Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 273

A Challenge to Mr Thompson



1.    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.

 

 

When Money Dies - the horrors of inflation

Most of us think we know about the great German hyper-inflation of 1923 – the people struggling through the streets with wheelbarrows full of billion-Mark notes (it really happened – but sometimes thieves stole the wheelbarrows and left the money behind) , the wild, almost comical increases of prices, the (true) cliché that it opened the way for Hitler.  I used to have, as an annexe to my boyhood coin collection, a small, mainly brown scrap of stiff paper in heavy gothic script which was alleged to be a ten million Mark note (these days, I have a Zimbabwean note for a similar sum) . Maybe it was genuine. It always looked a bit unconvincing to me . This is not surprising, given that many such notes were being run off at the time by local authorities or employers, as the Reichsbank’s presses could never cope with the demand for cash, cheques and credit having become entirely impossible. It may to this day be in the back of some drawer or cupboard, undisturbed. I do wonder what can have happened to all that worthless paper once the  crisis was over.

 

But I certainly tended to think of it much as one thinks of a hurricane , when sitting in a calm valley in the English Midlands. It was something that happened elsewhere, to other people, from which we British were shielded by the sea, by common sense and (in this case) by the great piles of gold in the vaults of the mighty Bank of England.

 

Well, those piles of gold have largely gone, partly sent abroad secretly by warship to pay for World War Two, when it had only just begun,  more recently sold off by Gordon Brown in an almost inexplicable act of folly.  And, by the way, one of the most interesting features of modern history is that the Tory front bench made no protest against this grotesque act of idiocy at the time.  Though they have made much of it since, the Tory leadership of the time did not regard it as important. The criticism of it in the Commons was led by a backbencher, the Blessed Sir Peter Tapsell. I remember this keenly.

 

And what exactly it is that sustains the Pound Sterling at its current value, I am never sure. People deride faith in God quite a lot, but it strikes me that Faith in Money can genuinely move mountains, or at least move the bulldozers that move mountains . The great sums involved in paying for our motorways, tunnels, bridges, hospitals and other great projects, paid for by such dodges as the Private Finance Initiative appear to me to be like a vast block of stone supposedly suspended as by magic in space (as one is invited to glimpse, behind a curtain in the dark, in a famous mosque in Cyprus).  What is it that keeps them up? Best not to look too closely, pull back the curtain or switch on the light.

 

And the assurance that it couldn’t happen here was rather dented, for me, by the convulsion of inflation that set in during the early 1970s. It didn’t hurt me much – my tiny wages were so generously index-linked that the real value of my pay actually went up. But it turned my father’s apparently comfortable savings (a retirement gratuity to recognise more than 30 years in the service of the Crown)  into very thin gruel indeed. It wasn’t German hyper-inflation. But it destroyed savings, punished thrift, swept away landmarks and familiarity. And at the time it seemed out-of-control and rapid. By the time it stopped, many people had lost a way of life and not found another one. It was, I now suspect, the dawning of the new age of funny money, easy credit and an economy staying up with no visible means of support. What caused it? Some say the huge demand for raw materials caused by the Vietnam war, others the oil shock after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, others still higher wages (though I am not convinced by this). There’s also the long-term effect of Harold Macmillan’s largely-forgotten but momentous decision in 1958 to increase the deficit, which caused all his Treasury ministers to resign but which he survived. And of course there is the great expansion of the state sector, particularly in social work, education and local government, which had got under way in the Harold Wilson era. One of the many fascinating revelations  and recollections in a recent Tariq Ali article on the 1960s, in the Guardian (here http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/07/1963-beginning-of-modern-era )

 

 

…is an account of what happened when Tariq’s fellow leftist students raged at  Michael Foot for selling out to the USA ( which in fact the Wilson government hadn’t done): ‘In 1965, a year after the election of a Labour government that went back on many of its promises, Michael Foot shouted at us in despair as we denounced his leader, Wilson, for "crawling to the Pentagon". "You idiots," he screamed. "Don't you realise that Wilson is the most left wing prime minister this country is ever going to have?" Our satirical laughter enraged him. We're not laughing now.’

 

 

I think we are now going through something similar to the Heath inflation, but more cleverly managed and with no end in sight.  If it continues for long enough, it will be a powerful wealth tax, and will squeeze what is left of the old middle class out of existence, leaving the super-rich on top, and huge class of hand-to-mouth, moonlighting, two-or-three-job toilers at the bottom, trying and failing to pay a tax bill that cannot be met.

 

It will also allow the British government to default on its debt, without ever actually saying so, and for millions of near-bankrupt spendthrifts to do the same. Their debts will simply shrink away to the point that they don’t matter. But where will the money come from? From the thrifty.

 

Official price indexes seem to me to have lost touch with reality. Everything I need has gone up quite violently in price, especially travel and energy, but also food. The supposed inflation rates seem to have little to do with this. I think they are distorted by the bizarrely low interest rates for home loans, a puzzle which I have yet to solve. Observing these rates is, to me, like watching water flow uphill without apparent agency. When I first went into the mortgage market,  interest rates rose frequently, often to very high levels indeed, in response to economic conditions. One could even predict (until 1997) that they would rise sharply after any general election. Now they barely move. 

 

At the same time there is very little point in ordinary saving. Saved money simply depreciates, suffering what is in effect negative interest.  For most people, work is increasingly hard to find, and pay is not rising, certainly not above the official rate of inflation, and is definitely not enough to absorb what I regard as the real rate.

 

And we hear all the time about ‘Quantitative Easing’, a polite way of printing money, being used deliberately and consciously by the Bank of England to try to revive our sagging, wheezing economy. I believe the term originates in Japan, where they make the best euphemisms. I think we are paying for it, and will pay for it. I doubt if it will lead to the scenes depicted in ‘When Money Dies’, an icy, rather detached account of the German Inflation by Adam Fergusson, which I have at last read.

 

Nobody nowadays is stupid enough to respond to a hole in the state’s accounts by just printing money over and over and over again (though one of the actual legal preconditions for this, the uncritically-praised move to ‘independence’ of our central bank from Parliament, is in place) . But what if our political leaders have read the history, see the problems but don’t necessarily dislike the outcome?

 

I think this book may have been overpraised because of its uniqueness, and because it disappeared for a while from view, and has only now been reprinted after a long period when it was very hard to find.  For me, it concentrates too much on the figures, too much on the politicians, too little on the people.

(I should add here that It deals also with the parallel crises in Austria and Hungary, just as tragic but less well-known) . Actual starvation is glancingly mentioned. Violent and destructive raids on the countryside by destitute city-dwellers are described, as is a horrible descent on the Austrian city of Linz, by respectable persons turned into barbarian looters by the collapse of their world.  

 

The connection between the collapse of money and rampant Judophobia is also made. People’s minds, inflamed by hunger, jealousy, suspicion and the old simple-minded fantasies of Jewish financiers and profiteers, fill with a sort of black smoke, leaving no room for facts or reason, or kindness.  German peasants refuse banknotes for eggs, milk and meat saying ‘We don’t want any of your Jewish confetti from Berlin!’  And so a hellish outcome, 20 years later, is prefigured.

 

But these moments are rare, like the mention of the fact that employees of the Berlin Finance Ministry were, by the end, being paid partly in potatoes. Or the terrible anecdote of the Austrian middle-class woman, urged (by her bank manager) at the beginning of the inflation of the Krone to switch her savings into Swiss Francs, loftily ignoring the advice and then discovering that her entire family fortune, on which she had relied to see her into old age,  is now worth little more than a box of matches. Like so many people then and now, she simply did not understand the way inflation, like a cloud of locusts, devours value at an astonishing speed. Actually, it does this even when there is no hyper-inflation.

 

How did she then live in later years? We are not told (though some hint of Austria’s post-inflation destitution and poverty is supplied in Stefan Zweig’s painful novel ‘The Post Office Girl’) . Did she abandon her status and become a charwoman or a street-sweeper (or worse) , or was she rescued in some other way? I have heard second-hand tales of Babylonian prostitution and debauchery among the educated and the formerly well-off in 1923 Berlin. Were these true? If not, how did people eat? Were the soup-kitchens enough? Could the respectable bear to go to them?  How did that class which fortifies itself with secure savings, cope with the abrupt collapse of its defences. How much did the morals of the middle class survive, and how much did they simply vanish, driven out by desperation? Can morals survive at all in such conditions, or will there just be a few noble martyrs? The book, by the way, also makes almost no mention of religion or the church. How did they act? What effect did these events have on them?

 

Fergusson says , in the moving passage which closes his account, ‘In hyperinflation, a kilo of potatoes was worth, to some, more than the family silver; a side of pork more than the grand piano. A prostitute in the family was better than an infant corpse; theft was preferable to starvation; warmth was finer than honour, clothing more essential than democracy, food more needed than freedom’ .

 

I would like to have read more about all of these things.  The book usefully explains the origin of the inflation in Germany’s gamble of financing the 1914 war by borrowing rather than taxation, risky even if she had won a quick victory, disastrous when she lost. It also explains that the inflation was, in the end, stopped by a confidence trick - the ‘Rentenmark’, whose value was accepted as stable largely because everyone wanted to believe in it, not because it was actually worth anything. (see what I mean about Faith in Money?) There is some general discussion of despair and demoralisation, but without the individual details it does not hit home. I wonder if, in these horrible experiences, the lasting shame and humiliation, the lasting knowledge of how low the human soul can sink in conditions of starvation and ruin,  the real origins of National Socialism lie, and the real explanation as to why ‘in the land of Goethe and Schiller, etc,  etc,  etc etc’ this terrible barbarism was born.  It was also the land of the Billion Mark Note. Note that National Socialism also flourished in Austria, and something very like it (the Arrow Cross) was powerful in Hungary. And these were the three countries most closely affected by this particular plague, all of them intensely civilised and ordered in the years before 1914, and with the most happily and successfully assimilated Jews.  

 

I could also have done with more about the almost purposeful nature of inflation – the way in which it functions as an unacknowledged tax, plundering the thrifty to cancel the debts of the government, and of the thriftless, concentrating wealth in the hands of far fewer people than held it before.

 

For one of the things which constantly strikes me about modern Britain is that there must be many people who would actually quietly like to see the collapse , or at least the shrinkage, of the currency. They cannot hope to pay off their debts in any other way .The same is true of the government, which has no idea how it will manage its deficit, and borrows more each day, an action no less stupid than Weimar Germany’s incessant printing of worthless money. How convenient a large inflation would be for them.

 

Could anyone do such a thing deliberately? Possibly. The book quotes but does not endorse suggestions that both the Bolsheviks and some of the Warsaw Pact states deliberately used hyperinflation to destroy the hierarchies, the certainties  and the middle classes which stood in their way. I have seen no proof of this, but it is not incredible, and we all know John Maynard Keynes’s attribution to Lenin of the (justified) belief that if you wish to destroy a nation, you first debauch its currency.  It is also a  very good way of destroying the power and influence of the independent middle class, who are the mainstay of any truly free and law-governed society, and the reliable regiments of conservatism. But of course those who are in charge of all these things are not Bolsheviks.

 

They are ordinary politicians, far too stupid to be so well-organised or directed. It is just an accident, a bungle, an unintended consequence by people too dim and short-sighted to understand that bills have, in the end, to be paid somehow. I am not sure whether that makes it any better, though. The results will still be very bad.

 

(*‘When Money Dies –the nightmare of the Weimar hyper-inflation’, by Adam Fergusson,  was re-published in 2010 by Old Street Publishing, but was originally published in 1975 by William Kimber.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Impartial is That? BBC Monitoring.

I transcribed what follows from Wednesday morning’s ‘Today’ programme (8th May 2013), a broadcast which British readers will know is the Corporation’s most respected news and current affairs programme.  

 

I did so because, when I first heard it early on Wednesday morning, I was shocked by it. And I am not readily shocked by the BBC, an institution whose hopeless liberal bias is well-known to me, and which I tend to dismiss with a shrug most of the time, because life is too short to fret.

 

John Humphrys, the presenter involved, is by common consent the programme’s most incisive interviewer and presenter.  I think the exchange  is quite extraordinary, for several reasons. One is that the BBC seems to have a very odd idea of where the line of disagreement now lies in British politics, and of what is the consensus and what is not. On the basis of this discussion, the view that the law should still be employed to control the use of illegal drugs no longer needs to be represented in discussion (even by the presenter playing ‘devil’s advocate’, as they are so often said to be doing in other circumstances when they introduce opinions into discussions which are not being expressed by any participant) .

 

The nearest we get to a representation of this view is a comment on the unwillingness of politicians to consider the idea of drug decriminalisation. Even on the (shaky) assumption that nobody on the ‘Today’ programme knew this issue would be coming up (preliminary discussions on such items can often take 20 minutes, as the researcher is anxious to know what the guest will say so the presenters are prepared), this is pretty odd.

 

Then there is the whole jokey tone of the discussion, gravely offensive to anyone whose life has been destroyed because he, she or a family member has taken illegal drugs.

 

Finally, a partial view on the nature and operation of criminal justice is expressed by a guest without any challenge.

Imagine, if you will, this item being broadcast 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago on the same programme. Here is the point at issue:

Just after 6.49 a.m. on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme (for the next few days you may listen here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s8mnj), John Humphrys (JH) introduced a discussion by two think tanks supposedly ‘on either side of the political divide’ These are Madsen Pirie (MP) of the Adam Smith institute and Tom Papworth (TP) of the Centre Forum , a Liberal Democrat think tank I hadn’t heard of before.  Embarrassingly, both alleged antagonists broadly agreed on all their proposals. That was bad enough . After a few minutes of more or less complete agreement between these supposed foes, matily addressed by their Christian names,  Mr Humphrys said he was ‘beginning to wonder if they were on opposite sides’  Mr Pirie then said the discussion was ‘dying of agreement’).

 

At this point, Mr Pirie said he had something that he thought would ‘stir the pot’. Not exactly, as it turned out.

 

Madsen Pirie: ‘We have been losing the war on drugs for 50 years. It is about time we did something to win it. So we would like to see the proposal that the hard drugs be medicalized.  And that means that addicts would be able to get supplies within clinics run by doctors and nurses after medical examination, and the recreational drugs should simply be legalised.’

 

JH. ‘Now you know you’ve no chance of that . (TP giggles) Experience tells us that politicians run a mile from that sort of thing doesn’t it,  Madsen?’

 

MP. ‘Experience shows that politicians will probably carry on doing the thing that hasn’t worked for 50 years (John Humphrys chuckles) and calling for more of it to be done. We’d like something different to be done.’

 

JH : All right. What do you think of that one,  Tom?

Tom Papworth: I’m slightly disappointed that the Adam Smith Institute doesn’t want to just legalise it and tax it, really.’(JH: Laughs)

 

JH : ‘Well, there you go. Why not go that step further, Madsen?  Legalise it all and tax it?’ (in light-hearted voice)

 

MP:   ‘The point is that if you did decriminalise the hard drugs and legalise the recreational drugs you would be able to control the quality to some extent and much of the health damage that’s done by drugs is done by polluted drugs, contaminated drugs,  people taking the wrong dose. If it were done under medical supervision you wouldn’t have that problem. But the big thing is you would be taking crime out of drug addiction.’

 

JH: ‘And that is a very big thing isn’t it , Tom?  If you remove that then you do solve a huge number of social ills.’ (These words (if you remove…social ills’), are, in my view, spoken as a statement, not in the tone of voice normally used to ask a question. What do you think?).

 

TP: ‘A huge number of social ills,  and frankly it is a brilliant cost-saving measure for the government. The government basically spends billions every year locking people up for drug offences. The result of which is that you take people who have drifted a little bit into crime and you seal them into a university of crime for a few years and when they come out their future is definitely… (word unclear, may be “criminal”).’

JH : ‘Well, there you are Madsen. You’ve got his approval of that as well’

My Part in the Rise of Ken Livingstone

Tonight I’m down to debate at the Oxford Union on the motion that ‘This House Remembers New Labour Warmly’(or is it fondly?) . I shall be speaking against.

 

My main ally, enjoyably enough,  is my old comrade Ken Livingstone. This won’t be the first time we have worked together for a common aim. I rather reluctantly campaigned for Ken in the 1979 general election, when he was Labour candidate for Hampstead, that semi-mythical district of North London, an airy hilltop lifted high above the teeming city, flanked by the Heath and by Parliament Hill, and in the election season of early May glorious with blossom and trees newly come into leaf.

 

At the time, Hampstead seemed impossibly expensive and unaffordable to a young Fleet Street scribbler,  as I then was, though we did contemplate buying a miniature flat just off Heath Street, simply for the delight of being up there in the real NW3 postal district, a few yards from the Heath,  and the delightful old Hollybush pub.  There just wasn’t room to breathe when you were inside it, so we didn’t. Now it is impossibly expensive for everyone except Russian Oligarchs and Arab oil gazillionaires. That tiny flat would probably be worth about two million pounds by now. I dwelt instead in the foothills of Hampstead, Belsize Park, former home of Spencer Perceval, the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated, technically NW3 but not within the 435 (formerly HAM) telephone exchange, which was the real frontier.    

 

Hampstead in those days still had a fading reputation for being a thoughtful place full of bookish and intelligent people (not to mention Peter Simple’s fictional Stalinist villainess, Deirdre Dutt-Pauker, who dwelt in the mansion called ‘Marxmount’ with her Albanian au-pair Gjoq). But it was also a rich one, which then meant a large Tory vote (it wouldn’t now) and had only once returned a Labour MP. In the now-forgotten but then tumultuous  March 1966 general election, the event which really inaugurated the British cultural revolution. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, though on reflection I wonder if they had put something in the water.  Harold Wilson had scraped a tiny victory in October 1964. But 18 months later he managed a majority of 97, the first majority Labour government to be elected since 1950, and the first solid majority Labour government, with real freedom of action, to be elected since 1945. The great Jenkins-Crosland programme of reform could now begin. Ben Whitaker (still with us)  had beaten Henry Brooke, the Michael Howard of his day, a ‘right-wing’ Tory Home Secretary much lampooned by the BBC and Private Eye. I think a special effort had been made to unseat him. The constituency fell back into Tory hands in 1970 and would stay that way for some years to come, by which time its boundaries and nature had been transformed anyway.

 

In the late 1970s I joined the then Hampstead Constituency Labour Party, as its most right-wing member. I’d abandoned Marxism in 1975, but still saw myself as being on the Left, a disciple of Arthur Koestler, a socialist who loathed Communism because he had seen it form the inside and knew what it really was - or so I thought then.  I had also learned a few tricks in my Bolshevik days. Knowing that my own ward (where I was loathed for being anti-CND) would never elect me to the governing General Management Committee (GMC) , I and my wife-to-be attended wearisome meetings of the Camden Co-operative Party, which we also joined for a modest fee. Nobody else from Hampstead ever paid any attention to this body, a relic of an older Labour Movement, which had been forgotten about by all but us. After a year or so of these appalling gatherings, attended by us and by a handful of incoherent loners who seemed to be keeping out of the rain, but who were sometimes  capable of quite long (if repetitive) speeches,  we nominated each other for the Camden Co-Op party’s two allotted seats on the Hampstead Labour Party GMC, and were duly elected.  The necessary documents were then signed and stamped. It was all worthwhile when we turned up for the annual meeting, duly and correctly accredited, and bearing the necessary paperwork,  as voting, speaking members of the GMC . The fury and dismay of the Comrades, when they realised they had no way of blocking us under their own rules,  was a joy to behold.

 

When I spoke ( as I did from time to time) I would be called to order by the Chairwoman (not yet by that stage a ‘chair’, though possibly a ‘chairperson’)  for provoking the comrades into heckling me. They were *not* called to order for heckling me.  I still think this was very funny , as well as educational. Then came the selection of our candidate for the approaching general election, a process which must have taken up much of the autumn of 1978. I honestly cannot remember Vince Cable coming before us, though he did then put himself forward. One of those I do recall, later a Cabinet member, flatly denied to me that she had ever sought the Hampstead nomination, so perhaps my memory is at fault. I can remember (or think I can) , when it came to the final vote, being one of a small group who voted against the nomination of Ken Livingstone ( who, as it happened, was an old acquaintance of my wife-to-be, from long ago in South London).

 

It made no difference, as he was selected anyway, and I duly delivered leaflets for him and turned out on polling day to bang on doors and get out the vote, confident that he would be beaten and anxious to prove my loyalty to the cause. It was often fun to listen to him speaking. he had ( as he always has done) a good dry sense of humour about himself, and after his defeat could put wonderful satirical force into nasal calls (which he knew to be ludicrous) to ‘bring down the Tory government’. I hung on in the Hampstead Party till 1983 or 1984, when I became a full-time political reporter and thought it wrong to carry a party card, though by that time I was pretty sick of Labour anyway – there was no hope of beating the Left, as had been done by Bill Rodgers and the Campaign for Democratic Socialism back in the 1960s -  and my sympathies were with David Owen, though I never joined the SDP.

 

The problem with Red Ken was that the disarmingly self-mocking funny man was also a dedicated soldier of the hard left,  whose ideas, at the time were still regarded by the mainstream as outrageous – particularly his sexual politics and his views on the Irish question. Ken has never had the credit he deserved for imposing these ideas first on the London Labour Party, then on the national party and finally on the country as a whole, where his beliefs are now the orthodoxy of the age, and people like me are the eccentric, mistrusted outsiders.

 

Ken is good (by which I mean effective, not that I agree with him)  in back rooms, good on the phone, good in committees, good at rallies and marches and picket lines. But he is not clubbable, and not a parliamentarian, so others have reaped where he sowed, and eaten the grapes from the vines he planted , and profited from the corn he gathered into barns. It must be very frustrating for a man who shaped our national politics, that he could never rise higher than Mayor of London. He was made for a Presidential system (which the Mayoralty of London largely is). But, thank heavens, we don’t have a President of Britain.

 

Yet another argument for monarchy, you might say.  But I long to know (and hope to find out tonight) why Ken doesn’t look fondly on the years of New Labour. Politically, they were a triumph for all he believed in.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Should Men Hold Doors open for Women?

Once again, it is the topic I gave least space to that seems to have attracted most intense interest here and elsewhere – the custom of men opening doors for, and giving up their seats to women.

 

I am told : ‘When you give up a seat for a woman, then what you are saying to her is that she is a flake who needs coddling. Do not pretend that you are doing anything else than demeaning her, because you are not. It is an insult. If you can't see that, you are stupid.’

 

Well,  I may be stupid. Others can judge that. But here is why I think this opinion is mistaken. Chivalry, or gentlemanliness, has been the unintended victim of the militant feminist revolution. The sexual revolutionaries thought that, if they destroyed what they thought were the rules of ‘patriarchy,  and the ‘stifling’ moral codes of Christianity, they would begin a Brave New World in which the sexes were entirely equal and dealt with each other on equal terms.

 

But it was not so. My fellow York graduate Linda Grant (with whom I shall be discussing the issue in Bristol on May 19th) writes in the Guardian today of how, in the early years of this great enlightenment,  she was variously mauled, molested and date-raped (her term) during the 1970s.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/06/in-defence-of-the-1970s

 

Well, this is disgusting to me. But I happen to think that the older morality was a far better protection against it than anything we now have. The truth is that the demolition of the old relationship could only be replaced by elaborate codes (such as the Antioch College one I discussed here  (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2008/08/the-rape-of-rea.html)

in one of my doomed attempts to hold a rational debate about the issue of rape, which I no longer discuss because nobody listens to a word you say).

 

It can also only be replaced by the criminal law, which, where you have a presumption of innocence, is incredibly hard to employ when there are only two witnesses to an event, and they conflict.  

 

Neither arrangement is perfect. The old system of lifelong marriage, and sexual activity outside marriage much frowned on,  unquestionably has its drawbacks. Who could deny it?  But I am not a utopian. I think women have paid a very high price for their supposed ‘liberation’ from marriage . This seems to me to have been an enslavement to commerce, toil and the state, not to mention to plastic surgery and the cosmetics industry.

 

As for opening doors, giving up seats and all the other things which I try to do as a matter of course , and curse myself when I fail to do so, these are much more about what I regard as the principles of chivalry , which are:

Give way to, and be generous to those who you have the power to hurt, shove aside or belittle. In any contest of equals, in a doorway, in a narrow corridor, on a road, or for any other thing, be the one who gives way, as an acknowledgement that your neighbour is at least as valuable as you.

 

Stand up to those who have the power or ability to hurt you. This is the corollary of the above, and part of it. The one who holds open the door is, I suspect, more likely to be the person who comes to the aid of the threatened victim. This is not because he (or she) is a better person, but because he or she has trained himself or herself to be concerned with the lives of others.

 

The giving up of seats the opening of doors, the friendly greeting to strangers, are all constant reminders to yourself that we are all fellow-passengers on the journey to  the grave, none superior to the other.  Anyone can reject these offers if he or she wishes.  

A Bit Of Bible Study - my response to Messrs Aaronovitch and Thompson

Oh, dear. If you don’t respond to attacks, people think you have no answer to them. So what follows is done more out of duty than anything else. It concerns Damian Thompson. Some readers will recall an extraordinarily virulent and personal attack on me by this interesting and entertaining Daily Telegraph columnist a few weeks ago.  This was ostensibly to do with my views on addiction, though Mr Thompson had suddenly expressed a personal dislike for me during our first  (and so far only) meeting.

 

On the 9th March he wrote as follows (using my deceased brother as a weapon with which to attack me, as so many troubled people do ) : ‘Did you know that the late great Christopher Hitchens (see above) had a younger, less talented, journalist brother called Peter? Me neither – until I was asked by the Spectator to debate the subject of addiction with this gentleman, a chap in a blazer who reminds me of the Viz character Major Misunderstanding.

 

‘I've taken a lot of flak for arguing, in my book The Fix, that addiction is behaviour, not disease. But Hitchens believes that addiction does not exist at all – that it's an excuse for the illegal behaviour of "selfish" people.

 

‘This is scientifically illiterate – people can become involuntarily addicted and their brain chemistry changes. But Hitchens was having none of it, banging on about "the worship of the self" in the way that self–obsessed folk often do.

 

‘Alas, I lost my temper and was rude to him. Now I'm wondering whether I should send him a peace offering. I'm told he adores cravats. Anyone know where I can lay my hands on one? ‘

 

This peculiar, spiteful outburst was quite unprovoked. I had never so much as spoken to Mr Thompson until the first time I met him. I had rather enjoyed his column, and saw him as, in many ways, an ally rather than as a foe. I still read his column.

 

Now he writes (beneath the headline: ‘An unrepentant scaremonger’) as follows:

 

‘It was “the Hillsborough of my profession”, said David Aaronovitch in The Times on Thursday. He was referring to scare stories about the MMR triple vaccine, pushed by journalists and partly responsible for the measles outbreak in Swansea. I agree – though let’s not forget Tony and Cherie Blair, who in 2001 refused to say whether baby Leo had been given the MMR vaccine. (He had.)

 

‘Andrew Wakefield’s “research” linking MMR to autism quickly fell apart, though hacks were slow to catch up. Cue reverse ferrets, as we say. But one scaremonger is unrepentant: Peter Hitchens, who still refers to assurances that MMR was safe as “propaganda”. Also, he doubts that his own tabloid article on the topic, published in 2001, “influenced even one person”. Really? That would be the article which proclaimed: “They told us thalidomide was safe.” Hitchens never usually plays down his own influence; how telling to find him doing so now.’

 

Well, readers here will know that the article to which he refers was written in 2001, almost three years after the Andrew Wakefield paper had been published in ‘’The Lancet’, a respected medical journal, years during which his concerns had been treated sympathetically by many media . I believe these may even have included the Telegraph, as well as ‘Private Eye’ .  I am told (and would be glad of any recollections) that the Wakefield theory was also given friendly treatment by at least one major  BBC programme as well as by a variety of columnists, left and right. I had not been involved at all, as far as I recall. The discrediting of the Wakefield paper had yet to happen, though it was under official and establishment attack.

 

By the time I wrote my long and detailed article, in which I was careful to offer no opinion on the matter ( I said ‘There is no proof that MMR causes or has ever caused autism, or the severe bowel disorder Crohn's disease which can lead to brain damage’) ,  the belief that there might be a risk from the MMR was already widespread and common. I had not contributed even slightly to that.  I genuinely did not believe that I knew one way or the other. The subject of immunisation is a very complex one, in which many apparently sweeping statements turn out to be qualified when you look into them. As a parent myself, I was disconcerted by this, and I had embarked on my research in the hope of finding a clear answer. 

 

As readers can read here,  (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/04/some-reflections-on-measles-and-the-mmr-.html) I did not then find one. I recently re-published the article, clearly as a historic document, partly to rebut claims that I had in some way urged parents not to have their children vaccinated. A number of other recent (and older) discussions of the matter can be found by going to ‘MMR Vaccine’ in this blog’s index.  I had detected the creation of a myth, now still being stoked, that the current outbreak of measles in Swansea is the fault of wicked and irresponsible right-wing journalists, who whipped up hysteria. Well, I find no hysteria in what I wrote.  And, as I keep pointing out, sympathetic coverage of the Wakefield thesis was to be found way beyond the ‘right wing’ popular press.

 

There’s a separate question about the behaviour of the Blairs.  I was among journalists who asked Downing Street ( I may have been the first, I am not sure) if Leo Blair, their small son, had been given the injection, as he was of the correct age.  Downing Street refused to answer. I was puzzled by this behaviour, and I still am. As others have pointed out, Mrs Blair was later quite willing to speak publicly about the actual conception of Leo at Balmoral, revealing details about her ‘contraceptive equipment’ which many might have actively preferred *not* to know.  So claims that they needed to guard their privacy hardly carry much weight. Nor do I think it right for a journalist at ‘The Guardian’ to describe this question as ‘unsavoury’. It was a legitimate journalistic inquiry under the circumstances.

A straightforward ‘yes’ would have ended the matter, and boosted take-up.

 

And Mr Blair was at the time at the head of a government which was actively spending taxpayer’s money urging people to give their children the jab. So why the silence? Even some of my critics on this matter acknowledge that the Blairs’ behaviour was unhelpful to the cause of immunisation. Should this episode be blamed on the questioner, or on the person or persons who chose not to answer? It seems to me that if people are to be morally blamed for asking questions of paid members of the government, who have voluntarily sought and accepted public office and responsibility, then we do not have a fully free press. In fact , as I recall, I asked it because readers (and a fellow journalist herself worried about the controversy) suggested that I did so.

 

As for Mr Thompson’s attack, I am interested to see that the only direct quotation he produces is a statement of undisputed fact, that doctors once told us thalidomide was safe. It was one of several examples of the authorities, or the pharmaceutical companies, or medical opinion in general, being partly or wholly wrong, either by default or by deliberate action. I advanced these as reasons why responsible, thoughtful people might reasonably be sceptical of official reassurances about safety.

 

They are also, of course reasons for journalists to be instinctively sympathetic to ‘mavericks’ and ‘whistleblowers’ who challenge the authorities or the drug companies. We may provide their only chance to warn of grave dangers that might otherwise be suppressed. There is a risk that they may be wrong. But there is an equal risk that they may be right. Where controversy continues to exist, it is reasonable, in fact responsible, for journalists to decline to suppress such people’s work, and to decline to accept, solely on trust, official reassurances that all is well.  If The ‘Lancet’ publishes a paper, the layman is entitled to take it seriously, precisely because scientists have done so.

 

If this controversy, where the whistleblower turned out to be wrong, is used to discourage future vigilance, then that is a misuse of it. Journalists, of all people,  should not seek to weaken their trade’s ability to expose.

I say all this though I had no part in the initial coverage of the matter. By the time I wrote my first article on it, the worry was already abroad. I thought then, and think now, that single jabs on the NHS would have been a great comfort to th perplexed, and would have much increased coverage against measles. I am indeed ‘unrepentant’ about that, and see no reason to repent.

 

As for ‘Hitchens never usually plays down his own influence; how telling to find him doing so now’, I am certainly not given to boasting about my influence, as far as I know (though I enjoy pointing out when I have been right, a different thing).  And I would, as I said, be surprised if an analytic 3,000-word article towards the back end of a Sunday newspaper made much impact on a controversy that had already been raging for almost three years. Much as I hope that lots of people read it, I am by no means sure that they did.

 

One other thing. Mr Thompson begins his attack by quoting David Aaronovitch, now of ‘The Times’ . He said ‘‘It was “the Hillsborough of my profession”. Well, I am not terribly convinced by Mr Aaronovitch’s argument, which I can’t link to here because it is behind the Times pay-wall. The headlines on the article ferociously use such terms as ‘sensationalism’ and a ‘crime worse than phone-hacking’  Actually phone-hacking *is* a crime. Reporting in good faith is not. Nor is debating controversies. It’s an interesting formulation.

 

It does provide one fascinating piece of information (and I did not previously know this). It cites a campaign by a local newspaper in South Wales which began *before* Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 press conference. That is a separate issue, it seems to me, from the reporting of matters arising from a paper in ‘The Lancet’. I’d like to know more.

 

Apart from that it’s mostly the regurgitation of government statements about how single jabs are less effective than triple ones. Well, yes, David, perhaps, though the logic is a bit feeble ( it assumes that the parents involved are irresponsible, which the evidence suggests is not the case), and the facts in support of it are scanty, but even if this argument were much stronger than it is –one more time – single jabs are more effective than no jabs, and if you offer worried parents a choice between triple jabs and no jabs , under the circumstances existing in 1998-2003,  a lot of them will choose no jabs. That’s what happened. That’s why the policy Mr Aaronovitch backs failed, a failure his faction never, ever acknowledge or take responsibility for.

 

They suffer from a basic misunderstanding of human nature, and a basic misunderstanding of the proper relationship between the state and the individual.

 

This is where I get a little narked. Mr Aaronovitch’s problems with people who won’t do as they’re told (especially when it’s officially for their own good) may have something to do with his upbringing as a Communist, a world-view he doesn’t seem to me to have repudiated all that thoroughly.  Readers here will know that as an ex-Marxist myself (rather more ex than most) I have an informed and intense interest in this question.

 

But if we are going to go searching for Hillsboroughs and misdeeds by our trade (Journalism, thank  heaven, is not a profession),  is a controversy about a vaccine really the  most prominent recent example of the power of words to affect lives, and of mistaken behaviour?

 

Mr Aaronovitch, it must be recalled, was one of the most notable media supporters of Anthony Blair’s appalling Iraq War, which without doubt was responsible for tremendous loss of life. Whereas the damage done by the current measles outbreak, and all measles outbreaks in recent history,  is not only immeasurably smaller, but (in this current case) is also arguably attributable (I put this at its most modest) to government pig-headedness, at least as much as it is to Andrew Wakefield’s behaviour and that of the journalists who, in good faith, reported his concerns sympathetically.

 

Now, Mr Aaronovitch has since then offered various tortured and obviously distressed noises about his part in supporting Mr Blair's war. He’s had grave difficulties in acknowledging that the government did not tell the truth. He’s tried to advance Iraq’s new democracy  (itself a rather questionable thing) as a justification for the gory hell which we visited on that country, and which still persists. I won’t say he’s not repentant. He’s clearly troubled. But essentially, when it was a journalist’s duty to be sceptical and critical of politicians and the state, he was supportive and helpful to those politicians and that state (I might point out that I took the opposite view on the matter) . And therefore his actions played a part in making possible an event of great violence and destruction. In my view, he continued to defend it, and its authors, long after he should have stopped. But I can see the difficulty.  

 

But do you know what? I won’t embark on a campaign which suggests that in future people such as him should be afraid to voice such opinions,  or urge such courses of action for fear that they might be wrong (I never went so far in advocacy over the MMR as he did over war) . Nor will I impugn his motives, which I believe to have been fundamentally good. Many of us make mistakes, about things which are great and small. I will certainly not equate his actions with deeds which are actually crimes.

 

But I will offer him this quotation from the Authorised Version of the Bible (The Gospel according to St Matthew, the Seventh Chapter, beginning at the Third verse) : ‘ And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye, and behold, a beam is in thine own eye ?’

 

For the sake of peace and harmony in our trade, and because I am very conscious that all such scriptures invariably refer to the one who cites, as well as to the one cited against,  I shall go no further, but suggest he looks up the foregoing and later verses for himself.

 

As for Mr Thompson, I am happy to forgive him as soon as he offers me any occasion to do so. But if he doesn’t watch out, I shall have to add his name to the ever-growing list of enemies, mostly unsought, for whom I have to pray. Though whether he thinks my Protestant prayers count, I am not sure.

 

Fruitcakes and closet racists? Cameron's talking about YOU!

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

It is now
just a matter of time before the Tory Party dies. This is not a moment too
soon. For far too long this futile and fraudulent body has stolen the votes of
conservative patriots.

For far
too long Tory leaders have secretly despised their own supporters.

When
David Cameron described UKIP voters as ‘fruitcakes and closet racists’, he was
actually giving his true opinion of the men and women who have kept his own
party alive.

Since
then, he has shown by his every action that he loathes what is left of
conservative Britain, and that none of his promises is worth anything.

If there
is ever a monument to him, it should be made of cast-iron, brittle and prone to
rust away, like his broken pledges.

Now that
Tory voters have at last realised that he hates them, they are deserting him.

Some may
come back, in the vain belief that the Tories can win the next General Election
– or indeed, any General Election, ever again. But plenty more are gone for
good.

As I
wrote here three years ago: ‘I beg and plead with you not to fall for the
shimmering, greasy, cynical fraud which is the Cameron project. You will hate
yourself for it in time if you do.’

Of his
various promises, I wrote: ‘These “guarantees” fly from his lips whenever he needs
to please a crowd, but they are less valuable than Greek junk bonds.’

At that
time, shockingly biased and misleading media reporting had suggested falsely
that the Tories might win the 2010 Election. Anyone who read the actual poll
figures knew they hadn’t a hope.

And a
savage campaign of personal denigration had been directed against Gordon Brown,
as a substitute for anything resembling a conservative manifesto.

So there
was some excuse for continuing to vote Tory. Now there is none. Tory stalwarts
have not voted for UKIP because they love Nigel Farage – I think he is a
charming charlatan myself, and his party a rickety jalopy bolted together in a
garden shed. They have voted UKIP to punish the Tories for many years of
betrayal and deceit.

But it
goes much deeper than that. Tory voters were, until now, deeply loyal. They
thought it was part of their creed. They would flock to the colours at the
trumpet’s call, however little they liked it, because it was their duty.

But the
Tory leaders have been disloyal to their rank and file, and that old, deep
magic has finally failed. That is why the Tories are done for. Once loyalty is
gone, it is all too easy to see that the party machine is wretched, decrepit,
exhausted and broke; and to see that the party leadership is dishonest, cynical
and careerist.

I do not
know how many elections it will take, but the chance will soon be here to build
something much better. Let us hope we take it, for if we do not save ourselves,
nobody else will do it for us.

I wouldn't dare to hug lovely Diana

Where
does reasonable feminism stop, and where do mad man-hating wimmin’s rights
begin? The

Still-lovely
Diana Rigg says the frontier runs somewhere between putting your arm round a
woman (Dame Diana seems to think this is just about OK, though dangerous) and
patting her bottom, for which she recommends a slap.

I wouldn’t
dare attempt either without prior written permission. But I’ve never understood
why a sensible equality, in education, property, work and elsewhere, should
stop men giving up their seats or opening doors to women. To me it’s so deep it
feels like an instinct, and it hurts nobody.

Taxes need rescuing from their sad fate

I had
hoped that mine would be the only household in the country to be getting child
benefit, a free bus pass and winter fuel allowance all at the same time.

Alas, we
have had to give up the child benefit, so it will never come to pass. But I am
not at all ashamed of seeking to get every penny I can back from the State.

I regard
taxes as an absolute legal duty, but a cold one. I certainly don’t regard them
as a moral obligation. Most of the money I have given the State (for which they
have never once said ‘thank you’) is spent on things I don’t like.

There are
the bad schools, whose primary purpose is to force compulsory equality down our
throats, with education a very poor second. There are the increasingly
frightening hospitals, whose main job is to employ people.

There are
the motorways I hate, and the European Union I want to leave, and the police
who won’t do the job we pay them for. And there are the subsidies for fatherless
families which condemn so many children to blighted lives.

So if I
can rescue any of my money from these purposes, I am glad. For me, it isn’t a
free bus-ride, or a free prescription, or a winter fuel allowance. It is
unhappy, abused money, rescued from a sad fate and given a good home.

I knew
when I first heard of ‘restorative justice’ that it was a scam of some kind.
Since then, its semi-secret onward march has been rapid and decisive.

As we
discovered last week when it was revealed 34,000 offenders were dealt with
using ‘community resolutions’, it means that quite severe violence now goes
completely unpunished.

What
reformers need to understand is that before we had criminal law, we had
blood-feuds and chaos. A grudging insincere apology or a trivial payment are no
substitute for justice.

Who
really wants to privatise the Royal Mail? Who, after BT, the private water
companies and the private power companies, thinks it will be better as a
result?

It can
only be done because we, the taxpayers, have taken on the Post Office pension
fund. And how can the company be both private and Royal? Dogma once again
overrides common sense.

Given
that the police now seem to be mainly concerned with crimes (or alleged crimes)
committed 40 or more years ago, can we expect, around 2053, a great nationwide
mass arrest of elderly, white-haired muggers, burglars, shoplifters, vandals
and GBH merchants?

I do
wonder just how many of the planned ‘tough’ prison rule changes will actually
happen. I’ve been studying the summary, issued by the ‘Ministry of Justice’,
and parts of it seem a bit vague. I think we should monitor it carefully once
it comes into force, remembering that it was announced in  an election
week.

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

It's Too Late To Say You're Sorry, Mr Slippery

Some things cannot be unsaid. And the dismissal of UKIP voters as ‘fruitcakes’, ‘closet racists’ and ‘clowns’ by several senior Tories is one of them. Because, you see, it is what they really think. For years, the Tory elite were not afraid of their own supporters. They relied upon their pathetic loyalty. They thought they could kick them, ignore them, shove them aside, do anything to them, and they would still carry on raising the money and delivering the votes.

 

I remember, over various lunch and dinner tables, trying to explain to various Conservative heavyweights that they had deserted the British people over education, crime and disorder, mass immigration and national independence.

 

They were contemptuous, bored, and I could see behind their eyes a lofty disdain that I, apparently a member of the elite classes myself, should have anything to do with what they saw as lumpen rubbish.  If they didn’t actually call me a ‘fascist’ as left-wingers tend to do, they weren’t far off thinking it.

 

They just wanted to get back to discussing the latest gossip, the latest faction fight. They were professional politicians. The last thing they wanted to discuss was politics. They were surprised that I, a political journalist, was interested in such stuff. Shouldn’t I be concentrating on gossip, like everyone else?

 

It ws so wonderful to watch it all blow up in ther faces at the weekend, the Kenneth Clarke outburst followed by the visible gulp, and the cold sweat, as they wondered suddenly  ‘what if they actually do take votes from us?’

 

And now Mr Slippery is bleating that he is sorry: “We need to show respect for people who have taken the choice to support this party and we are going to work really hard to win them back.”

 

Surely nobody will believe this. Respect? Fear, more likely.  What he means is “ Blast! We counted on them remaining loyal whatever we did, and now find that we were wrong. They are more intelligent than we gave them credit for, and we have hurt their feelings. But we are not intelligent enough to see that the cat is out of the bag. They know what we’re really like and will never forget it. So we will once again treat them as if they were stupid.  We will pretend, really hard, that we actually like them, at least until the votes are counted at the next general election, after which we will go back to doing what we always did.”

 

Now there are problems here. For me the great paradox is that Nigel Farage  – if he were not in UKIP – would be a perfect embodiment of much I dislike about the Tory Party.  I sometimes wonder how some of the ideas I set out here end up in the UKIP manifesto, given that UKIP’s thinkers (whoever they are) are unlikely to be former members of the Labour Party,  ex-Marxists or former Moscow correspondents , and so couldn’t really have reached the same conclusions that I have done. Of course, the Leader’s musings on the subject of drugs , on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions on Friday 2nd April 2010, are a point of absolute disagreement between me and UKIP. And it’s not just about drugs. It sums up the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals.

 

Let me refresh memories:

 

Here’s what Mr Farage said :’ I have a feeling that prohibition in this whole area simply isn't working. Every year we say that we are going to fight the war on drugs harder than we have fought it the year before. And I think this is one of those areas of life, and, whilst people may find this distasteful, I think we need a proper full Royal Commission on this whole area of drugs to investigate whether perhaps life might be better for millions of people living on council estates that are dominated by the drugs dealers, that are dominated by the crime that surrounds, the money that people raise, to get these drugs, let's find out through a Royal Commission whether perhaps we should decriminalise drugs, whether we should license them, license the users, and sell them at Boots - because frankly if you add up the costs of drugs to society the big problem is the fact that they're criminal and everything that goes with that. And I think there is an argument that says if we decriminalised it we would make the lives of millions of people far better than they are today.’

 

He went on to add, when challenged by the [then] Labour Cabinet minister Peter Hain: ‘The drugs problem, the cost of policing it, the costs of prisons, gets worse every year.’

 

 When Mr Hain said that he (Mr Farage) was talking about a drugs free-for-all, Mr Farage (in my view not very accurately) retorted that he hadn't said that, but that he had called for a Royal Commission to investigate it. It seems clear from his words that he would hope for that Commission to produce a particular outcome.

 

He then returned to his argument, saying: ‘If you examine the percentage of crime, the amount of police time, the amount of court time and the amount of people in prison and you add it all up, drugs are costing this country £50 to £70 billion a year - all because it's a criminal activity. And I would argue that when the ban on Mephedrone comes in, the big winners are the drug dealers.

 

‘The policy's failing. More and more people are taking drugs, the cost goes up every year, we are losing the war on drugs, let's face up to that.’

 

When the programme's chairman, Jonathan Dimbleby then pointed out that some police officers believed decriminalisation would ease the problem, Mr Farage appeared to me to say ‘absolutely’ in approving tones.

 

A discussion about this, and the full context of the matter,  can be found here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/what-did-nigel-farage-say-about-drugs.html

 

 

Some of you may have noticed that a growing number of ‘libertarian’ Thatcherite think tanks take the same line, and it’s my view that this view is a completely logical development of Thatcherite liberalism, which substitutes the market for morality and indeed finds it hard to tell the two apart. Would the Lady have been for decriminalisation? I wouldn't put it past her. I believe she favoured abortion, and we know she was relaxed about divorce.

 

I think UKIP is not a conservative formation, but Thatcherism in exile. Alas, the combat over the corpse of British Toryism is largely a fight between Hayekian economic liberals (who have belatedly become hostile to the EU)  and Macmillanite Third Way social democrats who just love the EU. The battle over the EU gives the conflict some apparent edge. But in fact actual conservatism is hardly represented at all, and has little interest in the outcome. Both offer no challenge to the Gramscian movement (by the way, a recent reader complained that I had linked Gramsci and Roy Jenkins. I hadn’t in fact done so,. Jenkins and Crosland revived social democracy after Attleeism ran out of steam. Gramsci reactivated revolutionary socialism after Soviet Leninism failed. Both currents came together in New Labour, whose ‘Eurocommunist’ current merged with the old Jenkins-Crosland tendency. Note how New Labour has gradually become able to deal with Jenkinsite Social Democrat defectors from the 1980s again (though several of them also ended up in the Tory Party, which tells you something, not least that Mr Cameron really is the Heir to Blair). And note how relations between Blair and Roy Jenkins were warm and cordial.

 

Even so, UKIP (whatwever its origins, nature and direction) is a torpedo which has holed the Tories below the waterline, and should with luck finish them off entirely over the next ten years  when I expect a great realignment of British party politics. Serious conservatives, however, should be careful before committing themselves to anything. 

‘

Goodbye to All That

I promised some thoughts on ‘Goodbye to All That’,  Robert Graves’s memoir of his schooldays and his years during and immediately after the Great War, including his time as a young officer in the trenches. When I was first introduced to this book, aged about 14 and attending a minor public school, it still had a great power to shock. I can’t now recall if I was urged to read it by a teacher or discovered it for myself.

 

Back in the mid-1960s the Great War was generally understood to have been a tragedy, but a lot of people still objected to the Joan Littlewood view  (‘Lions led by Donkeys’ etc) expressed by the play ‘Oh, What a Lovely War’  (which I believe was later copied by something called ‘Blackadder’, which I have never seen) as unpatriotic and irreverent.  My view of the era was hugely influenced by the grandly-bound volumes of ‘Punch’ (a now-defunct humorous magazine) which stood in long rows in a corner of my prep school library. It was a beautiful room, looking out through French windows, northwards over dense woodland across the Tavy valley, a view enlivened by the occasional passage of steam trains on the two lines that ran that way, clanking and puffing, sometimes seeming to race with each other, leaving rival plumes of steam behind them. It was an Edwardian prospect, a good place to lose myself in the Edwardian world. I didn’t then realise that I was also benefiting from that perfect circumstance for thought and contemplation, a North-lit room.

 

There, undisturbed by my unbookish schoolfellows, I could often hide from unpleasant activities or unwanted and fairly pointless chores, of the sort that were always being invented to keep us from being idle.  Nobody ever looked for anyone in there. Of course, I read little of the dense type and gazed mainly at the illustrations, particularly the richly-detailed political caricatures and set pieces of Bernard Partridge which even now (for me) set the standard for political cartoons, an art form I love. They were superbly drawn, far more serious and less frivolous than those of today.

 

As I leafed through them, week by week, it was obvious at that distance that a slow disaster was under way. Partridge’s drawings grew darker and less optimistic as the years went by.  From them I formed my impression of the Kaiser, of Admiral Tirpitz, of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and of Asquith, Churchill and Lloyd George. From them I learned a narrative of the war, and gained an impression of the atmosphere of my country before and after that war, which has never left me. It was full of dark skies and foreboding, things Partridge was very good at portraying.  It was obvious, from the volumes after 1918, that the cartoons (and articles) were dealing with a country wholly transformed.  Uncle Sam, for a start, was much more frequently present. John Bull and Britannia, had begun to look much more careworn.  A revolution of some sort had taken place, and something very important and rather comforting had been lost for good. I couldn’t have put this into words at the time. I knew it was true. I remember passing through Amiens, on the old ‘Golden Arrow’ in 1965 and half-expecting, half-hoping to see the ghosts of dead soldiers by the side of the track.

 

I went on from that school to a larger, more organised establishment where (and this immediately appalled me) it was much harder (though not impossible) to hide from the tedious demands of authority, and its obsession with finding me something to do, in a crowd, when I much preferred to follow my own ends, in my own company.

 

There we were in surroundings consciously designed to imitate the Charterhouse which Graves describes, a type of school which for  many years I accepted as somehow inevitable, but which I now greatly mistrust. I’ve no doubt that some of the big old Public Schools provide an excellent education and give their pupils an independence and self-reliance that is indispensable. But I’ve always found it hard to argue against the view that the English upper classes like boarding schools because they don’t much like their own children.

 

My own poor parents, both of them from backgrounds where such things were a mystery, struggled to do their best for me and my brother without really understanding how the system worked.  Off we went into that world of tuck boxes, school caps, gerunds, prunes, football in the sleet, cross country runs, dormitories, prefects,  gristle, suet and impetigo, a world beautifully summed up in the title of an anthology ‘Whimpering in the Rhododendrons’, and perfectly described in the ‘Molesworth’ books which no social anthropologist, studying England, should neglect.

 

I’ve no doubt it was character-forming. But did anyone really need the sort of character that it formed? And mightn’t there have been a better way of forming the better bits? Too late for me now. I suspected at the time that it was all a terrible mistake, though I always enjoyed the beautiful setting of my prep-school, a handsome Georgian squire’s house amid rooky beechwoods, on a Devon hilltop, and found many ways of enjoying myself.  I also didn’t want to get let out of this strange world, just in case it wasn’t a mistake. It is now both too late and too early to know.

 

Now, here, in my hand was a book by a distinguished man of letters, a poet of high repute, an undoubted success in life and an oracle of poetry, a man who had fought for his country in battle and been badly-wounded doing so, denouncing the public school way of life (even in the mid-1960s still recognisably similar) for its hatred of thought,  its miserable sexual confusion, and its worship of sport. Graves’ unstated but implied conclusion, that intelligent people in such schools ought to learn to box,  very well indeed, seems to me sensible but impracticable.

 

When, in the end, I and the public school system parted company, Robert Graves and ‘Goodbye to All That’  had something to do with it. It was impossible, after reading it, to be sure that what I was experiencing was right, or that it was doing me more good than harm.

 

And then he turned his mind to the War.  I suspect that Graves was genuinely physically brave, though not very conscious of it, in a way that many more people used to be. His description of his own very severe wound is either conscious and deliberate understatement or an example of the old-fashioned Protestant stoicism which we were all once taught to observe, but which has largely disappeared in the modern world.  I suspect it is the latter. He seems genuinely not to have minded going out on near-suicidal missions between the front lines, and, while he muses on the chances of him being reduced by the grind and fear of war to a shaking wreck with soiled trousers, it didn’t happen to him( as it did to many strong and upright men). Though if he had not been so badly wounded, who knows? So-called shell shock was a great destroyer of minds, and there were, in my childhood, many mental hospitals where its worst victims were still said to lie, trembling and staring, never to recover from the horror of the trenches.

 

 

 

Graves, brought up in the Edwardian English upper middle classes, just seems to have assumed that this is what he was supposed to be. The description he gives of warfare is all the better for being so detached. It is plain from what he says that the generals were largely clueless, the quality of troops very variable, the Germans in general very effective fighters, the waste of life appalling, the conditions verging on the unspeakable.  It is also plain that his eventual weariness with the war (like Siegfried Sassoon’s) was not in any way motivated by pacifism or any other sot of left-wing dogma. There’s a wonderful account of a conversation with Bertrand Russell at Garsington, in which he shocks Russell quite badly by explaining the true attitudes of the men serving under him.

 

The whole thing is written with a wonderful, insouciant lightness of touch which makes the dark, heavy truth he tells all the more startling. And then there is the day when, on leave and full of revulsion at the jingoist, sentimental view of the war among civilians,  he goes to Church for the last time, and his scorn for the Church of England military padres (who mostly stayed away from the front), compared with the Roman Catholic priests (who went eagerly forward, to be sure to be in a position to give the last rites). Some of this I remember almost word for word after nearly 50 years, so strong and clear is the writing. Graves was born and brought up in another, wholly different England from the one I live in.  If you think that life has always been more or less the same, and that people are not shaped by moral and religious climates, then this book will disabuse you of that.

 

Oh, and a couple of other things, for those who remember some controversies we have had here. He recalls a French schoolroom, with a fearsome mural depicting the slow decline of a drunkard. It ends with delirium tremens (not a symptom of ‘withdrawal’, as it is now claimed to be,  but of continued drunkenness, as it has always been understood) and death. And there is a scene in Cairo where a woman is found naked and screaming in the public street, and her insanity is explained by the police as being due to the widespread use of cannabis in Egypt at that time (also mentioned by Malcolm Muggeridge in ‘Chronicles of Wasted Time’ ). The disastrous effect of the widespread use of this drug in Egypt led directly to the international treaties making it illegal, which are now being subverted by a powerful and well-funded campaign . Nobody ever learns from history, when self-interest is involved.  

A brief interview with PH, from York

Again, for those interested, a brief (Too brief? Not brief enough? You decide) interview with me , which took place after the York meeting on Tuesday (and no, I don’t know if the meeting was recorded).

The encounter shown here was very brief, as the interviewer only appeared at the latest possible moment, as my hosts were preparing to take me to supper, and I felt it would be rude to them to linger. So it was agreed that I would only talk for a very short time.  Bizarrely,  the interviewer introduced the subject of capital punishment at the end. I thought this was frustrating, not least because the interviewer appeared to know little about my position on the matter; also  it is such a vast subject and there was so little time in which to tackle it (those who watch to the end will hear me complain to him, once the cameras are off, about this. I knew perfectly well that this complaint would be recorded, and am not at all surprised that it has been included in the clip).

 

Here it is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-LfcCAI8sU