Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 280

The Hated Peter Hitchens versus Professor Will Self - a debate on gun control

On Wednesday evening ( 7.00 pm London time)  I expect to take part in a  debate on the subject of legal gun control, and so of the USA’s Second Amendment, protecting the right to bear arms from such control.  The topic for debate (which I , the Hated Peter Hitchens, shall be opposing and Professor William Self proposing) will  be ‘The Right to Bear Arms is a Freedom too Far’ . I believe it will  be streamed on the Internet. Tickets for seats in the small London auditorium long ago sold out. The encounter is sponsored by Intelligence Squared, who have organised many excellent debates on important subjects, and by Google, who also staged the debate on drugs in which I had one of my more amusing clashes with the Rt Hon and Most Rev Russell Brand, probable next leader of the  Conservative Party and establishment spokesman on the drugs issue.

 

Basic details can be found here.

 

http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/versus-right-to-bear-arms/

 

 

I particularly draw readers’ attention to the quotation from Thomas Jefferson ‘Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.. they make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants.’

 

 In my annoying way, I checked the origin of this and apparently these are not Jefferson’s own words, but were first written by Cesare Beccaria (a liberal Italian jurist of the 18th century, and an early opponent of the death penalty) and were included in Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book.

 

A fuller extract reads : ‘Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.’

 

 Given Jefferson’s role in creating and enshrining the US Bill of Rights, which includes the Right to Bear Arms, I think we can assume that he broadly agreed, though James Madison was probably more involved. Amusingly, another person of Italian origin, Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano, an American Mafia turncoat, made the same point more pithily two centuries later. Mr Gravano told ‘Vanity Fair’ in 1999: 'Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always going to have a gun.’

 

It’s ten years since I wrote this account of my position, based on the relevant chapter ‘Out of the Barrel of a Gun’,  in my widely unreviewed book, unavailable in all leading bookstores,  ‘A Brief History of Crime’ .

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-173487/Why-I-demand-right-carry-gun.html#ixzz2ONWCAgfI

 

Since then, the alarming incidence of gun massacres has changed the debate by raising the (unanswered) question ‘ If guns are the principal cause of these massacres, why are there more of them when, if anything, guns are more restricted in the USA than they were before, they happen not only in the USA but  in gun-controlled countries such as Britain, Germany and Finland, and they were almost wholly unknown anywhere until the modern era, which just happens to be the era in which the use of illegal drugs and the prescription of legal psychotropic drugs, became common?’

 

The question also has to be asked about why, given the widespread availability of guns in Switzerland, the number of massacres there (though they are no longer unknown) is absolutely and proportionately rather low.

 

I have dealt with an important aspect of these massacres here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/index.html

 

and here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/12/stop-and-think-and-you-will-realise-that-banning-guns-is-a-waste-of-time.html

 

and (this contains an interesting new note about one of the Columbine killers) here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/usa/page/2/

 

I believe it is intended to be a fairly brief and concentrated debate.

 

  

 

Fight for freedom? 'Duvet Dave' would rather be in bed

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

So who really won the Cold War? In the past week this great and famous home of liberty has set off down the road to a state-controlled press. And in supposedly free Europe, the authorities (the same ones who endlessly seek more power over us) have sought to steal money from supposedly free citizens.
We all know the old saying that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. The world in which we live may call itself free, but if unfettered speech and thought are endangered, and private property is not safe, then our liberty is a lie.
It is quite funny to listen to British politicians and pundits sneering (as they do) about arrangements in modern Russia. They should attend to our own troubles before lecturing Vladimir Putin on his.
We have gone so far down this dismal slope that I have more or less given up hope that anyone will do anything about it. All that is left for me to do is to point out what is going on.
It is all yet more proof of the fact that you can never trust politicians. Left to themselves, they choke freedom as bindweed chokes a garden.
But I think the chief shame has to lie with Mr Slippery, our Prime Minister, living up to the name which I long ago bestowed upon him.
Mr Slippery set up the original Leveson Inquiry in a short-sighted attempt to look good. By the time he realised he had created a great clanking, devouring monster, it was too late to stop.
So he pretended that he would prevent the Leveson report from turning into state regulation of the press. Then he realised that he couldn’t, so he disguised his defeat as a decisive act of strength. That was when he abruptly halted the talks in which he was being wrestled to the ground by the press-hating lobby of spiteful, short-sighted leftists and vengeful celebrities.
Finally, he was responsible for what will come to be seen as one of the stupidest and most shameful moments in British political history.
 With freedom of the press – and in the end the freedom of the country – at stake, neither Mr Cameron nor his meaningless cypher of a ‘Culture’ Secretary, Maria Miller, could be bothered to attend the decisive meeting. That meeting was held on enemy territory, the Labour leader’s office. It was attended by the anti-freedom campaign ‘Hacked Off’. Yet it was closed to any spokesman for the free press.
The only representative of the ‘Conservative’ Party was the giggling Leftist intellectual Oliver Letwin, famously so  gullible that he once let a  burglar into his house in the middle of the night. As Mr Letwin doesn’t much care for press freedom, and was armed only with some warm pizza, he was of little use.
 If we still had history books, this incident ought to go down alongside King Alfred burning the cakes and King John losing the Crown Jewels in The Wash. We could call it ‘The Ministers who went to bed rather than fight for freedom’.
Even now, in a corner of every newspaper office in the country, a faint shadow is growing and gathering. In time, it will thicken, darken and resolve itself into the chilly, relentless figure of the censor. And David Cameron, who has achieved nothing else of note in his life, will be remembered mainly as the man who brought censorship back to Britain.

Oh brother, what an odd way to show you support the Church
I have always loathed the compulsory mateyness of Red Nose Day. Charity should be done in secret, not used to polish the images of showbiz figures and the grotesquely ill-managed BBC.
It also suffers from the default Leftism of modern ‘comedy’.
The quickest way to a laugh is to use the  F-word, and many alleged jokes trade on the fact that some people still hate swearing, love their country and – horrors – believe in God. Insult them, and the mob will cackle.
No need to make an effort or be truly witty. At any time of day, a real funny man would have refused to perform the embarrassingly bad lines, full of coarseness and crudity, mouthed by Rowan Atkinson on ‘Comic Relief’, which might as well be renamed ‘Vomit Release’ if this is the best it can do.
He would have done so not on the grounds of decency, but because he was ashamed to be associated with such poor, weak stuff. Whose idea was it to mock Christianity? Mr Atkinson’s brother Rodney has revealed that the alleged comedian has supported the church in private life. So why attack it in front of a crowd?
Even ten years ago, these events would have caused an enormous row, not the mild media tremor they actually brought about. We have been shocked so much that we are numb. What worries me is this: if this could happen in 2013, what will be considered normal in 2023?
The distinctive smell of lunacy
Since the police have taken the law into their own hands and decriminalised cannabis possession, why do they bother handing out laughable ‘scratch and sniff’ cards so that people can nose out cannabis farms in the house next door?
Cannabis farming is one of our few successful growth industries, flourishing without any EU subsidies. Since everyone (except me) thinks it’s perfectly all right to smoke it, even though it can make you go permanently mad, and since its principal ingredient is now available through the NHS, what is the logic in stamping it out?
One thing or the other.
But not both.

Next Sunday, the 31st, we once again go through the pointless ritual of shoving all our clocks and electronic devices forward an hour. Millions of people, compelled to get up 60 minutes earlier, will be forced to suffer jet-lag without even going anywhere. I’ve never seen a decent reason for this performance, which doesn’t increase the amount of daylight by one second.

For Christians, next Sunday is Easter, the most important church service of the year, and it’s a real nuisance to be robbed of an hour that morning. Until 1997, the law recognised this, and the clocks never went forward on Easter Day. Since then, the Godless European Union has compelled us to move our clocks about when Brussels says, Easter or no. Just another little sign of our loss of independence.

This week, as it was revealed that our gas supplies are only a few days from exhaustion, we started shutting down several perfectly good coal-fired power stations (Didcot ‘A’ near Oxford was among the first to go).

This unhinged decision is a self-inflicted wound, imposed on us by our futile pursuit of a ‘low-carbon’ economy. By the time we’ve crippled our electricity generation, and are suffering power cuts, China will no doubt have built another 20 coal-fired stations. Who benefits from this dogma-driven behaviour?

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Inflation - the Gods of the Copybook Headings Speak

It looks to me as if the government has now decided to inflate its way out of the crisis. The new Governor of the ‘independent’ Bank of England has been given the nod that he may carry on with more ‘quantitative easing’, and the Budget seems to be offering help with mortgages to people who can’t really afford mortgages, which will create a new bubble of unrepayable borrowed money, possibly in return for a short-term boost to the economy. Everyone knows this is a bad idea, after what happened in the USA when they lent mortgages to people who couldn’t repay them. It is not even a kindness.  Why do they do it?

 

It’s all pretty desperate, as one might expect from a  government which never had any ideas in the first place.  As far as I can find out , Vladimir Ilyich Lenin didn’t actually say ‘The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency’. Maynard Keynes rather hesitantly attributed it to the old monster. But it’s true,  whoever said it. Since Gold-backed currencies gave way to paper, man has had to have faith in banknotes – so much faith that perhaps he hasn’t had the strength to have faith at the same time in God, who is considerably more credible than the average Cabinet or Central Bank.

 

He has to believe absolutely that the pretty blue, green or pink beer-token in his wallet is worth the goods which he purchases with it, and so does the shopkeeper who accepts it in return for those goods. He has to believe with all his heart that the columns of figures in his bank account stand for real value, along with the price he thinks he can get for his house if he sells it.

 

Once he ceases to do so, then money dies.

 

And then, nothing important stands between society and a catastrophe, which can easily end with respectable persons begging on the streets or prostituting themselves, for the price of a meal or a few sticks of firewood. Sophisticated, civilised Berlin became a modern Babylon of corruption and humiliation during the era of hyper-inflation, as did poor Vienna, whose similar humiliation in the same period is less well-known (though bitterly described by Stefan Zweig in ‘the World of Yesterday’).  Both cities would go through a second period of special misery, after World War Two. Many of you will have seen that marvellous film ‘The Third Man’ , set in post-war Vienna. I never really understood it until I had lived in Moscow at the end of the Soviet era, and had actually seen decent people, much like myself but with the ill-luck to have been born Soviet citizens,  standing by the roadside, desperately hawking their own personal possessions to stay warm and fed.  The government had ravaged their life savings overnight, as governments like to do. Their jobs had gone, Their homes were threatened. The promises of the state, of sufficiency in food and shelter, of medical care and security in old age, were so much paper.  In those days I thought I lived in a country of propriety and integrity, above all that kind of stuff. More fool me.

 

Now, whenever I see the opening scenes of ‘The Third Man’, I feel a chill pang of memory and a sort of guilt. There was no discernible justice in the fact that they were destitute and I was not.  There is no reason to assume that there is some special reason for me to be immune from this curse, the invariable result of irresponsible and stupid government.  In fact, as I live in a more or less free society, have a powerful platform from which to protest,  and yet have wholly  failed to prevent myself from being governed by irresponsible, dishonest morons, perhaps justice requires that I shall undergo it too, before I die.

 

I have seen this, I think. It can happen. People survive it, in a way, though not as the people they were before.  Will I live to see it again here? I don’t rule it out.

 

There are many causes of inflation, but the main one is government. Governments start wars, and spend money they have not got. If they win, they may get away with this by plundering their defeated opponents. If they lose, then the bill will be presented. I was told by an economist friend back in the late 1970s that much of the inflation which we were then experiencing was the bottled-up result of the USA’s vast spending on the Vietnam war. But our own government’s insistence on spending more than it had, stoked up by the ‘Conservative’ Harold Macmillan in the early 1960s (and protested against ineffectually by Peter Thorneycroft and Enoch Powell) had a lot to do with it too. So, I suspect, did the higher food prices caused by our entry to the Common Market . I am a bit suspicious (suspicious? I loathe it)  of the great overpraised project to sell off all the most desirable council houses, very cheap, which must have shoved billions into the housing market in a matter of a few years, and of course stimulated more borrowing on the security of those houses.  Then of course there’s the Iraq war, the vast price of which is seldom mentioned as a cause of our present mess, but must play a part in it.

 

That period, for people of my generation, was as close as we had come to the terrors of Weimar Germany. For me it wasn’t particularly hard. I had no appreciable savings and wages so low that I actually benefited from inflation ( there were automatic set cash rises for every extra point on the Retail Price Index, and my pay was so low that the cash I received was worth more than what I had lost through inflation) . For my parents, who had sold the family home and invested the money (reasonably wisely, but not in property) in 1963, because my father’s job had a tied house to go with it, it was a disaster. I remember being entrusted with the cheque for that house, a semi in the pleasanter suburbs of Portsmouth, which sold in 1963 for £4,500, and taking it to the bank, thinking what a vast sum of money £4,500 was. The money itself was my father’s retirement gratuity after 30-odd years in the Navy, which by the time he died in 1987 was a mere remnant. I am told he may now qualify for a posthumous Arctic Star, for his time on the Murmansk Convoys. I can hear him laughing as I write these words.

 

By 1973 an equivalent house would have cost more than double, and was  in any case completely out of reach if they wanted to try to put right their mistake. Nowadays it would probably go for £350,000. Food,  newspapers, electricity, petrol, hardware, clothes all shot upwards in price in great leaps. I do feel a fond sense of loss as I look at my old 1960s and 1970s Penguin books, marked at three shillings and sixpence ( 17 and a half pee).  The recent change in the currency seemed to help this happen faster, as the basic unit, the new penny, was more than twice as big as the old penny. They got it under control in the end, browbeating the unions (or rather, the less powerful unions) into understanding that their members were simply going to have to endure a lower standard of living, and wouldn’t ever catch up with inflation. Quite how they managed to persuade us all that inflation had been *caused* by the unions, I can’t now quite work out. They certainly kept ti going, but they can hardly be blamed for it. Take a look at the fine but dated film ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ featuring Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch, to get a good idea of the national atmosphere of perpetual crisis that was common in those days. When I see it now I am filled with wonder that nobody cares about the balance of payments any more. I suppose that is because there is no conceivable possibility that we shall ever het it straight again, whereas it seemed just possible then.

 

You’ll have to apply elsewhere for an explanation of the Thatcher miracle under which the country suddenly seemed to be flooded with money. As far as I can see now, it was floated on credit, and worked because credit stimulated a new consumer and service economy which seemed to function on the basis that we all sold each other mobile phones, hairdos and cappuccinos, the entire livelong day, while borrowing heavily on the value of our mortgaged houses to pay for it all. It is amazing to remember how hard it used to be to borrow money for a mortgage, let alone how you used to have to have any money you took abroad marked on your passport, to make sure you didn’t take too much.

 

Meanwhile, the Private Finance Initiative appeared to give the state the same facility, to borrow hugely without actually ever admitting it was in debt. Looking back at the period 1979-2008, I can’t for the life of me get party political about who to blame. It seems to me to have been a riot of general irresponsibility, in which everyone hoped for the best and imagined (as they keep doing) that the Gods of the Copybook Headings had been abolished. Manufacturing industry? Who needs it? Protect our own industries? A dreadful mistake.  Ensure that men have productive work to go to? Why bother? Outdated. Do your best to be able to feed yourself? Not necessary in a global world.  We'll see about that.

 

The chief of these ugly old creatures (the Gods of the Copybook Headings) goes by the title of ‘If you don’t work, you die’. You can postpone him or divert him ( by ‘robbing collective Peter to pay for collective Paul’) , but you can’t abolish him. As Mr Kipling remarks, this ends with a familiar problem  ‘But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those Clever Young Men at Cambridge Get it Wrong

In a recent account of a Cambridge Union debate, I expressed some pleasure at the odd result of the vote . I wrote that, faced with a difficult choice between Tory attackers of New Labour, and New Labour's own defence of itself, the largest group of undergraduates sensibly chose to abstain.

 

Alas, the result was (apparently) announced wrongly by an official of the Union society. I now have the correct figures, and they are not as interesting or as encouraging as I thought. In response to the motion 'This House believes that New Labour ruined Britain', the votes were as follows.  :

Ayes - 64, Noes - 186, Abstention - 136

 

It certainly confirms my view that very few are prepared to vote for a proposition supported by the Tory Party, however right or true it may be ( I spoke for it too, but made it plain that I included the Tories in the indictment, thus separating myself from the other speakers on my side).

 

But alas, loyalty to the Labour Party is still strong among students. I can only take comfort from the fact that there was, even so, a very arge number of abstentions and that - together with the Ayes, they outnumbered the Labour supporters.

The Great Life of Bishop George Bell

I recently recorded a programme for BBC Radio 4, on the subject of George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester who courageously opposed the bombing of German civilians, and as a result almost certain destroyed his hopes of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury,

 

The programme, in the 'Great Lives' series,  is presented by Matthew Parris and is timetabled for transmission on Tuesday 2nd April (the Tuesday after Easter).

 

Details can be found here :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2013/14/r4-great-lives.html

  

 

Reflections on the Threepenny Bit

While going through an old chest of drawers I recently came across an old twelve-sided threepenny bit. Most people don’t remember these coins,  but to me they were once part of daily life. One of them would once have bought you a national newspaper or a very small chocolate bar. Technically, they were worth a little  more than one of the decimal pennies (always known scornfully as ‘pee’) which were introduced during that year of revolution, 1971. It was a dead thing when I found it, long unused and though not actually tarnished, just a flat, matt yellowish shape of cheap base metal.

 

But it cheered me up in some undefinable way, so I put it in my pocket with all the other change and after a few days it had come to life again, and taken on a bit of sparkle and glow. This was how I remembered it in use. It made a great difference to its power to evoke – just as the sight of a main-line steam engine on a proper railway conjures up far more memories than a tootling tank engine shuffling about on a few miles of revived branch-line track.

 

It’s not a specially handsome coin, as the old half-crown was, and the pre-1939 shillings were. It would never have bought a Mars Bar, as the old sixpence used to do (Could you get a ‘Milky Way’ with it? You could certainly get a rather unsatisfactory confection called a ‘Punch’ bar , not to mention twelve four-for-a-penny chews - though it was no good offering the lady in the sweetshop a farthing for a single one of these chews, as the farthing ( a quarter of a penny) had gone out of circulation by then, though there were still quite a few about; nor usually a ha'penny ( half penny, for those unfortunate enough not to recall this coin) for two of them. It was four for a penny, and multiples thereof, or 'Clear off!'). 

 

 It only existed as legal tender for fewer than 40 years, as it gradually replaced the old silver threepence, the despised ‘Joey’ which features so much in George Orwell’s long, heartfelt complaint about the hell of middle class poverty,  ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’. The ‘Joey’ was  a silver disc so small and thin that ( a bit like the modern, miserable Five Pee, or the American dime) it would stick to your fingertip and was worth so little that it was almost embarrassing to spend it, an admission that you were down to your last few pence.

 

Why did it cheer me up? Well, the usual thing, the awakening of pleasant memories of saving and spending such coins on small childhood pleasures, plus the warm, overwhelmingly British shape of it. I learned very early on in life that nobody, apart from the Swiss (whose silver pieces were comparable to our old ones in weight, detail and shine) , had a coinage that was as confidence-inspiring as ours. Foreign coins had holes in them, or were made of industrial grey metals so light that they seemed likely to blow away in the wind.  And they were all boring decimals.

 

The very idea of a coin representing three of something, and which was at the same time a quarter of a shilling, was subversive of the boring, regulated decimal world beyond our shores, in which everyone counted on their toes, and nobody could divide anything by three, or (and this was even odder) wanted to divide anything by four, let alone eight, which of course real people do all the time. Athe equivakent of a penny in the Channel Island of Jersey was in those days something called 'Eight Doubles', pronounced 'doobles' , as I clearly remember,  though Jerseymen in recent years have expressed baffled scepticism about this memory. 

 

The only exception to this was the American Quarter Dollar, another lovely coin which defied the decimal logic of the US currency and suggested that the Americans, in their hearts weren’t wholly wedded to toe-counting as the supreme form of mathematics. Which of course they're not, bless them. Free people never are. In idaho a few weeks ago I rejoiced to see paint sold in gallons, meat sold by the pound and coffee sold in fluid ounces. And do you know, it wasn't backward at all?  

 

The US Treasury also prints Two Dollar Bills, though these are quite hard to find (Ask at a bank if you are in the US. They sometimes have them. Some people regard them as unlucky). They fit into no proper mathematical sequence, toe-counting or advanced. You will only ever receive these in change at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s lovely, boyishly gadget-filled house in the Virginia Hills (depicted on the US nickel, the five cent coin). That is because they have a picture of Mr Jefferson on one side, and rather fine depiction of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence on the other. It is in many ways the most interesting piece of paper money you will ever see (though those pyramids, eyes and strange Latin inscriptions on the single dollar bill always seem to me to attract less attention than they should).

 

It was only after my last portable typewriter eventually wore out, from too much frenzied hammering and from being dropped too often, that I realised that modern computer keyboards don’t provide fractions. This must be a deliberate decision. They do provide all kinds of wholly useless (to me) and mysterious (to me) keys, while oddly being quite unable to agree on where to put the now-essential ‘@‘ symbol, which on some foreign keyboards requires acrobatics to locate. I’m sorry, but 1/2 just doesn’t look like ‘half’ to me. There just isn’t any peaceful coexistence between decimals, and metric measures, and the old world of halves, quarters, thirds, and threepenny bits. And whenever I complain about this, angry decimalists and metricators rage spitefully at me, falsely accusing me of wanting to stamp out their dull, inhuman measures, when all want to do is to live and let live.  I assume they accuse me of this fault, because in some Freudian way they project their desires on to me.

 

 

 

 

 

  

Not about Teddy Bears and Plovers' Eggs - Brideshead Revisited Revisited

In the belief that Budgets are always misrepresented by their authors, and misunderstood by the experts on the day they come out, I offer a small diversion here, about Evelyn Waugh’s novel ‘Brideshead Revisited’ . We’ll find out what George Osborne really meant when the clever boys and girls have scanned the Treasury Red Book properly, round about Friday. Depend upon it, the early verdicts aren’t worth the bother.

 

My Brideshead diversion came about because I felt a little drained on Sunday.  I had gone, in the snow, to debate against Sir Simon Jenkins on the subject of drugs, for the Oxford Literary Festival. As usual in such debates, the experience was like hacking at a fogbank with a cutlass, as the English middle classes have for the most part been completely brainwashed on this subject. They wrongly think they know what is going on, when in fact they have no idea at all and are usually 180 degrees in the wrong,  and it is all one can do to get them to think about it at all. But by then, time is up.

 

I pointed out to a reasonably large audience in the splendid Sheldonian Theatre (which with its neighbour the Clarendon Building pretty much solidifies the Anglican settlement in stone) that my book ‘The War We Never Fought’ had been more or less buried in silence by the book review pages of almost every major newspaper or other book-reviewing publication, despite being written in clear English by a reasonably well-known person, on an interesting and topical subject,  attractively designed and published by a large and reputable publisher, sent in advance to a long list of influential commentators and ably publicised by one of the most skilful publicists in the business. Had I written, say, about the urgent and central matter of male prostitutes in Victorian London I would have been reviewed all over the place. Except that, since it would have been me writing about them, I wouldn’t have been, if you see what I mean.

 

I did take advantage of our debate to tell Sir Simon that it was about time he actually responded to my book  in print, as it was squarely and explicitly aimed at him and his many articles on the subject. I wonder if he will. The thing is that he is so right about so many other things that this mistaken position on this subject is particularly important.

 

Anyway, virtue goes out of you on such occasions, and I hoped to gain solace by walking home, but my rhythm was disturbed when I found that my chosen route was (for what I think is the fifth time this winter) flooded . Rather than go back and traipse round by the long way, I rolled up my trousers, took off my shoes and socks and waded through the icy water, which required too much concentration to be relaxing.

 

By the time I eventually got home, I was in the mood for total, selfish escape from the day. So I pulled from the shelf my old, slightly foxed edition of ‘Brideshead Revisited’  by Evelyn Waugh, a school prize given to me for general knowledge (ha!) in the summer of 1966 when I was not yet 15. It’s under the imprint of Chapman and Hall, and, while beautifully printed in England on good paper, has more typographical errors than even this blog, and (ha! again) at least one misplaced apostrophe.  By the way, I’m not as militant about apostrophes as some people, because it’s not possible to be, logically.  While I loathe the way councils leave them off street signs, I have to admit they’re confusing, and not as rigidly unchanging as we might like to think. In my ancient edition of ‘Alice in Wonderland, the word ‘shan’t’ is repeatedly written ‘sha’n’t’, which was no doubt correct at the time and actually makes perfect sense when you think about it.  But if anyone did that now, they’d be reported to Keith Waterhouse’s Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe (AAAA).  Where did that extra apostrophe go, and when? I’d guess it went sometime between 1914 and 1918.

 

German, which (much like English) uses a terminal ‘s’ to signify possession, doesn’t bother with the apostrophe at all, as far as I know. Though I think Dutch does.

 

But I digress. How much I understood the book the first or second time I read it, I can’t now be sure. I was in a sort of smog of misunderstanding when I read books in adolescence, but of course I didn’t know it at the time. Not realising that you don’t understand what’s going on, you may miss the point of whole, huge passages. Yet others, thinks to the sheer power of the writing, or because they are funny and truthful, get into the mind and stay there. I have always remembered the cruel sneer against Anglo-Catholics, always remembered the young lady with the moustache and the big feet who attends the sublimely awful dinner, always remembered Charles Ryder’s father and his feline, cunning methods of domestic warfare, always remembered the bat’s squeak of unexpressed desire when Charles Ryder first meets Julia Flyte. I’ve always laughed out loud at Sebastian Flyte’s unexpected mimicry of his horrible, lisping German boyfriend, always loved the (two) moments in the book where Charles Ryder finds himself in the dining car of an express bound from Paddington to the magic parkland of the softest, most wistful part of the English countryside, where it is forever cool and green and peaceful, and more often than not, towards the later stages of summer twilight.

 

I’ve also always enjoyed the description of the hero’s night in the cells after a drunken incident with a car, and the relentless, savage demolition of the character called Rex Mottram, who is supposed to be based on Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s unloveliest crony, but who is really just a modern version of John Bunyan’s Mr Worldly Wiseman, a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and who simply has not developed as a complete human being. The descriptions of the Atlantic crossing in a storm, during which Charles embarks on the adulterous relationship which seems to be the culmination of the story and isn’t,  also seem to me to capture many, many potent emotions with supreme skill. They also convey something of the strange, out-of-the-world sensation which I have myself felt during two Atlantic crossings (one rough, one not).

 

And I have never forgotten the moment when Lord Marchmain gestures to the hideous, grotesquely ornate bed which he has compelled his servants to assemble on his return from long exile, and says to Charles (now a painter by trade) ‘You might paint that. You could call it “The Death Bed”’, and it is like a great bell tolling.

 

I also remember, pestilential atheist as I then was, furiously objecting to the central scene in which Lord Marchmain returns to the Roman Catholic faith on that death bed. Now an equally pestilential Protestant, I have slightly different views on  the matter.

 

So, having become familiar with the book in my teens, and re-read it perhaps three or four times between 1966 and 1980, I was always slightly puzzled by the way in which ‘Brideshead’ came to be associated (through the 1981-2 TV series) with silly undergraduate excesses in 1920s Oxford, Teddy Bears , plovers’ eggs and foppery . These scenes are in the book, but they are not its point. Waugh himself seems to have been a pretty unbearable and perhaps epicene young man, and was by many accounts a fairly unbearable old man (his own account, that fine book  ‘The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold’,   suggests that he knew perfectly well how horrible he was, but enjoyed it too much to stop).

 

But the book is not about silly students. It is about love, friendship and God’s grace, and also about the author’s own reflection( after saying he now planned to live in a  world of three dimensions, using his own five senses) that ‘I have since learned that there is no such world’ – a statement which has haunted me since the first time I read it , has troubled me ever since and which I think I now more or less understand ( see my recent posting on Chartres and its cathedral).

 

The TV series is actually quite good,  as the eventual script (not the one by John Mortimer, which was not used) more or less followed the book, pretty much word for word. I’m not sure if Castle Howard was quite right as ‘Brideshead’ but it was near enough, and the casting, while sometimes a bit off, was also sometimes close to genius, all smoothed over by Geoffrey Burgon’s more or less perfect music.  You can see, if you can bear to watch the more recent cinema version, how badly the same thing could have been done in other hands.  

 

But it can’t avoid the honeyed shots of Oxford and of the great house, and so doesn’t (in my view) quite have the more masculine, shadowy power of the book.  Waugh, as far as I am concerned, was a genuinely great writer who sometimes hid that genius in the middle of laughter, so making people ignore or forget (or not notice) the genius. Several moments in ‘Brideshead’ seem to me to go well beyond the ordinary, the competent or the merely good - the early scene when, as Charles once more hears the name of ‘Brideshead’  a ghastly shouting voice seems suddenly to have been switched off, the description of Sebastian’s desperate drunkenness as a blow falling repeatedly on a bruise, and the extraordinarily bitter segment where the chivalrous, self-sacrificial Christian young men who were killed in the First World War are said to have died   "  ... so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat, wet handshake, his grinning dentures". There’s also a disturbing passage in which Sebastian’s drinking, and everyone’s desire to keep from full knowledge of it,  is compared to a fire at sea, black and red far below decks, occasionally bursting out in sudden wafts of smoke, and an unforgettable characterisation of the General Strike, as being like a fabled beast which emerges briefly from its lair only to sniff the air and return unbloodied to its cave.  I am myself very fond of the description of the strange dinner which Charles shares with Rex Mottram at the stately, unfashionable Restaurant Paillard in Paris, where the ancient beauty, craft, dedication, joy and tradition expressed by the wine (an old Burgundy) is contrasted with Rex’s modern vulgarity and crassness. I think I know exactly what he means.   

 

Having pulled the book out of the shelf on Sunday, I could not rest until I had once again read it to the end (in the course of doing so finding three or four small details which I had previously failed to notice). Forget the blasted Teddy Bear. This is a real book of great power.

 

 

What is that Distant Sound? Some Thoughts on Press Freedom

The Parliamentary tussle about Press regulation seems to me to be a choice between the bad and the worse. All my instincts rebel against any form of press restriction, and I think it has only come about because British newspapers are so much weaker than they used to be, and also because some journalists (by no means all) behaved so badly that they provided their enemies with a pretext (but not a reason) for restrictions.

 

I am quite unsentimental about this. Newspapers, and the people who work for them, often behave indefensibly.  They usually do this because the British Press has always been a highly competitive market, in which editors and their subordinates strive for circulation and the advertisement revenue it brings.  Newspapers are not unique in this. Most commercial enterprises go too far, from time to time. So do all politicians. The problem is that, if you restrict press freedom, then you weaken one of the main forces restraining all the other sorts of wrongdoing. That is why civilised states have tended to concede that it should not be subject to state control.

 

It is also a statement of the obvious to point out that a wealthy person who buys a newspaper can immediately become influential and quite possibly powerful, and that there is no particular justice in this – except that the influence, in the end, depends on the newspaper’s ability to win and keep readers. That is actually a pretty good democratic test, arguably better than the one provided by elections in which the public approve pre-selected candidates for Parliament.

 

So proprietors may not start with any legitimacy, but they can attain it.  In the old days, on top of power and influence, they also used to get peerages.  This is not in fact restricted to Conservatives. I think it was in Francis Williams’s rather good book on the British press ‘Dangerous Estate’ (at least I thought it good when I read it last, 35 or so years ago. Williams was very much of the Attlee left and became a Labour peer himself, as did many Daily Mirror chieftains in the old days) that I read the rhyme, once current in the offices of the old ‘Daily Herald’,  ‘We have no party creed or bias. We want a peerage for Elias’.

 

This referred to Julius Elias, chief of Odhams, who eventually became the First ( and last) Lord Southwood in 1937, and was later made a Viscount and was Labour Chief Whip in the House of Lords. Oddly enough, it was generally thought that the Labour-supporting ‘Herald’ under Odhams ownership, had begun the great circulation wars of the 1920s and 1930s which at one stage turned the ‘Herald’ into the biggest-selling newspaper in the world. I always have to think twice before recalling that the old 'Herald' is in fact the direct ancestor of today's 'Sun' , though there was a strange intervening period - the Cudlipp 'Sun'. This was a paper 'born of the age we live in' carefully designed with market research in mind, modern, responsible, enlightened and a complete and utter flop, which is what allowed Mr Murdoch into Fleet Street. For he bought it and turned it into what it now is. 

 

The Daily Express and the Daily Mail, and later the Daily Mirror, struck back at the Herald with their own relentless campaigns for readership, fiercely fought in an age when there was no competition for advertising from commercial TV, so whoever could win the sales battle could charge tremendous rates. The old Daily Express, under Beaverbrook,  would eventually hit 4 million (it was still at more than two million, and a broadsheet,  when I first worked for it back in January 1977). But by then the big new developments were Rupert Murdoch’s ruthless ‘Sun’, which in my view dragged Fleet Street down, and David English’s reborn ‘Daily Mail’, which in my view was Fleet Street’s answer to the challenge of TV, a newspaper based much more on clever comment, human interest and controversy than on straight news, and the model for all serious dailies and Sundays ever since.  

 

The Daily Mirror, which had been top dog in the 1950s, was driven into endless retreat by ‘The Sun’.  I’ve said here before that Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Sun’ was the real revolution. I occasionally visit the British Library’s newspaper collection (soon to be moved from its old home at Colindale) and it is amazing to see how much more literate and thoughtful the most popular newspapers were in the Age Before Murdoch.  It is also interesting to see how scrappy and thin the old and unpopular broadsheets were, in comparison to their present state, but that is a different story. New technology allowed them to say a lot more, and to say it in much better-designed pages.

 

The old Daily Mirror, in particular, made a tremendous effort to treat its readers as intelligent beings. Competition from The Sun’s Page Three, and from Mr Murdoch’s, ah, unrestrained view of how newspapers should look and feel, soon put an end to that, and I don’t think the Mirror has ever recovered from that. Nor has anyone else. A time traveller from 1965 would register plenty of shocks at the changes in familiar things, but in many ways the alteration in newspapers between then and now is greater than anything else. They still bear the same names and serve the same purpose. But they are all utterly, radically different from their old selves.

 

I don’t think this was inevitable. It took Mr Murdoch’s special qualities (a very keen intelligence, combined with a specially Australian scorn for many British institutions and customs, plus an Oxford education and plenty of inside knowledge of the society he was invading, not to mention that bust of Lenin that he kept in his rooms at Worcester College) to bring this about.  I often wonder what would have happened had he never entered the British newspaper market. I also wonder if he could have succeeded if we had not wrecked our state school system, especially by abandoning  proven methods of teaching children to read,  and if we had tried harder than we did to restrain the power of commercial TV, another great force driving down the levels of culture and taste.

 

It was noticeable, when the old ‘News of the World’ closed and they reproduced a lot of the paper’s historic editions, that its transformation into its final incarnation is actually quite recent. Right up until the late 1960s, the old NoW still contained quite a lot of serious, heavyweight news. That was the paper that George Orwell was referring to in his famous words in the essay ‘the Decline of the English Murder’. I doubt if he’d have had much interest in the Murdoch version of the paper.

 

Now, as far back as the 1940s, the British political Left had it in for Fleet Street as a whole because they thought it was keeping them out of power, and restraining them when they won office.  They felt that, despite the Mirror and the Herald, they were outgunned by the ‘Tory Press’, and that this force was uncontrolled and illegitimate.  The complaint about the imbalance was mathematically true, though the imbalance wasn’t that huge when you counted the Mirror and the Herald, and Labour managed to win the 1945 and 1950 elections despite the imbalance. What’s more, unlike the BBC, no newspaper had the power to *make* anyone buy it. If the 'Tory Press’ sold more copies, that was because more people chose to buy them. As for legitimacy, press freedom in a free society can be based only upon commercial success and the independence it brings.  Lord Zinc or Lord Copper may be a billionaire and own a huge office on Feet Street and a printing and distribution network. But if people don’t buy his papers, he is nothing.

 

And commercially viable newspapers will contain a fair amount of show business and salesmanship, which will always be in conflict with responsibility and restraint. The less educated and cultured the population is, the fiercer this struggle will be. The editor’s job is to resolve this conflict into a product that is both attractive and truthful, and which deals properly with the great issues of the day and with the small entertaining things that all people enjoy reading. It’s no good being perfect, if nobody buys it. For it is the crucial fact about newspapers, or was until recently, that people had to volunteer to pay for them with their own money. If the people stop buying, there’s no further argument. This of course does not apply to the BBC. If people stop paying for the licence, they’re taken to court. If they stop watching BBC programems, they still have to pay for them. By the way, it’s worth noting here that many unpopular newspapers are subsidised, either by popular papers or by other successful commercial organisations to which they are linked. It is very rare for an unpopular newspaper to be commercially independent.

 

On the question of newspaper snobbery, I’ve always been very fond of a New Yorker cartoon which shows two men, side by side, holding newspapers appropriate to their class and status. On is a thin, austere gent, clutching a serious , thin, austere paper with such headlines as ‘Federal Reserve intervenes to prop up dollar’ and ‘Supreme Court rules on accountancy fraud’. Next to him is a chubby, disreputable person, who is gripping a garish tabloid plastered with such headlines as ‘Film Star found dead in bathtub’ and ‘Gang massacre in nightclub’. The tall, thin, serious person is peering surreptitiously over the little fat man’s shoulder, neglecting his own more serious pages.

 

The whole nature of the British press is unsatisfactory, when viewed from Utopia, that blood-girt, unreachable isle where I suspect everyone reads the 'Guardian'. But I’ve never seen a better arrangement suggested, and I know of many countries in which the press is enfeebled, corrupted, neutered by privilege, or directly under the thumb of the state. But I can still see why the Left are unhappy. A free press is unlikely to be a left-wing press, whatever happens, just as a major broadcaster, state or private, is unlikely to be conservative – there’s something about the bureaucracy and artiness of broadcasting that attracts the cultural left (the big US networks, privately-owned as they are, are no less left-inclined than the BBC. You could say the same for Hollywood).  Out of this argument came no fewer than three Royal Commissions, from which the idea of a regulatory body repeatedly emerged.And now here it is again.

 

I still recall my long-ago (36 years, to be precise) brush with the Press Council, as the first of these bodies was known.  Thanks mainly to the work of a diligent freelance reporter, I had uncovered some misdeeds in a local education authority ( I was then a junior education reporter). The authority objected. The Daily Express at that time was boycotting the Press Council ( I cannot recall why,  but the episode was quite separate from the current behaviour of the paper that now bears the same name) so I did not defend myself, and ended up being officially reprimanded for ‘obtaining a document by subterfuge’, which I had rather thought was my job. Actually, it was the freelance who had obtained it, but it seemed that the gentlemanly thing to do was to take the rap quietly. I thought then that it was silly, and have thought so ever since. But I have since learned to live with the existence of a code of practice, and a body to enforce it. It’s not that I object to its aims, which are laudable. It’s just that I instinctively recoil from the regulation of free institutions, especially where freedom of speech is involved.  A former employer once asked me to sign a document which obliged me (among other things) to refrain from sexism in future. I simply refused, and nothing happened,  because it was unenforceable in those days. But you can easily see which way this could go, once it is established in law. Look at the law-backed Equality and Diversity codes which surround anyone in the public sector.

 

I later reluctantly accepted that, since the regulator was there, I might as well make use of it when it suited me and asked the Press Complaints Commission to help me resolve a dispute with the Huffington Post and its writer Mehdi Hasan.  Mr Hasan (as I have described here) had published words he alleged I had spoken to him, in quotation marks as if they were a direct verbatim account backed by shorthand notes or a recording. As it turned out, Mr Hasan had no such notes or recording, and so the Huffington Post agreed (after much correspondence) to remove the quotation marks. This minor triumph would probably not have been possible without the PCC and I am grateful to its officials for their patient diplomacy.  It was important to me in a separate dispute with the BBC, which of course is not properly subject to any independent regulator.  But would I still rather live in a world without press regulation? Yes, I would. What about the BBC? I think its licence-fee and its effective monopoly put it in a different position. I'd like to devise a body to regulate it, and oversee its impartiality commitment,  but I'm not sure I'd want it to be statutory even so.

 

But whatever wording Parliament accepts for a new Press regulator, it seems clear to me that we are on the path (the good old Primrose Path to the Eternal Bonfire, always soft and welcoming at first, always turning out nasty and frightening when it is too late to climb back down, the sort of path any mountain rambler will have encountered at least once, and been wary of ever since) towards ever-greater regulation of newspapers. As I think has been pointed out by many,  the whole Leveson affair is an illogical response to phone-hacking and the other misdeeds of my trade, almost all of which can be dealt with through the courts already.

 

It will not benefit the victims of these wrongs, if the press is weakened. It won’t even benefit honest legislators, who will find that, in a country with a feeble Fleet Street, their role will also be diminished. Acting in the names of the Dowlers, the McCanns and Christopher Jefferies, others have got what they have long wanted. Those journalists who gave them the opportunity, by behaving stupidly and irresponsibly, have much to answer for . But those who are taking advantage of this by seeking press restraint have a much greater responsibility. They chose to pursue their sectional and personal interests, and ignored the interests of the country as a whole.

 

Now, I may be wrong (I sometimes am) about what is going to happen next. The new regulatory body may work in a civilised and responsible fashion, restraining bad behaviour while leaving the papers to carry on with their proper job of exposing wrongdoing and stimulating national debate on the great issues that the powerful are always trying to smuggle past us in disguise. Pressure groups, lobbies and Politicians may not take advantage of this small opening in the wall which once defended newspapers from state interference. They may not, over time, seek by small and subtle steps to tighten and increase their powers. The new restraints may not limit the capacity of newspapers to fight for circulation in a tough market. The papers may survive and prosper as powerful independent institutions able to stand up for themselves. The BBC (whose immense bias to the Left cancels out any press bias the other way, and then some)  may finally devise a system of regulation in which it is not Judge and Jury in its own cause.

 

All these things may come to pass, but wait! What is that distant noise? Why, it is the sound of massed squadrons of bright puce pigs roaring overhead in battle order.

 

 

The Story of the Bad Samaritan - some reflections on 'The Lady Vanishes'

How I wanted Sunday Night’s TV dramatization of ‘The Lady Vanishes’ to be good. Long ago, I read the book on which Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film was based. Published in 1936, it was originally called ‘the Wheel Spins’, though it was re-named ‘The Lady Vanishes’ after the success of the film.  I couldn’t believe how much better the written story was than the Hitchcock film, which I’ve never thought was that wonderful, though the 1979 remake was even less satisfactory. And as far as I could tell, the BBC had decided to follow the book rather more closely than either film.

I should have known better. I stuck it out for about 40 minutes and decided I’d have more fun flossing my teeth.

 

As usual, the BBC has only one way to summon up a period – through costume, and by making everyone smoke all the time to show that it is the past. I’m surprised they don’t get them to smoke while they’re asleep.  Even some of the costume was wrong. An Anglican clergyman of that period would certainly not have shaved his head. I doubt if middle-aged spinsters would have smoked in public either.  Also there were unconvincing shots of the wrong sort of steam locomotive and the wrong sort of carriages. The idea that a continental express, charging through the Balkans in the late 1930s, would have contained a piano bar is also, I think, a bit far-fetched. As usual, they couldn’t get anything else right either.   Iris, the sort of heroine, is not a very nice person at the start of the story, but she was sour in a 1936 sort of way, not in the 2013 way in which she was portrayed.  And of course the accents were all hopeless. Miss Froy, the Lady who Vanishes, was quite without the sweet, winsome appeal of the original (the passages in the book, in which her old and impoverished parents innocently wait for her return in their chilly English village home, quite unaware of the perils she is passing through, are beautifully written and make terrific pictures in the mind, which have not left me since I first read them 30 years ago).

 

But there was something else wrong, a sort of desperate urgency. When Iris gets lost in the mountains, she does so in an urgent, noisy way, rather than in the genuinely alarming but slower fashion in which she realises she is quite alone in a strange landscape, as portrayed in the book. The scenes on the train, in which a distracted and ill Iris is comforted by Miss Froy, were made needlessly jarring and unpleasant to watch. The book conveys her sunstruck, headachy discomfort so much better.

 

Ah, the book. What I love about the book is that it is such a severe dissection of English life at the time.  During a few hours’ journey in a stuffy, grimy express, somewhere on the ragged edge of the old Austria-Hungary (we never learn exactly where the journey starts, though we know it is bound for Trieste, so Yugoslavia seems likely - but which part?), we learn a great deal about that lost England which died in September 1939, and the people who lived in it.

 

Iris’s worthless, rackety life in London is cleverly hinted at. The various secrets , miseries and fears of a group of seemingly respectable and upright English people are slowly but believably revealed, so that when they all fail the test of loyalty and duty, we know that we, too, could have abandoned the poor, abducted Miss Froy to her appalling fate. But it is unpleasant, selfish Miss Carr who, despite all, refuses to give up the effort to save a person she hardly knows (because, after all, she is an Englishwoman) , and takes appalling risks to do it. There’s a lot less comedy in the book than in either film, and rightly so. It’s a morality play, a sort of Parable of the Bad Samaritan in which outward goodness counts for very little when it comes to it.

 

Ethel Lina White’s motif of the train, its engine and its driver straining every rivet, piston  and muscle to reach Trieste, when Trieste also means a particularly horrible doom for Miss Froy, drives the story along in the imagination (this is especially effective for those who are lucky enough to have been on a steam-hauled express on unwelded track, seen the smoke pour past the window, and felt the almost animal straining and panting of the locomotive and the blacksmith clatter of the wheels on the rails, but the rest of you will just have to try to picture this). You have a constant sense (which I did not feel in any film version) of the rapid approach of black terror, along with the equally rapid approach of nightfall.

 

Miss Froy’s disappearance, by the way, has absolutely nothing to do with the Nazis or a secret code.

 

Oh well, one good thing will come out of this. I shall have to read the book again.

 

 

 

 

We fuss over mothers... then tell them to dump their children in baby farms and go back to work

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The more fuss we make about mothers, what with all those soppy cards and special Mothering Sunday lunches in restaurants, the less we seem to want them to bring up their own children.

The view seems to be that it’s just about all right for women to give birth, but after that can we please separate them from their young as soon as possible, for the sake of the economy?

New Labour was frank about it, with that terrifying commissar Patricia Hewitt describing the dwindling numbers of full-time mothers as a ‘problem’.

The Lib Dems’ chief feminist, Lynne Featherstone, says with her usual simple-minded bluntness that having a baby is a ‘bit of a setback’, adding that: ‘One of the main barriers to full equality in the UK is the fact women still have babies.’

The Coalition wants 40 per cent of two-year-olds in day care by next year. The shiny Modern Tory Liz Truss (I can’t call her a conservative) hires a costly nanny for her own children but wants the less wealthy to stuff their progeny into baby farms with industrial staff-to-toddler ratios.

Even the Leftist Polly Toynbee, who has nothing in principle against nationalising childcare, describes the Truss plan as ‘warehousing’.

Nobody ever questions the claim that it is automatically good for mothers to go out and be wage-slaves. Once, this idea was widely hated, and every self-respecting man worked as hard as he could to free his wife from the workbench.

Then the feminist revolutionaries began to argue that the home was a prison and marriage was penal servitude, chained to a sink. Most people thought that was nuts – until big business realised that women were cheaper than men, more reliable than men and much less likely to go on strike or be hungover than men.

What’s more, all the really beefy men-only jobs – mining coal, rolling steel, stoking furnaces – had been abolished.

So suddenly the wildest anti-male ravings of the ultras became the standard view of the CBI, the political parties and the agony aunts. And off the women trooped, to their call centres, their offices and their assembly plants, choking back tears as they crammed their toddlers into subsidised nurseries.

They got tax-breaks. Fatherless households got welfare subsidies. So as far as the State was concerned, the one arrangement that was discriminated against – and hard – was the one where one parent went out to work and the other stayed at home.

A selfish upper crust of female lawyers, professional politicians, bankers and journalists imagined that all women enjoyed work as much as they did – when the truth is that most do it to pay the bills.

But this self-satisfied clique was and is very influential. Who, in Parliament, law, business or the media, speaks for full-time mothers? Certainly not the steely, suited superwomen who have done very well out of the sex war.

Does all this matter? Well, I suspect it does. Children need parents, and small children badly need the devoted, unstinting personal attention that only a mother can give. Without it, they will grow physically but they will not flourish as fully developed humans.

If you wonder where those feral teenagers came from, or why so many primary school children can barely talk and are not potty-trained, ask yourself if it might not be connected with the abolition of motherhood.

But surely Scandinavia, the home of mass day care, is a  paradise? Well, not if you believe Swedish sociologist Jonas  Himmelstrand, who last week warned psychological disorders have tripled among children in Sweden since the child-rearing revolution there in the Eighties.

Culture can’t be transferred from one generation to the next when children are left to bring each other up. He says of mass day care: ‘It is at the root of bullying, teenage gangs, promiscuity and the flat-lining of culture.’

As usual, we have been warned. As usual, we will not take any notice until it is far  too late. For no political party stands up for private life or the independent family.

 *******

Every few
years a sort of blue mist blurs the vision of the dwindling battalions
of Tory loyalists. They persuade themselves that some more or less
fraudulent person is the new hope of the future.

Facts
are ignored. Blind faith is deployed. From this came the wild and
comically wrong belief that David Cameron was a secret patriot, who
would rip off his green, liberal garments when he assumed office.

Well,
we know how that worked out. But, learning nothing from the experience,
the poor old Tory Tribe are now looking for a new delusion to cling to.

Some
are beguiled by Alexander (alias ‘Boris’) Johnson. They don’t even know
his real name, and have also failed to notice that he is politically
correct, pro-EU and, while he is cleverer than his schoolmate and fellow
Bullingdon hearty, Mr Slippery, he is the same sort of thing.

But dafter even than that is the cult of Theresa May, now being hawked about as the New Iron Lady.

Oh,
come on. Theresa May is the Marshmallow Lady. She U-turned over
militant feminism, switching without explanation from opposing all-women
shortlists for parliamentary candidates to supporting them.

She worked happily with Harriet Harman over the passage of the horrible Equality Act.

And
as for her non-pledge to put withdrawal from the Human Rights
Convention ‘on the table’ if the Tories win the next Election, what’s
that worth?

‘On
the table’ doesn’t mean she will do it. And the Tories will lose the
next Election anyway. As a statement of intent, it is like that fine old
music-hall chorus: ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and
eggs, if we had some eggs.’

 

The awful Huhne case shows how driving cars brings out the worst in all of us.

Perfectly
pleasant people, once in control of a ton of steel and glass, become
irrational, arrogant, impatient speed-maniacs muttering ‘get out of my
way’ and buying personalised number plates.

How much time did Chris Huhne save by his speeding? What did he do with it? He has plenty now.

As
I ride my bicycle, I notice the steady worsening of manners on the
roads, more hooting, more violent swerving, more red lights jumped, more
mad texting while driving.

The people involved are probably saints at home or at work, but become fiends and morons once at the wheel.

 

It's started. The Coalition is breaking up, as I predicted here in September 2011.

Get
ready for a noisy Tory minority government, all mouth and no trousers,
designed to fool you into thinking they’ve rediscovered their
principles.

 

I gather that the wrongly imprisoned
police officer April Casburn, convicted on some of the flimsiest
evidence I’ve ever seen, will not be appealing.

What
a pity. I should have thought the Police Federation would be anxious
to  protect its members from the danger of such prosecutions, and would
want to press the  matter even if Mrs Casburn is reluctant.

 

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