Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 277

Some Reflections on Measles and the MMR

I’m asked for my thoughts on the measles outbreak in Swansea.  I’m not sure quite why, as most readers here will know my views on the MMR controversy.

 

Perhaps there’s some intended suggestion that I am in some way responsible for this outbreak, which is also being attributed by some to a long-ago local newspaper campaign against the MMR vaccination. The local newspaper, I should add, says that it covered the controversy fairly, which I have no reason to doubt. I was interested to hear its current editor rather aggressively and righteously questioned on the subject by a BBC presenter the other day.

 

Longstanding readers will know that I was myself mysteriously targeted, some years ago, by a skilful anonymous letter writer who faked a letter from a mother claiming that her child’s terrible illness was my fault. As it turned out, the woman whose identity the fraud had stolen (and whom I eventually traced) confirmed that no such thing had taken place. Nor, of course, had she written the letter sent to me with her signature faked upon it.  The address from which the letter was sent was also a fake, though a very clever and carefully-planned fake which I only uncovered by going to visit it personally, a step the fraud did not think I would take.

 

The elaborate faking of the letter, the invention of a real-seeming address, the use of an actual name, have always seemed to me quite sinister and unpleasant. And it is things like this, rather than the science of the matter, which have continued to make me question the behaviour of those who petulantly insisted that the MMR injection was the only option for worried parents.  I  am still astonished that the supposedly beloved National Health Service, every inch of which is paid for by the public, treats the parents of children in this high-handed way. If it is the people’s service, a national benefit, surely its loyalty is above all to those who use it? Is the state our servant or our master?

If it is our servant, it should sympathise with our fears. Yet, while public money could not, apparently,  be used for single jabs, it could be used to pay generous bonuses to doctors who increased the uptake of MMR, and it could be used for propaganda campaigns telling parents that all was well. Yet the Chief Minister of the government which used tax money for these purposes refused to reveal if his own small child had been given the MMR which his ministers and civil servants were vigorously pressing on everyone else.

 

Another of the authorities’ tactics has been to over-rate the importance of immunisation. They suggest wrongly that the main defence against measles is immunisation, when (see below) history shows that it was general improvements in public health, especially in nutrition, housing and the availability of clean water, which reduced the numbers of measles deaths from thousands to a tiny few, before any vaccine was brought into use. Linked with this is a tendency to exaggerate the dangers of measles. In rare cases, measles can without doubt be very damaging. But in most cases it is not. And the rare measles deaths which take place in the modern era tend to involve patients who are already gravely ill or otherwise vulnerable for separate reasons (such as chemotherapy making immunisation impossible).

 

Given the possibility, also discussed below, that a small minority of patients may react badly to any vaccination, this is an important point in calculating risks.

 

Before quoting my January 2001 article, I should make a historic point. It was written when the dispute over the safety of the MMR was already in full swing and had not been resolved. I doubt very much if it influenced even one person in deciding whether to give their child the MMR or not. It certainly was not intended to do so. Many parents had already declined the MMR and were unconvinced by official assurances of its safety. They may have been mistaken in this view, but their fears were reasonable at the time.

 

An experienced doctor’s public doubts about the vaccine had been considered so significant by medical journalists and news outlets that a controversy had by then continued for three years (though, as I show below, it goes back even further than that).  This is not itself unreasonable. Medical treatments can go wrong. Vaccines can have problems.  Should reporters or media suppress such worries? Surely the default position, in a free society, is to publicise them. What if they had been justified, but suppressed?

 

As a parent  myself,  I sympathised then, and sympathise now with those parents who were worried. It is a very heavy responsibility to authorise an injection, in the fear that it may unpredictably do permanent and irreversible damage. The chance may be very small. The authorities may be saying that it does not exist. But if it is your child, you won’t necessarily be convinced by such words. Any parent will know this. Many non-parents will simply not understand.

 

 

I say now what I said at the time and have always said. If the true aim of the authorities was the maximum possible level of immunity, they should have authorised single jabs on the NHS while the controversy was still continuing. My view is that events show that , if maximum immunity was their true aim, they went about it in a very odd way.  The predictable ( and predicted) effects of what they did were – as we now know – a significant number of children who were never immunised.

 

It seems to me that what they wanted above all was to get their way. The fact that this involved a number of parents refusing the MMR,   could perhaps be blamed not on their inflexibility, but on the wicked media. QED.

 

The current events in Swansea and elsewhere were entirely predictable 12 years ago, and I predicted them.  Exhortation and official reassurance were never going to work. A significant minority of parents would not let their children have the MMR, but would unhesitatingly have given them single jabs. Had this happened, there would now be no Swansea measles outbreak, or it would be much smaller (no injection has a 100% success rate, even when given twice,  as the MMR is).

 

Here I will reproduce the very first thing I recall writing on the subject, and the earliest of my writings about it that I can find in any archive, which was in the Mail on Sunday on 28th January 2001.

 

It was published under the headline ‘ Is it Really Our Duty to risk our children’s lives with this Jab?’, and it followed Anthony Blair’s refusal to say if he planned to let his small son Leo have the injection, at the height of the controversy over its safety.  It read

 

‘Many mothers would die to save their children's lives, and many would kill anyone who threatened their young with danger. But now they are being asked to risk their own offspring for the sake of others. You may be worried about your own child, say the authorities, but your fears are groundless and actually rather selfish. Be responsible. Overcome them.

 

Trust us, for we know better.

 

This is an astonishing piece of State bossiness in an age that has seen a catalogue of mistakes, panics and mysteries in the world of disease and medicine.

 

They told us thalidomide was safe. They said that we would all get AIDS. Official advice on avoiding cot death switched from 'babies must lie on their fronts' to 'babies must lie on their backs' with barely an apology. The wise person responds with deep caution to the words 'Trust me, I'm a doctor', and with even more caution to the words 'Trust us, we're the Government'.

 

The same authorities who refuse even to consider that there might be a risk from the Mumps, Measles and Rubella (MMR) vaccine have embarked on a massacre of cattle, and on slaughter and hygiene regulations which have crippled the entire beef industry, when there is still no actual proof that eating BSE-infected meat leads to CJD.

 

But they demand conclusive proof of danger before they will even entertain doubts about MMR. They shout 'bad science' at Andrew Wakefield, the consultant who has persistently raised questions about MMR. Yet nearly half the health professionals questioned by the British Medical Journal say they have concerns about children being given the second of the two required MMR jabs. Surely they, with their long and careful training and education, can recognise 'bad science' when they see it? And what about Tony Blair, who refuses to say if he will follow his own Government's advice when little Leo comes up for his first MMR any day now? If it's so wonderfully safe, why not give a lead to us all?

 

This weekend the triple vaccine is being urged on every parent of small children through a £3million propaganda campaign, mounted at our expense in breezy defiance of unproved but frightening suggestions that MMR could be behind a sudden increase in childhood autism. Most GPs back the Government line, though this may have something to do with the fact that doctors can increase their annual income by £860 if they achieve a 70 per cent take-up of the jab, and by £2,580 if they can reach 90 per cent.

 

The pressure is strong. If you don't let us immunise your child, says the Government, you could help cause an epidemic of measles. And don't imagine that measles is just a few spots. This is a serious disease which can kill. The Department of Health speaks of the 'devastating brain-destroying impact of measles in young children', known as SSPE, which sometimes accompanies measles.

 

Yet it is the devastating brain-destroying impact of autism which is so worrying for the parent who hovers at the surgery door, wondering whether to submit a cheerful, healthy toddler to MMR.

 

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.

 

But both of these afflictions have become more common since the triple MMR was introduced in 1988, and they have brought unutterable misery to many families. Heartbroken parents speak of how they have 'lost' their children even though they are still alive. Toddlers who were alert, responsive, full of laughter and recognition, suddenly went quiet, and retreated into an unknown world where they are no longer the people they were or might have become.

 

Imagine wondering for the rest of your life whether you were to blame for such a thing happening to your own child.

 

You cannot know, but you will always suspect. Because the decision on whether to inject or not was yours alone, this would be far worse than coping with the random, unpredictable ravages of a disease. It is an awful choice, and those who must take it need not propaganda, but help.

 

Why do they not get help?

 

Why do parents have to take this decision at all? The alleged autism risk is linked entirely to the joint use of the three vaccines in one go. If there is a connection it is possibly because three viruses at once overload the child's small frame. While we find out for certain, why not let worried parents have single vaccines, spread over time?

 

The official answer to this is astonishingly thin. Parents are told that huge studies - especially a recent one in Finland - have shown no link between MMR and autism. But the Finnish study, it turns out, was not really looking for any such link so it is no great surprise that it did not find one.

 

Asked to explain its rigid refusal to leave a loophole for worried mothers and fathers, the Health Department brusquely proclaims: 'The Government recommends the use of MMR because the evidence is that combined MMR is better for children than separate vaccines. There is evidence that separating the vaccines puts children unnecessarily at risk of diseases that have serious complications. Recommendations on MMR vaccines are categorically not based on financial considerations, nor do they aim to deny parental choice. We cannot offer parents the choice of an unsafe and unproved option when a safer and more effective vaccine exists. The Department must make recommendations based on the best scientific evidence and the advice of experts and this is that MMR is the safest way to protect children against these diseases. For this fundamental reason we cannot support the use of single dose vaccines.' Dr Jayne Donegan, a sceptical London GP, says the official position about this is confused and self-defeating. The reason for the current panic is that fears of MMR have led to a severe drop in the take-up, down to levels of 75 per cent, which are not enough to insure against an epidemic. If this is so, she points out, then the urgent task is to get as many children immunised against measles as possible. By making the single measles vaccine available easily in this country, the Government could get levels back up to 90 per cent. Even with a six-month gap between jabs, toddlers could then be immunised against the more distant dangers of rubella and mumps within less than two years.

 

And she asks: 'Why is it safer to give them together?' It is true, she says, that the old Berna-Rubini single mumps vaccine had a poor record. But there is no reason why the new and effective Jerryl Lyn mumps immunisation could not be given on its own. However, you cannot readily get it here except as part of the MMR.

 

The Department's fierce statement that the single-vaccine alternative is 'unsafe and unproved' does not seem to be founded on much, and an unkind person might well suspect that this assertion was 'bad science'.

 

Dr Donegan used to be an enthusiast for vaccinations of all kinds, but experience has turned her into a doubter. She believes that the medical establishment is in the grip of an intolerant orthodoxy that will not listen to questioning voices.

 

'They think that people who question the vaccine are socially irresponsible. If I say anything critical about vaccines it's as if I were saying that God was dead.' Certainly an act of faith is required. The claims of an MMR risk have not been proved, but nor have they been disproved. There is no reason for either side to be certain, and every reason to be cautious, especially if the future of a tiny child is in your hands. Yet the use of emotional strong-arm tactics comes just as much - if not more - from the pro-injection lobby as it does from the antis.

 

Are their scares valid? The MMR enthusiasts make much of recent measles epidemics in Ireland and the Netherlands which involved several thousand children.

 

Dr Donegan says measles is indeed deadly if it attacks badly nourished children living in dirty conditions, or if it affects those who are already seriously ill. She says most health improvements, even the ones credited to vaccination, are really due to the march of civilisation. In an advanced country with clean food and water, fresh fruit and vegetables readily available, and modern, spacious housing, she believes measles is unlikely to be fatal for healthy youngsters.

 

Normal, fit people can suffer severely or even die from measles, but such deaths are rare. The Netherlands recently suffered an epidemic in the country's rural 'Bible Belt', where vaccination of all kinds is frowned upon.

 

There were three deaths among the 3,300 who caught the disease. One two-year-old had underlying heart problems, but the two other victims, a three-year-old and a 17-year-old, died from measles complications.

 

The two measles deaths in Ireland's epidemic last year suggest that Dr Donegan has a point. One of the victims was a 12-month-old baby girl from a very poor family living in grim conditions on a large Dublin housing estate and was, incredibly for a European capital in the year 2000, malnourished. The other was also exceptional and seriously ill before he contracted measles. He was a two-year-old with a severe malformation of the throat which linked his windpipe with his oesophagus and who had to be fed by a tube let into his stomach.

 

The Irish epidemic also revealed another unsettling fact for the 'MMR at all costs' lobby. At least ten per cent of those who developed measles had been given the MMR jab. One in ten is a pretty high failure rate for a treatment that is being pressed on the public as a great social duty.

 

And it is that idea of social duty which really lies at the heart of this argument. The lofty view that 'the health of the people is the highest law' seems to have shoved aside all other thoughts. The authorities, who take more than a third of our income in taxes, are not delivering very much that is good or laudable in return, as the NHS decays into Third World conditions.

 

They are anxious to prove to us that they are still benevolent and good: the abolition and defeat of diseases is one of the few ways they now have of doing so. They have made a calculation which leaves no room for doubt and they think we are obliged to help them. Luckily for us, they cannot - yet - make us vaccinate our young. I bet they wish they could, but in the meantime they are forcing the parents of Britain into a deeply unpleasant and completely needless dilemma which may have the opposite effect to the one they intend. If there is a measles epidemic in this country, the rigid minds of the Health Department will have to share the blame for it. ‘

 

I have deliberately emphasised my original final sentence.

 

I still think that, given the state of knowledge when this was written, this is a reasonable summary of the case. I was the only journalist to track the measles deaths in Dublin and find out the true circumstances from the Irish authorities. This would have been impossible in Britain, where my requests for such information on a measles death was brusquely refused, on the spurious grounds of patient confidentiality. I never sought to identify anyone so that cannot be the reason.

 

 

It is useful to recall that Andrew Wakefield’s original paper in ‘The Lancet’, suggesting that the MMR (introduced in 1988) might have risks, had been published in February 1998, almost three years before I wrote the article. The concerns about the safety of the MMR had already taken hold in the public mind long before I ever uttered a public word about it.

 

 

In fact, they go back further than the famous press conference which began the controversy. Using an electronic library database, I found that fears over the MMR being linked with autism and bowel disease  were raised in newspaper reports in March 1994, January 1996, November 1996, June 1997 and July 1997. In 1992, two of the original MMR vaccines had been withdrawn because of a separate concern over the safety of the mumps component.

 

I am not going to attempt to go into the rights and wrongs of this controversy now.  I can only say that it seemed to me that some legitimate concerns had been raised, and that parents were entitled to be worried. Some personal experiences of mine have made me worry about all claims of total safety for vaccines. Nor is it just personal experience, nor the ghastly experience of Heather Edwards and her son Joshua,  which I have often written about, and which haunts me to this day (Joshua had severe reactions after *both* his MMR injections, suffering both regressive autism and grave bowel problems. No, this doesn’t prove anything. But it is surely worrying). 

 

As I noted in July 2007, ‘ I am hugely grateful to Vivienne Parry, a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which advises the Government on the controversial MMR injection, for finally explaining the true attitude of the authorities: “There's a small risk with all vaccines,” she says. “No one has ever said that any vaccine is completely without side-effects.”

 

“But we have to decide whether the benefits outweigh the risks. If we had measles, it would kill lots of children. If you have a vaccine, it will damage some children, but a very small number.” ‘

 

As I wrote then: ’It's not really true about measles, a rather minor risk to a healthy child in an advanced country. But what a refreshing change this candour is from the woodenheaded assertions by the medical establishment that the MMR jab is proven to be completely safe.’

 

The problem here is that governments may regard the ‘small number’ who are damaged as unimportant. But the individuals who are personally and directly affected see it in a very different way.

 

 

I don’t think I have ever met or communicated directly with Andrew Wakefield, though I have corresponded with many people,  whose children suffered from bowel complaints and regressive autism, who did meet him and who had and continue to have a high opinion of him as a doctor and a man.  I note that many modern accounts of the controversy describe his actions as ‘fraudulent’ or ‘false’ or as a ‘hoax’, suggesting a deliberate attempt to deceive. I don’t personally think this is fair. 

 

Another doctor ( I won’t name her in case it brings extra trouble to her) who dared to sympathise with worried parents, and whom I believe to be a fine and ethical professional, was also dragged before the General Medical Council for daring to give evidence on behalf of such worried parents. I am glad to say that she was cleared, but not until after she had been put through a professional and emotional ordeal which would have crushed many people.

 

One of the things which always made me sympathise with the worried parents was the intolerant fury of the pro-MMR campaign, which to this day exaggerates the dangers of measles.  The prevalence and dangers of this disease (grave among malnourished people without access to clean water) had already fallen precipitately before the first vaccine was introduced in 1968.

 

Annual Measles deaths in in England and Wales ranged between about 9,000 a year and 12,000 a year before the First World War, rose to a peak of nearly 17,000 in the harshest period  of the war (during, and perhaps caused by, the now-forgotten severe food shortages of that period) , fell after the war, at one stage to fewer than 3,000, then rising again to nearly 6,000 before beginning a long, jagged fall to around 100, a level reached in the mid-1950s 13 years before the introduction of any vaccine at all. During the first 60 years of the century, its victims fell from more than 300 deaths per year per million to about two per million.  (Older figures show a far higher death rate in the 1840s – 700 per year per million; and again in the 1880s – 600 per year per million. There is a data gap in the 1890s

 

In the five years immediately before the first vaccine, deaths were as follows : 1962:39; 1963:166; 1964:73; 1965:115; 1966:80; 1967:99; 1968:51.  To give an indication of the range of possible variations in those times, deaths in 1956 were at 30, while the previous year there had been 176 and in 1957 there were 96, and in 1958, 49.  The width of the variation did narrow after 1968, but not vastly.  Nor can we be sure that the vaccine was responsible, or wholly responsible, for the subsequent continuing fall in the number of deaths to zero or very near zero, which has been maintained since then. General standards of housing, nutrition and public health were all continuing to rise in that period, which saw the final removal of some of the worst slums.

 

Deaths in subsequent years fell even lower, falling to 6 in 1979.  This is obviously an advance. But a) it is really quite small compared with the changes wrought by better nutrition, housing conditions and hygiene achieved in the previous 60 years. And b) it is very hard to say whether it is attributable to the vaccine, or to the continuing improvements in public health which had already had so much effect.

 

Let us all hope and pray that there are no deaths or serious illness as a result of the current measles outbreak.

 

As always, the subject is illuminated more by thought and facts than by dogma and emotion, though it is, in my view, kind to respect the fears of others, and foolish to ignore them.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

PH debates the Thatcher Legacy on Radio 3, with Professor Self, Edwina Currie, Dominic Sandbrook - and others.

Readers may be entertained by this discussion of Lady Thatcher’s legacy,  broadcast on BBC Radio Three’s ‘Nightwaves’ programme last night (Thursday 12th April)

For now, it can be listened to here.  

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rr924

 

My first contribution comes 15 minutes into the 45-minute programme ( a tribute to my self-restraint. I hope all those who accuse me of ‘interrupting’ in broadcast discussions, as they have and will, notice this).

 

The presenter is Samira Ahmed. Among the contributors are Edwina Currie, Will Self, Dominic Sandbrook , Selina Todd, Mark Littlewood and Edith Hall. I enjoyed researching Edith Hall and Selina Todd on the World Wide Web.

'Antidepressants' - A Crack in the Ice

Those of us who suspect that ‘antidepressant’ medication may not be all it is claimed to be have a very hard time in public debate. A great polar ice-cap of intolerant certainty faces the explorer in these regions. But it has begun to crack. A very significant fissure appeared on Tuesday evening, when BBC Radio 4 ( see below) broadcast a commendable programme on the subject  

 

I have some suspicions as to why the forces of conformity are so powerful . Partly, of course, it stems from the power of the big drug companies, which make eye-watering amounts of money from what is, in effect, the creation of an entirely new illness, and the ‘treatment’ which , oh-so-coincidentally, deals with it - or, at least, is said to deal with it. Such enormous commercial power, wisely and subtly used, can of course influence media coverage and the academy, though public relations, advertising, research grants, endowments  and similar methods.

 

Then there is the influence of doctors themselves, a group of men and women granted a great deal of respect by laypeople, even quite educated laypeople. Yet doctors are themselves not immune to fashion, conventional wisdom or the blandishments of a large promotion budget, and all the treats and perks which can flow to those who prescribe as desired.

 

And finally there are all those people (many of them very influential in society, the media and the academy) who are gratified to be told that their difficulties with life are not their responsibility, but are the outcome of an implacable disease which has nothing to do with them or their way of life, and also that this disease can be cured.  

 

 

I’d be very interested in tracing the origins of the thing which many people started saying towards the end of the last century, as if they had discovered it for themselves and it was an essential part of human knowledge ‘There is a such a thing as clinical depression – and it can be treated’.

 

Well, listeners to an extraordinary and creditable BBC Radio 4 programme - presented on that station on Tuesday night by my old opponent Professor Will Self – may learn something interesting about the origin of that belief. They will also learn a lot of other very interesting things.  

 

It can be heard here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rr377

 

 

To me, the single best thing about this programme (which has many good things in it)  is that Professor Self wrote and presented it. He is in many ways the opposite of me, a fashionable person whose thoughts are listened to and automatically given generous consideration, by the very people whose minds one must reach if one is to have any influence in our society. I don’t think this should be so, but I still have to recognise that it is so. This is, alas, an argument against me being allowed to present programmes on Radio 4, as I have now implicitly accepted that whatever I say on that station will probably be filtered out by the minds and ears of many of its most valued listeners.

 

It’s awkward, sometimes, following the logic of one’s own arguments. And I’m not sure it would be morally right for anyone else but me to follow the logic of this one. It oughtn’t to be so. And it is possible that, were I allowed to speak directly to the Radio 4 audience on enough occasions, the wild prejudice against the Hated Peter Hitchens might begin to dissipate, and the station would benefit from having another voice, apart from Stephen Fry and Clare Balding, who seem rather to dominate it at the moment.  That’s an argument in favour of letting me present programmes on Radio 4, by the way.

 

But I thought I’d mention it,  when I could easily not have done (and was briefly tempted by the devil of dishonest self-deception which lurks in all of us, to drop this line altogether rather than find myself trapped by my own logic into admitting something unwelcome). It usefully demonstrates the tricky workings of the human mind, and how we are ceaselessly lured towards self-deception and self-censorship 

 

Anyway, in a scrupulously balanced presentation. Professor Self makes it plain that there are significant doubts about ‘antidepressants’, that they are held by intelligent and scientifically informed people; that even the makers of these pills admit that they don’t actually know how they work (if in fact they work at all, which is very much disputed by others).  There is also some very powerful stuff about the connection between SSRI ‘antidepressants’ and the suicidal urge felt by some of those who take them, simply not explicable by the claim that people prescribed such drugs are likely to be suicidal in the first place.

 

Now, once this case is accepted for discussion in BBC circles, it seems to me that the end, though it may yet be very far off, is undoubted.  The science, and the morals, seem to me to be quite overwhelming. The world will come to understand that there is something very wrong going on here.

 

Once again, for those interested, I will provide links to what I regard as the single most powerful statements of the problem, two articles by Dr Marcia Angell, a very distinguished American academic doctor, in the New York Review of Books. These are reviews of important books, and entirely accessible to the intelligent layman. They may be found here:

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/?pagination=false#

 

and here:

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/illusions-of-psychiatry/?pagination=false

 

 

 

 

 

 

Atheism Kills, Persecutes and Destroys. Wicked Things are Done in its Name

I make it a general rule to pay no attention to people who post here with silly, pretentious multi-word pseudonyms, particularly in the wearisome, unwitty but self-congratulatory format of ‘The-person-formerly-known-as’ . 

Who do they think they are? Why should we care what they used to be known as? And I long ago recognised that there is simply no point in trying to debate with Mr ‘Bunker’, as I still think of him.  Whenever I encounter his debating style,  a picture forms in my mind of a mossy, weed-grown, lichen-blotched, dank concrete structure, in some twilit corner of a fallow field, with a lot of voluminous vests, greyish thermal long-johns and track-suit bottoms flapping heavily from an improvised washing line outside, as a thin stream of smoke, perfumed with bacon fat (or perhaps the aroma of supermarket lasagne),  issues from an even-more-improvised chimney.  A three-wheeled motor car stands not far away.  Next to this sad decay, a large peeling sign proclaims, with enormous letters 'Bunkerism. World Headquarters' This is, I should state, my image of the mind of Mr ‘Bunker’, not of the chap himself. No doubt he is a handsome and well-dressed person, living in a normal home.

 

But I felt it necessary to correct the following statement, issued from the Bunker Vatican on Wednesday morning, and posted on the ‘Miliband…’ thread, with that unjustified confidence, and that hectoring tone,  which typifies so many of his pronouncements.

 

Here it is : ‘I find it tedious in the extreme to have to explain for the umpteenth time that no crime has ever been committed "in the name of atheism". By definition. Atheism is the non-existence of a belief, and nothing can be carried out in the name of something that does not exist. You are completely wrong on this point. You say that communism is a fundamentally anti-religious ideology. So what? The reason why atrocities were committed "in the name of communism" (not of atheism) was that the dictators you mention wished to defend and spread their ideology (not atheism). Don't you understand that? ‘

 

Well, yes, I do understand that this is what he says. And it is historically incorrect.  I do not think Mr ‘Bunker’ has made any effort to study the historical record. Given that this is so, he should surely be more modest and cautious in his assertions. But this is precisely why it is so tedious to argue with him. The less he knows, and the less he understands, the more certain he is of his case. And the more totally defeated he is in argument, the more he glows and exults with genuinely-felt triumph, like the Monty Python knight who, reduced by unequal combat to a limbless trunk ( and perhaps even to a trunkless head, I cannot remember), continues to issue bloodcurdling, boastful challenges to his antagonist.

 

As Beatrice and Sidney Webb wrote in their admiring description of the USSR (‘Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation,  1940 edition) : ’It is exactly the explicit denial of the intervention of any God, or indeed of any will other than human will, in the universe, that has attracted  to Soviet Communism the sympathies of many intellectuals and especially of scientists in civilised countries’.

 

They added :’Lenin insisted, as the basis of all his teaching, on a resolute denial of there being any known manifestation of the supernatural. He steadfastly insisted that the universe known to mankind (including mind equally with matter) was the sphere of science….

 

‘…When the Bolsheviks came into power in 1917, they made this defiant and dogmatic atheism the basis of their action’

 

(these passages are from Chapter XI, ‘Science the Salvation of Mankind’) .

 

Then one must examine the practical record of *specific*, deliberate and planned anti-religious acts by the Bolsheviks, which gave material expression to their beliefs on the subject .

 

(The parallel but differing behaviour of the German National Socialists, who, thank Heaven , had only 12 years of power instead of the Bolsheviks’ 73,  is a matter for another posting, but there is no doubt that the Hitler Youth, in particular, were taught scorn for the Church, its teachings and priests, and especially for the fact that Christ was himself a Jew. I will not here reproduce the exact words of a typical Hitler Youth song (recorded by Olivia Manning in her Balkan Triology) which explained that followers of the Fuehrer did not wish to be Christians because Christ was a ‘Jewish swine’. It rhymes in German. Even so, it seems to me that the message is clear. The chapter ‘Converting the soul’ in Richard Evans’s ‘the Third Reich in Power’ is useful in this discussion. As is J.S.Conway’s ‘The Nazi Persecution of the Churches’).

 

Thus, one of the first decrees of the new Bolshevik government (first promulgated on 26th October 1917 old style, and  repeated and reinforced the following January) was Anatoly Lunacharsky’s, as Education Commissar:  All religious teaching was specifically forbidden in all schools. In January 1922, a second decree went much further, banning the teaching of religion to all children, even singly, in church buildings, churches or private homes. Severe punishment ‘with all the rigour of revolutionary law’ , up to and including the death penalty,  was prescribed for those who broke this law.

 

The Soviet state, while encouraging the destruction, desecration, befouling and plundering of hundreds of churches (or the seizure of their buildings for deliberately squalid and degrading secular purposes, such as the use of the lovely Danilovsky monastery in Moscow as a reformatory for juvenile delinquents, a wicked act from which this building triumphantly re-emerged during the Gorbachev years), the public mockery, by state-sponsored groups, of religious ceremonies, processions, feast-days and rituals,  the theft and melting down of their bells and the persecution , imprisonment and state murder of their priests and congregations, also set up large numbers of anti-God museums, and sponsored the publication of atheist materials, including the magazine ‘Bezbozhnik’ (‘The Godless’) .  A  'Union of the Godless’ was also established at an ‘All-Union Congress of Anti-Religious Societies’. It later changed its name to ‘The League of the Militant Godless’.  In a country in which all printing, meetings and speech were tightly controlled, this state-sponsored organisation was free to publish what it liked, and to mount meetings and demonstrations uninterrupted by the authorities. It attained an official membership of millions, unlikely to have been voluntary (this, by the way, is what we call understatement), and had 70,000 branches.

 

By contrast, in the year 1922 alone, 2,691 priests , 1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were murdered by the Bolsheviks, often after having been provoked into defending themselves or their buildings by Bolshevik activists (Source for the figures of deaths is ‘The Black Book of Communism’ ,  Harvard University Press, 1997, Edited by Stephane Courtois) .

 

A distinguished American newspaper correspondent, who lived during this period in Russia,  William Henry Chamberlin, recounted that ‘in Russia the world is witnessing the first effort to destroy completely any belief in supernatural interpretation of life’ (In ‘Russia’s Iron Age’, published 1935) .

 

Chamberlin noted energetic official campaigns against the bringing of Christmas Trees into Russian homes, campaigns to keep children from being influenced by their Christian grandparents, the severe persecution of priests and their children (denied both food rations and access to education, or employment, unless they renounced and denounced their fathers).

 

Mr Bunker might also learn (some hope, alas)  from F.A. Mackenzie’s book ‘The Russian Crucifixion’ (1930) , which details the complex web of rules by which the Christian church was driven out of Russian life by legal persecution, plunder and violence (even Church sewing groups were banned by law).

 

Mackenzie quotes Susan Lawrence, a British *Labour* politician who,  after a visit to Soviet Russia in 1922, noted that ‘the schools are propaganda schools, framed to inculcate a definite ideal, both in politics and religion. Communism is to be taught and religion to be exterminated’ , and the whole programme of the schools is to be directed towards this end’.

 

A fuller version of all the above is to be found in chapters 11,12 and 13 of my book ‘The Rage Against God’ published in Britain by Continuum, and in the USA by Zondervan.

The  exasperating and yet comically unshakeable conviction (held by Mr ‘Bunker’)  that the assertion of atheism is not a positive statement, that it is a mere passive absence, is directly contradicted by the death-dealing,  violently destructive, larcenous and aggressively propagandist application of their own passionate and positive atheism by the Soviet authorities, as soon as they had the power to put their beliefs into action.  If atheism is merely an absence, why on earth should it need to do these things to those who did not share its allegedly passive, non-invasive beliefs? And why, I might add, were both the Bolsheviks and the National Socialists so profoundly hostile to the idea of the Christian God (or, as Mr ‘Bunker’ would sniggeringly put it  ‘gods’ )?

 

Well, because these people, imagining mischief as a law,  have set themselves up as their own source of good, and cannot tolerate any rival to their own beliefs,  in the minds of men. One thing you can say for them : they understood very well what it was they believed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out to the Undiscovered Ends - a few First Thoughts on the Death of Lady Thatcher

RIP Margaret Hilda Thatcher, born in Grantham, Lincolnshire 13th October 1925, died in London 8th April 2013.

 

Don’t worry. This isn’t an attempt at an obituary or a summary of Lady Thatcher’s career. There’ll be plenty of those, and some of them will be very good. So will the biography which that fine writer, Charles Moore, has been working on for so long and which will now soon be published.

 

It’s just a few thoughts on the death of an undoubtedly great human being, whom I was lucky enough to have met and seen in action, so that perhaps one day , if I’m even luckier and our country and people survive so long, , a grandchild of mine, when very old, will say to someone deep in the 22nd century that his or her grandfather had actually shaken hands with Margaret Thatcher. And that someone will feel they have gently touched the edge of history.

 

Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Dedicatory Ode’ has long haunted me, with its tremendous opening line ‘From quiet homes and first beginnings, out to the undiscovered ends…’

 

I am always moved by the distance some people travel, especially in politics, though in other paths as well. Even when they are signing enormous treaties, speaking to multitudes from high platforms, celebrating smashing election victories and directing wars,  there is somewhere in their mind a small and shabby bedroom, a cat curled up by the fire, a third-hand bicycle, a clock ticking, a walk through shabby streets to an unassuming school,  a corner of a sooty garden in which they have managed to grow a few beans or potatoes, a frugal seaside holiday involving quite a lot of rain. There are also the little chores that tie us to normality, washing up, sweeping the stairs, taking out the rubbish.

 

How do these great ones cope with this contrast with what they really are, and what we have elevated them into being? They may have wanted to be great, and striven for it all their lives. But when they finally caught the enormous Atlantic roller of celebrity, and it lifted them unmistakably far above everyone else, were they dismayed to see their own past lives , and everyone in them, suddenly become so small and far away, and irrecoverable?

 

And what about those they left behind? The mighty still have old aunts and uncles living in bungalows, schoolfriends to whom they once told secrets, and closer family who knew them before their lives changed. You hear it often from such families that after so-and-so went off – to a parliamentary selection or some such event – ‘he never came back’. What they mean is that the person who achieves great power, riches or fame is not the same as the person they knew before, and never will be again. Different rules apply. They belong to other people now, and to other institutions,. And, if they’re not careful, when they die they will , like Abraham Lincoln , ‘belong to history’, the cruel words used to persuade Mary Todd Lincoln to stop grieving embarrassingly, as if she were a normal widow at the bedside of a horribly murdered husband, instead of a powerless woman at the deathbed of a secular saint, whose memory was now public property.

 

In Margaret Thatcher’s generation, even more than for mine, 30 years behind her in the decline of England from disciplined Protestant superpower to multicultural secular Babylon,  childhood and early life were necessarily modest, quiet and limited. It was enough of a thrill to see an express train tear through the meadows with its plume of steam and hiss of power, on its way to London, a city you might expect to see three or four times in a lifetime (Lady Thatcher didn’t see London till she was 12 years old) . A school scholarship was a tremendous achievement. A university scholarship glowed like a medal. There was never much money. It didn’t do to lose your temper or offend people. You would meet the same people again and again, and they would not forget. I can just remember, too, the vigorous adult hatred of time-wasting, which meant that if you were even so much as spotted in a moment of repose, a task would instantly be found for you. I look back on this with a mixture of regret, as I know it was good for me, and immense relief that it no longer happens, as I spent so much of my own childhood learning how to avoid being caught in idleness. For Lady Thatcher, I think it remained an ineradicable part of life.

 

One long-ago winter afternoon I broke a railway journey at Grantham (I think I had been to visit Lincoln Cathedral) and walked through the unassuming streets in the biting wind, just to get an impression. Cold, it was, and bleak and workful.  Grantham, of course, possesses one of the loveliest church spires in Europe, and has a surprising amount of handsome brick houses. But it is no metropolis and (as John Campbell’s superb biography says) , the young Margaret Roberts did not grow up in the prosperous or grand parts of the town. Her father’s shop – which Campbell points out was a sub-Post Office, though Mrs Thatcher interestingly never mentioned this in her own reminiscences – was in her childhood days on the edge of a pretty rough area. Like much of the striving middle class, the Roberts family knew exactly what they were escaping by adopting the diligent Protestant deferred gratification which is the foundation of middle class life.  

 

I saw a lot of Lady Thatcher’s speeches, in the House of Commons and at Tory conferences.  I once saw her at some Tory ball, in an astonishing blue gown, a sort of 20th-century Gloriana. The last time I glimpsed her , she was already old and unwell, but had come out selflessly to support an old friend who had published a book.

 

I was lucky enough to travel, crammed into the seats at the very back of her majestic, obsolete and noisy RAF VC-10, on several of her foreign trips, and she was generous with her time on those journeys, sometimes too generous as she loved discussing foreign policy but seldom provided any  news, let alone gossip. You couldn’t help being impressed by her. She always knew what she was talking about.  If she didn’t know a subject, she studied it until she did.  She wasn’t going to be bested, or shown up by anyone. And the legendary single-mindedness shone like a lamp. But the only time I ever felt I *liked* her was on Tuesday 19th April 1983, when, as a very junior political reporter, I was in the House of Commons Press gallery and Denis Healey, then still in his full vigour,  sneered that she planned to ‘cut and run’ by holding an election.

 

Mr Healey, who even now still preserves a Yorkshire accent, and was in those days one of the politicians whose speeches would fill the chamber, and who rather prided himself on his ability to cope with the rough stuff, got the shock of his life ( and so did everyone else) when the supposed Finchley housewife suddenly shook off nearly 50 years of delicacy, pearls and elocution lessons, and spoke in the language of the Lincolnshire back streets:

 

‘ The right hon. Gentleman is afraid of an election, is he? Afraid? Frightened? Frit? Could not take it? Cannot stand it? If I were going to cut and run, I should have gone after the Falklands. Frightened! Right now inflation is lower than it has been for 13 years—a record which the right hon. Gentleman could not begin to touch.’

 

‘Frit!’. We had never heard it before,  especially not from her, but you knew what it meant as soon as it struck the eardrum. It was much more damaging than ‘afraid’ or ‘frightened’ because it came from somewhere much deeper.   It was the sharp, unanswerable Saxon jibe and challenge, pronounced with a sneer, that you couldn’t answer and which everyone listening would know had struck home. It was completely British,  and it was not from the neat world of suburban lawns and afternoon tea, but from the other less gentle world of cracked pavements and grimy brick walls where the only thing to do when in trouble was to stand and fight. And so she did.

 

This was not a handbagging, but a straightforward kick in the shins, as no doubt administered from time to time in the playground of Huntingtower Road County Elementary School. (This was the school where, when the head told the young Margaret she had been lucky to win a poetry recital contest, the self-possessed little girl snapped back ‘I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it’).

 

Out of the same deep toughness came her resilience the night after the IRA tried very hard to murder her, and had succeeded in murdering or gravely hurting several close friends,  another moment which even the meanest of her detractors must surely admit does her credit.

 

That’s why, even though I don’t share the adulation that so many do, and even though I think that Lady Thatcher’s long-term legacy will be smaller than many claim, I’ll always back her against the silly critics who could never see the whole woman, nor give her any credit for anything, or grasp just how extraordinary and exceptional her rise had been, from her quiet home and first beginnings.

 

 

 

 

Eleven Million Visits and Other Thoughts

Eleven Million visits, and other thoughts

 

During Sunday night, this site received its eleven millionth visit, which means a million visits since Christmas. I continue to be grateful to all who come here to read (though less grateful to those who come here to write not to read).

 

I’d like to make a few general comments.  One is, once again, to confirm to doubters that I do in fact post as ClarkeMicah on twitter. I often challenge twitter users who have used this site to be rude about me, and their usual reaction to snort that I must be a fake. This is not so.  There are tedious technical problems involved in posting under my own name on Twitter, and I chose Conan Doyle’s character Micah Clarke as my nom de guerre. Why? Partly because ‘Micah Clarke’ is one of the finest of Conan Doyle’s unjustly neglected historical novels (beginning in his beloved Hampshire, it deals with the Monmouth Rebellion which ended at the Battle of Sedgemoor and the Bloody Assize). Partly because Micah Clarke is someone who learns, after many adventures, that good is done in minute particulars,  and that the General Good is the plea of the scoundrel ( as William Blake put it), and also to distrust both established authority and utopian radicals.

 

A few thoughts  on my problems with the Right Honourable Lord Heseltine, Companion of Honour who (as some of you will recall) accused me a few weeks ago of referring to young soldiers as ‘stupid’.

 

See the details here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/02/michael-heseltine-marlene-dietrich-and-me-life-and-times-of-a-minor-hate-figure.html

When I challenged at the time he stuck to his claim and said, emphatically : ‘You wait till you see the transcript. Well, as those who follow the link above will see, there is now a transcript and it supports my version, not his.  Since then, in private correspondence whose details I will not disclose, I have sought, politely and persistently, to persuade Lord Heseltine to set the record straight. He has declined to do so. I did not take this further when we met before last Friday’s transmission of ‘Any Questions’, as he was accompanied by Lady Heseltine, and I didn’t think it good manners to raise such a subject while she was present.

 

But I did notice that, during the programme, Lord Hesletine sought to get himself out of a debating difficulty by saying that I used to be in what he called the “Socialist Worker Party” . Do you know, it is the third time he has done this? He did it when we were first on the same ‘Question Time’ panel, perhaps four years ago, one evening in Greenwich. And he did it again, during our February clash. Apart from being a strikingly unoriginal line of attack, it is also quite interesting.

 

Lord Heseltine is quite intelligent enough to know that this non-revelation (of a thing I don’t keep secret or deny)  will only have an effect on the less-informed type of Tory loyalist. This is his fan club – a group of people who are not particularly politically conscious, and who have never properly noticed Lord Heseltine’s grown-up (and in my view just as extreme) affiliation with causes such as the Euro and the EU. This was the reason for my riposte to him,  ’And you used to be a conservative’.

 

Actually, like some readers here, I am by no means sure that Lord  Heseltine ever was a conservative. The problem is much more that in his mace-swinging Tarzan days, quite a lot of people, thought he was – and he did little to discourage them in this belief. The Cold War , in which even the soppiest Tory Wet could rally to the flag against the Kremlin menace, he could appear to be a tigerish patriot in face of the Soviet threat,  while simultaneously harbouring desires to hand over our independence to another lot of foreigners,  in Brussels and Frankfurt-am-Main.

 

Anyway, it seemed to me that this behaviour was clear evidence that he intended to do me damage, rather than to argue the issue. That’s quite normal in public debate, and one must expect it, even from experienced, educated and skilled Parliamentarians, immensely more powerful and influential than oneself. Their willingness to be ruthless is what makes them what they are.  In a way, it’s a great compliment when a former Cabinet Minister attacks one in this way. But it must stay within the bounds of truth. And the claim that I called young soldiers stupid is untrue. I am still pondering how to proceed. But I certainly cannot let it rest.

 

Some readers, convinced that my complaints against the BBC are motivated by a ‘thin skin’ and a sense of personal grievance may be interested in this link .

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01rw878/Its_Kevin_Episode_4/

 

I believe this programme is supposed to be funny. Anyway, about a minute into the transmission a picture of me (along with studies of a deceased spider, a broken cup, a dropped ice cream and an injured dog) is displayed in response to the alleged comedian’s plea to be shown something ‘sad’, as he has become too happy.

 

Well, I shall not be complaining. It’s quite flattering to have reached the stage where the Hitchens brand needs no introduction. And it is tedious to point out that the BBC’s licence-financed ‘comedy’ output long ago lost any sense of what it means to be impartial. I think that BBC management will rather more quickly realise that most of this stuff is not funny.

 

I would say more, but have just learned of the death of Lady Thatcher,  may she rest in peace, and must write a few words about that.

 

  

 

 

 

The Enigma of North Korea

Some readers have asked me to give my opinions on the current strange events in North Korea.  Very cautiously, I will respond. I am cautious because my only qualification to speak is a visit to that country nearly six years ago, the research and preparation I did at the time, and the interest I have maintained ever since. 

 

Here is what I wrote at the time on this blog, in the Mail on Sunday...

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486079/PETER-HITCHENS-North-Korea-great-Marxist-bastion-real-life-Truman-show.html

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/memories-of-pyo.html

 

...and in the American Conservative

 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/prisoners-in-camp-kim/

 

 

You will see that I concluded that North Korea is pitiable, hopelessly poor, not very sober and almost derelict, trying to find its way out of a dead end.

 

That dead end, at present, leads only to Chinese domination, a fate which might well suit the rest of the world, but which North Koreans themselves greatly dread. As the Tibetans and the Uighurs know (in Tibet and Chinese Turkestan), Chinese domination means the end of national culture, probably the population of the national territory with Han Chinese until the Koreans become a minority in their own country. This is the form which modern Chinese imperialism takes, and I am always amazed that people who get hoity-toity about the wicked past of British imperialism are so uninterested in this development.

 

China also does not want Korean unification. Mind you, nor does South Korea. They saw what happened in Germany, and they know it would mean ruin. So both of Kim Jong Un’s obvious exits are closed. He doesn’t want to become a Chinese province. And he cannot throw himself on the mercy of Seoul. Japan is also in no state to become North Korea’s saviour, though it is very interested in what happens there in the end. My guess is that Kim hopes, somehow, to drag the USA into a rescue.  What he longs for is a high-level US mission to Pyongyang, perhaps headed by an ex-president, followed by aid and investment and a gradual opening to the outside world.

 

The USA, which insists on seeing this decrepit state as a threat, either does not want to do this or cannot grasp that this is what Kim wants, or both. That’s all very well, but I do hope that American diplomacy is based on not wanting to help, rather than on a genuine belief that this alcohol-sodden, bankrupt, half-starved dump with its midget soldiers and its ancient worn-out weaponry, is a new Third Reich or USSR. It just isn’t.

 

I’ve no doubt that even North Korea’s decrepit military could do quite a lot of damage if it tried,  particularly to Seoul which is alarmingly close to the frontier line.  But it would lose any war it started.

 

And that, of course, raises the other ticklish question. If such a war happened, what would happen to Kim Jong Un (assuming he wasn’t killed in it)?

 

What will happen to him anyway, if he admits the whole thing is hopeless and gives up? As I wrote many years ago, all such despots fear two things. 1. They fear the fate of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, more or less murdered as soon as their own elite realised that their power had slipped away, which happened as soon as they showed any sign of  fear or weakness. 2. They fear the fate of Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein, filmed as they’re swabbed in some prison for DNA, as if it mattered, and then either publicly hanged or crammed into a prison cell in the Hague.

 

Who would choose either of those fates? Nobody who could avoid them. It may well be that, thanks to the large-scale illegal emigration of many North Koreans into China, across the frayed northern border, the truth about the outside world is seeping into North Korea,  and the magical hold of the Kim cult is weakening. For all I know it will crumble in a matter of days, next week or next month. My experience of Eastern Europe and the USSR tells me that such events can happen with extraordinary suddenness, and are often triggered by turmoil such as North Korea is now undergoing.  From what I can gather Pyongyang has been changing quite rapidly since I was there, with major currency reforms and a limited amount of market capitalism. Who knows what this betokens? Given that no foreign visitor sees much more than he is meant to see, and cannot travel freely, many other things could be happening, outside the relatively prosperous zone of Pyongyang, of which we know nothing.

 

I have often said that the world’s various despots would be much more easily removable if we would drop all this International Court rigmarole and let them climb on to a plane with their money, and vanish into quiet exile somewhere. I still think this. On the other hand, I don’t blame the USA for being reluctant to become a Sugar Daddy to Kim, with no certainty that American aid will lead to his departure, and the grave risk that the collapse of the old order will bring such chaos in the whole of North Korea that nobody will be able to cope, and millions of half-starved refugees clamber across the rusted defences of the DMZ to get to the South.  

 

It’s not easy. But I don’t think we make it any easier by accepting the idea that North Korea is a new USSR, or even an Asian Iran (not that Iran is a Middle Eastern north Korea, either) . As far as I can see, the thing Kim really cares about is the special hard-currency bank accounts, some now said to be located in Shanghai, which presumably enable him to purchase his lobsters , cognac and DVDs, pay off the rest of the power-elite with their share of luxury,  and keep his various palaces warm, and comfortable.  The last major North Korean nuclear crisis came after an earlier version of these bank accounts (then in Macau) was discovered and frozen by a US Treasury Department operation.

 

Would a high-level US mission to Pyongyang, armed with the power to give Kim safe exile,  succeed in ending this ludicrous, doomed regime and bringing North Korea back into the world? I don’t know. But it might work better than the current arrangements, which could accidentally result in an actual war, or at least deaths. I feel most of all for the actual people of North Korea,  who do not in any way deserve what is happening to them.

 

 

 

 

 

Miliband shoots at a footballing fascist - and scores an own goal

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

I should have thought fascism had a lot in common with football. Both like huge mass  rallies in ugly, grandiose buildings, in which the enraptured mob chants gormless, unpleasant slogans and sings unpleasant songs.

Both have personality cults. Both involve the worship of strutting, violent, dishonest and selfish people. Both are almost wholly masculine in a boozy, sweaty, muscle-bound way that sometimes makes me wonder if Germaine Greer doesn’t have a point about men.

The enthusiasts of both are, among other things, very  boring conversationalists, if you don’t happen to share their passion.

Both demand the adulation of youth and strength, and both require a great deal of very bad acting, shouting, posturing, eye-rolling and fake injuries or at least fake grievances. Both are based on an angry intolerance of rivals and both spill rapidly into serious violence, given half a chance.

So the only surprise about the revelation that Paolo Di Canio once said he was a fascist is the honesty involved. Mind you, why did it take so long for it to come out? Wasn’t poor old Swindon important enough for anyone to care that its football team was run by a man who liked giving straight-arm salutes?

But here comes the really funny bit: the resignation of the supposed political giant David Miliband from his posts at Sunderland Football Club, because he couldn’t bear to be linked with this totalitarian monster.

Now, I know from personal experience that the supposedly brilliant Mr Miliband isn’t that clued up about life (he survived some years as Foreign Secretary without even knowing that this country had conferred a knighthood on Robert Mugabe). But there’s something else here that needs to be remembered. In October 2012, a man called Eric Hobsbawm died. Professor Hobsbawm was at least as fine a historian as Mr Di Canio is a footballer.

But, alas, he was a lifelong supporter of communism, an unapologetic defender of the Soviet Union in the days of purges, mass murder and the slave camps of the Gulag. I’ve no doubt he gave the occasional clenched fist salute in his time, but I’ve seen no pictures.

Soon after his death, the other Miliband issued a statement saying that Hobsbawm was ‘a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family’. So did the young David Miliband stalk righteously from the room when this grisly old Stalinist apologist came round for comradely tea and buns, as I believe he did quite often?

Of course not. Mr Miliband only objects to one sort of violent, murderous political creed. The other sort is fine by him. The British Left-wing elite has hopeless double standards about dictators, and for some reason always gets away with it.

What do you think would happen if the Nazi Horst Wessel Song were sung at the funeral of a Tory politician? Yet the Internationale, the anthem of world communism, was sung at the Edinburgh funeral of Labour’s Robin Cook in 2005, and nobody fussed. It was played at the memorial service of Tony Benn’s wife Caroline in 2001 (and one very senior Labour apparatchik was heard to sigh: ‘Great to hear language we aren’t allowed to use any longer’).

The same suspect song was played at the Glasgow obsequies of another Labour Minister, Donald Dewar, in 2000, and the congregation joined in. They knew the words.

The excuse was offered: ‘It’s a grand tune, whatever you think of the politics.’ The Hitlerite Horst Wessel Song also has a fine tune, but I doubt the Edinburgh or Glasgow mourners would have stood by and let it be sung.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who is prepared to apologise for either fascism or communism should be a pariah, in football, politics or anywhere else. But you cannot scorn the one and be soft on the other.
 
Fancy that. Research shows that going soft on cannabis means more people take dangerous drugs.

Next, they’ll find out that printing money leads to inflation, and that cheap booze sold without limit means more drunkenness.
 
The BBC's vile Village betrays our history

Revolutionaries always defame the past to try to make us content with the horrible present. But I have seldom seen such tripe as the BBC’s The Village.

Teachers are savage disciplinarians. Husbands beat wives. The upper classes are snobbish and bigoted. The only likeable characters are Stoke Newington liberals from the 21st Century, presumably transported into 1914 by Doctor Who.

And the basics are wrong. The band plays Jerusalem – written in 1916. A banner reads ‘God Bless Our Troops’ – a US slogan I doubt you’d hear in Derbyshire then.

Cardboard justice created Mick Philpott

The Devil, as I was brought up to believe, finds work for idle hands. And there is no doubt that many people are corrupted in dozens of ways by the paid idleness offered to them by both major political parties.

The more I think of the way in which our great industries were destroyed, leaving millions of men with no proper work to do, the angrier I get.

But in the case of Mick Philpott, I think it is our cardboard criminal justice system that is at fault, not the welfare state. It is only thanks to the skill of doctors that Kim Hill, his first victim, survived.

Philpott stabbed her 27 times and ripped out a phone to stop anyone calling for help. I think attacks of this kind, which would certainly have led to the victim’s death 50 years ago, should be classed as murder and punished by hanging. The intent is clearly murderous. Why should the would-be killer be spared because good people have saved his victim?

But in any case the law should have responded to this foul act with more than a ‘seven-year’ sentence, an official lie told with the deliberate intention of fooling the public. In fact, he served only three years and two months.

And he did so in conditions that he no doubt found it easy to cope with – no hard labour, no discomfort, no austerity, no discipline, in short nothing that he would have feared undergoing again.

Philpott knows all about fear. As the judge noted, he liked to use his attempted murder conviction to scare his fellow creatures into doing his nasty will. But he never experienced fear himself. Two years ago, police were called when Philpott dragged his wife out of the house by her hair, after striking her. The police response to this action, committed by a known and convicted savage, was a ‘caution’ (they issue these for rape, too).

This was far worse than useless. It must have encouraged him in his justified belief that the authorities, too, were scared of him. How his neighbours must have trembled when they found out he had been let off. At the time of his final filthy offence, he was on bail after another violent attack.

I can only say it once again. If people such as Philpott are not afraid of the law – and they aren’t – then the rest of us will have to be afraid of them.

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

BBC Radio 4 'Any Questions' 1.10 pm Saturday 6th April

Readers may be interested to know that I am on the panel for this discussion programme  - the radio original on which BBC TV's 'Question Time' is based. It was recorded in (and transmitted live from) the Oxfordshire town of Abingdon on Friday evening.

 

You can also listen to the programme by going here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qgvj

 

Subjects under discussion include the Philpott case, bankers, the class system, Trident replacement and hate crime.

On the panel (almost identical to my last appearance on QT), The Right Honourable Lord Heseltine, Companion of Honour, Diane Abbott and the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb.

 

Watch out for the bit (33 minutes in) where I clash with the Right Honourable Lord Helseltine, Companion of Honour,  over Trident replacement. He says 'You used to be in the Socialist Workers Party'. I say 'You used to eb a conservative'. Amongst other things.

 

 

How to Get Jet Lag Without Going Anywhere

The first morning after the clocks go forward I usually manage reasonably well.  It’s a Sunday, and I have to bicycle six miles to church by what would have been 8.30 a.m. yesterday (and what my body, quite reasonably, still thinks is 8.30). But I’ve deliberately gone to bed early the night before, and I’m not actually getting up any earlier than I normally do. Most weekday mornings I’m at the railway station (about three miles by bicycle)  by 7.45, so it’s manageable. I just have less time to get up, read the papers and eat breakfast than I would on a normal Sunday.

 

It’s when the working week begins that the trouble starts. At this time of year, I suddenly have to get up in the dark again, something I thought I’d left behind at the end of January. It was bearable then. Midwinter has the compensation of Christmas and its afterglow. But it is like sliding down a great snake on the snakes-and-ladders board,  to be reintroduced to pre-dawn darkness, after several rather uplifting weeks when the mornings have been growing steadily brighter.

 

I have to set an alarm clock, which I don’t normally need to do. And I have to be at the station at what still feels like 6.45 a.m. because it is, in reality, 6.45 a.m. Yes, I know that the evenings are suddenly lighter later. But so what? They had already been growing slowly lighter, in a rather pleasing way, and I could easily have waited another few weeks for it to be light at seven p.m., in return for it continuing to be light at six in the morning. One person’s ‘lighter later’ is another person’s ‘darker later’. (in the case of early risers, one person's 'lighter later' is the same person's 'darker later', as early risers experience both).  And in any argument about which should prevail, objective truth would seem to me to be a good guide.  Time is not abstract. It’s based on the position of the Sun, relative to the surface of the Earth, and dependent on the longitude at which you find yourself. Noon, in England, is a real, objectively measurable physical relationship between England and the Sun. Likewise, Noon in Berlin, Moscow or Peking is an objectively measurable thing, and happens at a different time in each of them.

 

Any sundial (and my home city has many of them still) will insist on telling the truth about this. But for the next six months, all the clocks in the European Union will lie, to some extent, about this relationship. In England, Noon will be called 1.00 p.m. and eleven o' clock will be called. In France and Spain (and formerly Portugal, which in my original post I wrongly said was included inthis folly but which - as  know perfectly well but had forgotten - escaped from it after popular protests) forced to observe Berlin time though closer to the Greenwich Meridian,  Noon will be called 2.00 p.m. , and ten o' clock will be called noon. Yes, I know that there are minor variations already. Christ Church Cathedral still enjoyably keeps Oxford time, three minutes behind Greenwich. But a whole hour is a different matter.

 

In the debate we had here about the attempt to put Britain on Berlin Time (and how soon will that campaign be back, I wonder?) I had immense difficulty in getting my critics to grasp the following simple points.  Berlin Time was a real thing, justly called Berlin Time because it was based on the relation between the Sun and Berlin, that it is different from Greenwich Time, and that if we switched to it,  it would have radical effects on our lives. And the clocks would have lied all the time, not just half the year. What’s more, they would have lied even more grossly in summer, with nightfall in late June postponed till what is actually almost midnight.

 

Now, I’ve been as jet-lagged as most people, and I hate it. It knocks me sideways.  I specially hate travelling Eastwards because the clocks move forwards. It’s all very well doing this on holiday, when you don’t usually need to start your day early. But even on my recent visit to Chartres, the pitch blackness of the morning at breakfast time was noticeable. It was even more noticeable because my old long-wave radio could just pick up the Radio 4 Today programme, broadcast on the same longitude, but not operating on Berlin time. All the time checks were disconcertingly wrong.

 

But when I have travelled to China on assignment, the jarring effect has been huge, and I’ve usually been more or less prostrate with nausea for several hours after arriving. Stranger yet was my visit to old Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan, in the far west of Peking’s Empire, where they are forced to observe Peking time and it is dark until almost 10 a.m. in midwinter.  

 

In two years of living in Moscow, and another two years of living in Washington DC, I never fully accustomed myself to the local time (perhaps this was because I spent so much time on the phone to London offices, and had to be constantly aware of London deadlines, so was internally operating on two zones at once. All I know is that the human body is very sensitive to time.

 

And I still cannot understand the acquiescence of so many people to the absurdity of ‘Daylight Saving’ which saves no daylight, which favours the slug-abed late sleeper (who couldn’t care less if it is dark at six a.m.)  against the early riser (who cares a lot). What is it actually for? What measurable good does it do? Mostly, we seem to do it (pain in the neck though it is, twice  a year) because we always have done it. Claims of energy saving are thin and disputed.  It’s just another way for governments to boss us around and move our landmarks, introduced on the pretext of war production and never abandoned. 

 

After a week or two, I shall stop feeling quite so jaded and adjust to the new time. The mornings will gradually grow as light as they were before the clocks went forward. But I shall still long for the day in October when we go back to the true time.