of private schools, all but unknown in Germany. By comparison, France, which adopted a comprehensive system some years after us, under Francois Miitterand, is rapidly catching up with us in the race to the bottom.

 

Mr Oportoman says : ’I went to grammar school and yet did not get a degree, despite going on to higher education, my son went to a good comprehensive and got a 2:1.’

 

**Well, to use the language employed by Mr ‘Oportoman’, this comparison is not fit for purpose. By what objective standard was the comprehensive ‘good’? Surely he doesn’t accept OFSTED as a reliable indicator?  I certainly don’t. How would it have fared if its pupils had been compelled to take the ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels that were set at the grammar school attended by Mr ‘Oportoman’, and marked as they were marked? What proportion of children went to a university when Mr ‘Oportoman’ went?  We cannot pry into why Mr ’Oportoman’ did not get a degree, as the reasons may be personal, but what proportion of children went to university when his son went there? How did his son’s degree course compare to his own in content, rigour and numbers who took it?  Without knowing all these things, we can draw no conclusions from this statement at all.

 

Mr ‘Oportoman’ then jams his rose-tinted glasses back on (through which he views his Golden Age of the Present Day and the Wondrous Future) and asserts : ‘What we need to do is identify what makes a good comprehensive (which might include some streaming)’

 

**Why is this what we need to do? What if it is plain that the whole comprehensive idea has failed on its own terms, on his terms as well as mine? What if it is plain (which it is that those comprehensives which may be called ‘good’ (though are in my opinion inferior to grammar schools)  are in fact selective, but selective in ways which he cannot possibly defend – money privilege, being closed to people who do not hold a particular faith, other forms of covert selection -   It has not made the country more equal, as its supporters claimed it would. It has on the contrary entrenched inequality.  It has not improved educational standards across the board. On the contrary it has lowered them across the board, necessitating the introduction of examinations with far lower standards and far less content than their predecessors, and compelling universities also to lower their admission standards ( and introduce remedial courses for entrants) to cope. Why, by the way, would ‘streaming’ be of any advantage? Surely it is a form of academic selection, which he opposes on principle? (Certainly it is very hard to get streaming, or even the less controversial setting, introduced in many state secondary schools, where teachers oppose it).   

 

Mr ‘Oportoman’ ends by jeering at me. Claiming that I wish to ‘ indulge in wistful fantasies about a return to the halcyon days, which in reality never existed.’ I have dealt with that at the start of what I have written. I have no fantasies, wistful or otherwise, about the past. Grammar schools were successfully introduced, after 40 years of hated comprehensive schooling, in the States of the former East Germany. There is nothing wistful or fantastic about proposing their restoration here. On the contrary, the ‘wistful fantasy’  is embodied in the idea that by persisting with this world-class flop, we will one day make it work. Albert Einstein made a pithy remark about those who carry on doing the same thing over and over again, expecting it to have a different result.

 

Finally, a note on my attack on the ‘Economist ‘ magazine. I find the respect with which this organ is treated quite exasperating, as it is so often wrong. I’m also worried by the fact that many of its readers believe it to be conservative, when it is nothing of the kind.  It was one of the earliest publications to campaign for the weakening of drug laws. Its attitude towards Turkey has for years exemplified its general wrong-headedness about most matters of policy. Each time the Erdogan government behaved in a crass or unpleasant way, and each time it showed its true Islamist colours, such as in its new hostility to Israel, its harsh intolerance of dissent, its willingness to host visits by dubious statesmen,   I would watch, in the ‘Economist’ to see if it continued to refer to him as ‘mildly Islamist’. And it did. Even after the current events, I think the phrase ‘moderately Islamist’ crept in.  And yet this same organ cannot stop putting the boot into Russia, a country which (though it has many faults which I do not deny) is a good deal cleaner than it was under Boris Yeltsin, whom the ‘West’ mistakenly worshipped, and is far less of a menace to the comfortable world order from which we benefit than an Islamic Turkey will be. Russia, in my view,  only gets this treatment because it defends the concept of national sovereignty, which the ‘Economist’ is less keen on. There are plenty of corrupt kleptocracies in the world which do not get attacked by the ‘Economist’ as Russia is.  

End the Rule of the Rich and Thick. Bring Back Grammar Schools

This Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

If a democracy is a place where we tell our rulers what to do, why is it illegal to open any new grammar schools?

Once, this country was dotted with hundreds of these fine institutions,
open to all regardless of wealth, on the basis of ability. Then, mad
egalitarian vandals destroyed all but 164 of them in a spiteful frenzy.

They believed that if everyone couldn’t go to them, then nobody should.

Education: Grammar schools must be reintroduced for the good of the country, says Peter Hitchens

What this meant in practice was that
from then on, money, rather than talent, decided who got a good
education.

And so it has been for 40 years. It is my view that the
dim, greedy stupidity of much of modern Britain is a direct result of
this certifiable decision.

 
  


 

The privileges of thick, rich people
were preserved and protected. Untold thousands of clever children from
poor homes were condemned to lives of disappointment and exclusion.

Our elite, closed to fresh ideas and to hungry, ambitious young men and women, went stale.

All sensible people now recognise that
this was a terrible mistake. Despite the massacre of grammar schools,
it has now emerged that the remaining few survivors are besieged by
parents and educating record numbers of children.

They are also capturing large numbers
of places at the best universities, though nothing like as big a share
as they used to get before the 1960s revolution made Oxbridge once again
the preserve of the rich.

Of course, there are good state
schools that are not grammars.

But as the Sutton Trust reported last
week, they are incredibly socially selective. As the Trust’s chairman,
Sir Peter Lampl,  said ‘The bottom line is: how good a school you go to
depends on your parents’ income.’

Sir
Peter’s ludicrous solution to this mess is a sort of lottery, which
would just juggle the injustice around in a different way.

I
don’t understand how he reaches this conclusion, any more than I can
understand how some TV personality can be of any use in promoting
‘social mobility’.

Is it
that neither Sir Peter nor the political elite dare defy the Marxist
obsession with ‘equality’ which has done so much to wreck Britain
already, and which has actually made it much more unequal? Probably.

The way to fix it is to return to open selection by ability, and repeal the Blair law banning new grammar schools.

We don’t need to restore the old eleven-plus – German grammar schools select by assessment with plenty of second chances.

But
it does have to be done in a way that finds, encourages and nurtures
talent, rather than in a way that finds money and privilege, and
entrenches them.

 
A blast of truth that nobody can ignore

It
is very fashionable to sneer at Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, and
to sympathise with his (often equally dubious) opponents.

At the same time it is modish to make excuses for Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and to dismiss his opponents.

In
the world of London think tanks, the self-important, frequently wrong
and always bumptious Economist magazine and the BBC, Putin is bad and
Erdogan is good.

Brutal: Police in Turkey fire pepper spray at 'Woman in the Red Dress' Ceyda Sungur

Actually they are very similar,
except that Erdogan locks up more journalists, is more intolerant of
criticism and holds more political trials. I am not sure how to measure
which of the two countries is more corrupt. It is a close-run thing.

But in one thing, Erdogan is far more worrying than Putin, who is a simple autocrat.

Erdogan
is also a cunning and subtle Islamic fanatic, who knows he will get
further if he pretends to  be moderate, and in an unguarded moment said
that democracy is ‘a tram you ride as far as you want to and then get
off’.  

I have been pointing
this out for years, and so I was amused when at last the liberal elite
were forced (reluctantly) to acknowledge it.  

Erdogan’s
unpleasant state machine showed its real face when citizens of Istanbul
tried to save one of that city’s few remaining green spaces from
tasteless redevelopment.

The
stupid, thuggish and unprovoked gassing of one such citizen – the
now-famous ‘Woman in the Red Dress’, Ceyda Sungur – should tell us all
we need to know about the ‘mildly Islamist’ Turkish state – but only if
we want to listen.

Once again, our outrage is selective. And selective outrage is always a fake.

 

The scenes of horrible crimes are often demolished, because nobody can bear to live there.

Or at
least the names of the streets are changed, as happened with Rillington
Place, in London, site of the gruesome Christie murders.

So I was
surprised to see that the guest house which was the site of many of the
disgusting actions in the recent Oxford paedophile case, is still
advertising itself to tourists who arrive at the city’s railway station.

 
A human sacrifice won't clean up politics

Claim: David Cameron legitimately received thousands in mortgage interest payments through MPs expenses

I happen to think that entrapment is
slimy and unBritish. If you tempt someone into wrongdoing, and then
expose them, you have yourself done wrong.

But
even if you approve of the latest exposures of an MP and some peers for
allegedly taking money to lobby for causes, ask yourself this: are
these things really the problem with our political system? Surely it is
what is allowed that is the problem?

Nobody
exposes MPs when they abandon their principles for the sake of a
career, and allow themselves to be bullied into voting against their
consciences by the hired government thugs known as whips. This is normal
behaviour.

So is that of Mr
Tim Yeo MP, a noisy zealot for the Green lobby which is wrecking our
economy and our countryside, who last year made a six-figure sum from
companies which benefit from unhinged ‘renewable energy’ policies.

So
is that of the Prime Minister, who got away completely with being one
of the greediest housing expenses claimers in the entire House of
Commons (despite also being one of the richest MPs).

Media scandals are selective. Someone picks the victim. While they do so, they are generally ignoring other possible targets.

Some
stories are followed by everyone. Some, like your generous subsidy for
Mr Cameron’s immense (and perfectly legitimate) mortgage interest
payments, remain almost totally unknown to the general public. They
still think his only sin was to claim for clearing wisteria from a
chimney.

The real story lies
elsewhere – in a played-out, incompetent and scornful elite which
cannot admit its mistakes and which hates the voters

If that scandal ever properly catches fire, then we may get somewhere.

This stuff is merely the offering of an occasional human sacrifice to the mob, to keep them from seeing what is really going on.

We Need to Know More About This

I draw the attention of readers to the case of Matthew Tvrdon, who last October killed one person (Karina Menzies) and injured many more, using motor vehicles as his weapons on the streets of Cardiff.  Many of you will remember the  reports of this appalling event. Today, after pleading guilty to manslaughter,  attempted murder, and grievous bodily harm,  Tvrdon was detained indefinitely under the Mental Health Act.

 

Perhaps, like me, you wondered at the time of his terrible action,  how it might have come about.  Regular visitors here will, perhaps,  see the possible significance of the following facts. I personally wish to know a good deal more about Tvrdon’s earlier life than I have seen recorded or reported so far.

 

Tvrdon, according to the Daily Mirror, had been treated in the past for mental illness. I stress once more, for those determined to misrepresent my position, that by recording official classifications of mental illness I do not necessarily endorse the diagnostic method which is used to arrive at such specific categories, or accept that these categories have any objective solidity. But I would add, to avoid counter-misrepresentation by others, that this does not mean I doubt the existence of mental illness. Far from it. I regard it as increasingly common, suspect that it frequently results in many cases from physio-chemical damage to the brain itself, in many cases self-inflicted,  and believe that its incidence may well be increased by the increasing use of illegal and legal mind-altering drugs in our society.

 

It is an irritating fact, but anyone who is prepared to say anything outside the consensus now has to spend a good deal of time simply fending off mischievous and unresponsive misrepresentation by opponents who prefer this sort of smear propaganda to proper argument, and who also prefer muddy waters to clear ones. I won’t respond to this as it only encourages such people, but I will repeatedly warn readers to beware of this corrosive behaviour.

 

If possible, I would ask them not to respond to it themselves, except with rebukes. We have had several attempts to distract us from proper discussion here over the past few years, by people who take advantage of the freedom of speech I insist upon granting, and they end up wasting a great deal of time. This can be avoided if responsible contributors aren’t tempted into doing the mischief-makers’ work for them. Please ignore these nuisances if you can. If you can’t ignore them, please rebuke them. But I beg you not to treat them as if they are debating in good faith. That is not their purpose. They will respond to generosity with further meanness and obtuseness.

 

 

I must therefore ask you to beware.  If anyone attributes any thought or opinion to me, do not assume this summary or representation is correct unless it is backed by referenced and checkable quotation. My advice is to check the source in all cases, to ensure that the quotation has not in some way been doctored. Some people are not above this sort of thing.

 

Now, back to the Cardiff case:

 

The Daily Mirror said  on 6th June.

 

: ‘Taxman Matthew Tvrdon, 32, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, told police he thought Karina Menzies, 31, had been calling him names, Cardiff crown court heard yesterday.

 

He said: "I just wanted revenge on them. I just ploughed straight into them. I can't remember if the lady got back up but I just went over her again. I guess I wanted to kill her and her children." But the Daily Mirror can reveal Tvrdon was showing warning signs of his meltdown months before killing Karina and seriously injuring 17 others during 30 minutes of carnage in the Welsh capital last October.

 

One colleague says little was done about it, claiming he was bullied, persuaded to go off his medication - and once turned up to the office in chains.

 

Family, friends and colleagues had become increasingly uneasy about his bizarre behaviour in the weeks running up to the carnage.

 

‘ He attended a meeting with his line manager at the offices of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs in Llanishen, Cardiff, just two days before he went on the rampage in his white Iveco van.

 

It was decided Tvrdon should be referred to mental health professionals. But before action was taken, he snapped and went on his terrifying spree.

 

Staff at the office, who do not want to be named, claim Tvrdon's behaviour had become increasingly erratic and he once turned up to work wrapped in metal chains like a straitjacket.

 

During his time there he suffered TWO breakdowns, first in 2003 and then again in 2007 - spending time in Cardiff's Whitchurch Psychiatric Hospital before being discharged and returning to work.

 

He was finally passed fit at a review in October 2011 and was told by experts to slowly wean himself off his anti-psychotic drugs.

 

One former colleague, who does not want to be named, told the Daily Mirror: "Matt started out as a normal member of staff.

 

"But pretty soon it became clear he had some problems and became difficult to deal with. He would do strange antisocial things like smoke in the rest area and became increasingly erratic in the weeks before he went crazy.

 

"He was eventually taken off the phones because it became pretty clear he could not cope with members of the public.

 

"But the management did not seem too sympathetic to him and after he had a breakdown he was basically bullied back into work.

 

"He was clearly unwell but they did not seem to care." A spokeswoman for the HMRC refused to answer any questions about Matt Tvrdon's time with the HMRC.’

 

I note that the ‘Daily Telegraph’ reported : ‘The court heard that Tvrdon's psychological problems began in his teens, and he had a family history of mental illness.’ (My note: Tvrdon is now 32 years old)

 

Today, Thursday, the BBC gave this account of the Judge’s remarks during sentencing:

 

‘Sentencing on Thursday, Mr Justice Griffiths said of Ms Menzies' death: "You ran over her quite deliberately while she and her two children were walking outside Ely fire station."

 

The judge went on to describe all the incidents of that October afternoon calling them "horrific and deliberate".

 

He said he was prepared to accept that Tvrdon's mental illness "provides the explanation" for his actions.

 

The judge also said Tvrdon was advised to reduce his medication in 2011 and he did not apportion blame to the defendant for that.

 

He later said he was prepared to accept the doctor's advice that Tvrdon's culpability for his actions of that day was low because of his illness.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sexual Revolution

Some of you have asked if there is a recording of my discussion of the Sexual Revolution with Linda Grant , which took place on Sunday 19th May at the Bristol Festival of Ideas. Here it is.My thanks to Luke Major, who sent me this link:

 

 

 

http://soundcloud.com/bristol-festival-of-ideas/linda-grant-and-peter-hitchens