Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 281

Consorting with the Enemy

A few thoughts about a curious debate on Thursday night at the Cambridge Union, almost always the sharper of the two great University debating societies. It may be the chamber. The Oxford Union debates in what always seems to be an enormous, freezing sepulchre, with the ceiling lost in gloom, high above. Cambridge has a smaller, more intimate room, in which laughter stands a better chance. It may be Cambridge’s frostier, more astringent climate as compared with Oxford’s melancholy, soft dankness. Or it may just be that this is the way the luck has fallen for me on the dozen or so times I’ve struggled into my decrepit, baggy dinner jacket, and wrenched my annoying red bow tie into place for one of these occasions.

 

Anyway, last  night we were debating New Labour. Had they ruined the country? Well, of course they had helped to do so, and had given the poor old thing a severe shove down the slopes of doom.  But they’re hardly the only culprit. It’s a bit like Murder on the Orient Express, with a whole queue of suspects serially plunging the knife into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, its heirs and successors.

 

And then again, it’s still the case that if an Oxbridge debating society wants to discuss what’s wrong with Labour, they get Tories to speak for the motion, and Labour people to speak against it. It’s as if it’s a private fight, even though plenty of good patriots loathe the Tories, and plenty of proud socialists loathe Labour.   I hesitated over accepting the invitation, as I knew it would mean sharing a bench with Tories, whom I regard as my opponents just as much as Labour. On the other hand, these events don’t decide the fate of the nation, but they may just possibly help people to think – people who in a few years will be in influential positions in our society.

 

The outgoing President, Ben Kentish, opened for the Labour defence rather naughtily, saying that it was going to be very tough for my side to prove the rather severe proposition ‘New Labour Ruined Britain’. I pointed out to him that since he had written the motion himself , it was he who had set the bar too high for us. If he hadn’t liked it, he could have fixed it.  There was also a glorious moment when, after Mr Kentish had been railing for some minutes against the Horrors Of The Evil Thatcher Regime, a rather beautiful woman in the audience asked him sweetly how old he had been at the time.  Mr Kentish  was forced to admit that he had not yet been born during the Thatcher Terror, which took some of the whizz and bite out of his denunciation.

 

Hazel Blears, for New Labour, made a silly reference to the fact that all the speakers on the anti-Blair side were ‘white’ (I should have said ‘grey’ was a better description, but there) , and was a bit incommoded when I said that I thought it was time skin colour stopped being important to civilised people. What mattered was the content of their characters. I felt she never quite got her zing back after that, but maybe that was just my conceit.   

 

The Tories, John Redwood and Andrew Mitchell, said pretty much what Tories do say, about the economy  and the Gold Reserves, and in Mr Redwood’s case about the EU.

A contributor from the floor, rightly in my view, complained that the old-fashioned Left had no advocate among the main speakers.

 

So, when it came to my turn, I thought that I could, to some extent, put that right. Amazingly, you might think, nobody had so far mentioned the Iraq invasion. I did, and was slightly amazed to find Andy Burnham jumping up and asking righteously if I wished Saddam Hussein was still in power. I said (which is true) that I supposed that was the implication of what I said, since I was against invading other people’s countries to change their governments. But I did also point out that the Blair creature had said  clearly during the preparations for the invasion that his aim was not to topple Saddam (Chapter and verse, for those interested : 25th February 2003, Blair: ‘I do not want war. I do not believe anyone in this House wants war. But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam’s active co-operation. I detest his regime but *even now he can save it* (my emphasis)  by complying with United Nations demands …the path to peace is clear’ (House of Commons Hansard)) . Blair got into a similar mess about Slobodan Milosevic, and had had to be rescued from his militancy by a NATO spokesman in April 1999, after first calling for Milosevic to ‘step down’ .  I also tried to undermine some New Labour piffle about the marvellous NHS by contrasting it with the catastrophe of the Stafford hospital scandal, showing as it does that pouring billions into a nationalised health service does not automatically improve the health of the people.

 

But I also turned on the Tories, for complaining about the Labour surrender to the EU when they were only additions to surrenders made during the Thatcher and Major years. I also mocked their noisy complaints about Gordon Brown’s sale of the gold reserves, by pointing out that, at the time, the Tory front bench did nothing, and it was left to the eminent backbencher Sir Peter Tapsell to raise the matter in the Commons. This was typical of the supine state of the Tory party in the face of New Labour for most of its existence (they did of course fail to oppose the Iraq adventure). As I said, the first New Labour government was really the John Major government.

 

Perhaps I was too keen to peel off the many left-wingers there, to concentrate on the whole conservative indictment. I mentioned identity cards and detention without trial, and the attack on the constitution, but clean forgot to mention mass immigration. Was this a Freudian memory slip? Who knows?  By the way, the whole thing was recorded and will sooner or later be put up on the web, and I acknowledge that this is a wholly partial account which concentrates very much on my own contribution.

 

Anyway, the result was interesting – an enormous number of abstentions, many fewer votes for New Labour, and even fewer for the motion itself, though the margin wasn’t that great. The abstentions, in effect, won, which is rather an unusual outcome.  I like to think that the Left-wingers there decided they would rather abstain than support that tawdry government,  though they certainly weren’t going to vote with Tories.  I also like to think (after some post-debate conversations) that I may have encouraged them to do so. Unscrupulous? I don’t think so. I did oppose the Iraq war. I did oppose identity cards and detention without trial. On such things I’m quite willing to form alliances with opponents, as they rise above other issues. It’s an interesting exercise, both for Cambridge undergraduates who probably loathe me as a right-wing monster, and for me as someone who believes a new coalition in politics is possible, in consorting with the enemy, and wondering where the true boundaries really lie in British politics.

 

 

 

 

Britain's Drug Laws - Draconian, or Feeble? A Debate on Sunday.

Anyone interested in hearing me discuss the non-existent ‘war on drugs’ with Sir Simon Jenkins, who for reasons that escape me believes that the current regime is ‘Draconian’, is reminded that we will be discussing the subject in Oxford, at the Sheldonian Theatre at noon on this coming Sunday, 17th March, St Patrick’s Day. Tickets are essential and can be obtained here

 

 

http://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/literature-events-2013/sunday-17

 

or via 0870 343 1001

 

On Impartiality

When the wise man points at the Moon, the fool looks at the finger. And I’m afraid there are quite a lot of examples of this problem in the response to my posting about the BBC.  Various people on Twitter, including Mehdi Hasan, the presenter of the programme for which the BBC apologised, have discounted what I say as some sort of complaint about my treatment. I have to say that Mr Hasan’s hostile tone on ‘Twitter’ is itself interesting.

 

These critics are much like the cyclists in Kensington gardens who, when I ask them politely not to ride their machines on footpaths clearly marked with signs saying ‘No Cycling’ in letters ten inches high, respond with the words ‘Get a Life!’.  They seem to think that this is a devastating riposte. As it happens, and I thank providence for it, my life has been much blessed, and may possibly have been as satisfying and enjoyable as the ones those cyclists lead. The point remains, these cyclists are doing something wrong, and the fault is in them, not in me for pointing it out to them.

 

It is of course perfectly possible that I do sometimes indulge in self-pity. Most people do.  And I can’t say I positively enjoy the individual insults about my character,  appearance, etc, which are bestowed upon me by the Twitter Mob and the ‘Comment is Free’ mob. Though I do take a general pleasure in being the target of such fury, from such people.

 

And I would certainly like to do more broadcasting for BBC Radio Four, the most important speech channel in this country by a mile, and one I listen to a lot, which reaches an audience I very much wish to reach. I’d even be glad of the chance to do more TV presenting. It may be that I’d be no good at it. Certainly, if my voice really is as portrayed on ‘What the Papers Say’,  it would be unreasonable to expect much radio work.  Even the wit of Bernard Shaw or the eloquence of Demosthenes would sound pretty terrible in *that* voice. By the way, as my recording of the programme was supplied by the BBC, I believe it is their copyright and I have no lawful right to put it on the Internet myself.

 

But even if this is so,  the real point remains the one of impartiality . Did the BBC fail to show due impartiality on ‘What the Papers Say’?

 

Rather than deal with this, my enemies will drag up almost any other subject.  One Twitter critic said that a BBC run by me would be like the Taleban. This is a common misconception of defenders of the current left consensus. They think that conservatives want some sort of Fox TV, in which blatant rightist propaganda is woven into every paragraph, and everyone sucks up to ‘right-wing’ politicians.

 

Nothing could be more wrong. I have for years advocated what I call ‘adversarial broadcasting’ in which all presenters would openly acknowledge their bias, instead of pretending they had none, and in which every major current affairs programme would always be double-headed – presented by two people of opposing views so that nobody was ever interviewed by a friend, and so that any assumptions peddled by one side could be challenged on air, at the time,  by the other. The BBC’s current strong bias towards intervention in Syria, for instance, could not have survived such a system.

 

This would require the abandonment of the concept of the ‘centre’. This involves  the arrogation to themselves of automatic, unchallengeable rectitude,  by an elite sharing a consensus. That consensus is from then on permanently shielded from attack or criticism, because those outside the ‘centre’ are - automatically - either wholly excluded, or allowed to broadcast only under strict conditions ( as I am). These special conditions (always on the end seat, asked questions beginning 'are you seriously suggesting that...?', denied the last word, compelled to raise their voices to get a hearing, etc etc etc,  mark them out as dissenters whose main purpose is to provoke entertaining debate, but who are not fundamentally a serious part of the national discussion. The existing system of the approved ‘centre’ can and does coexist with a formal ‘impartiality’ between the political parties, which can be demonstrated to be more or less working at any time when the general bias of the system is attacked.

 

Of course, it doesn’t work if any party strays too far from the anointed  ‘centre’ in which case the BBC is openly hostile, as it was to the Tories in the Thatcher era, and especially during the Hague and IDS periods. Litmus tests for membership of the ‘centre’ are attitudes on the European Union, on immigration, on public spending, on crime and punishment and on education. Increasingly the sexual revolution and drugs are part of this test as well.

 

Anyone who has ever invited me to speak to a public meeting will know that I always say I would much prefer to debate with an opponent. Having experienced so much unfairness in debates, I am keenly aware of what fairness ought to look like, and rather keen on it as a concept and a practical duty. How can you win – or lose – an argument that has not been fairly conducted?

 

I recently chaired a debate on same-sex marriage, posted here a few weeks ago, and I would challenge anyone to show that I did so in a partial manner, though one of the debaters was a friend of mine whose view was also much closer to my own than his opponent’s.

 

When the then Talk Radio asked me to present a weekly radio programme on current affairs, I suggested that it should be double-headed, and that my co-presenter should disagree with me on the whole moral, cultural social and political spectrum. I still think it was  a very entertaining and interesting programme, and I miss it every week.

 

Various people have said that the BBC has some conservative presenters. Well, one can argue about the politics of, say, Andrew Neil or Jeremy Clarkson. But even if, for the sake of argument, I accepted that they were conservative in my understanding of the term,  that still makes just two out of scores of BBC presenters whose true views it is not very hard to ascertain from their known tastes, interests, their tones of voice, their manner of questioning, their decisions on who gets the last word, and so on.

 

I once asked Mark Thompson, when he was Director-General,  if he could think of a single BBC presenter who could give a hard time to Clive Stafford Smith, the noted campaigner against the death penalty, and he was stumped.

 

I don’t think he should have been. The BBC should draw from a much wider pool of people for its presenters. But it won’t, until it understands that it is biased, and how it is biased. That is why I pursued this case - because it was a rare instance of an objectively measurable action which explained and exposed the nature of that bias. True, the BBC recognised that they had done something wrong. But they sought to rob it of any significance by insisting that it was a ‘mistake’, not requiring any deeper explanation.  I’ll let you know if anything else happens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What the Butler Said - My Continuing Struggle with the BBC

The BBC Trust has rejected every part of my complaint against ‘What the Papers say’ last July,  so much so that it makes me wonder quite why they apologised on air for what they had done at the time. Those who wish to read their decision can find it at

 

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/appeals/esc_bulletins/2013/jan.pdf

 

and scroll down to pp.20 -32

 

My own original description of the problem can be found by going here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/07/what-the-papers-didnt-say-and-what-they-did.html

 

The Guardian, who picked up the BBC Trust judgement unprompted by me, have published the following account

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/mar/12/peter-hitchens-what-the-papers-say-bbc

 

which of course comes with a  free smorgasbord of saliva-flecked comments from the lovely readers of ‘Comment is Free’ (but Personal Abuse is Even more Free) about what a dreadful person I am, how I am whining , etc etc , how I can’t take mockery - and also emphasising that I do indeed sound just as stupid as I was made to sound on the programme. Alas, the original broadcast is for some reason not available on the web. I have my own personal recording, and occasionally, during this controversy, I have replayed it to myself to remind myself just how much of a distortion it was. I wish I could share it with you.

 

The point, of course, is not that I was traduced. As I say, I’m used to that – quite possibly more used to it than any living English person, as I am the target of so much Internet slime from so many different directions that I doubt anyone equals it, in sheer quantity - though much of it is so repetitive that, for all I know, it is mass-produced by 12-year-olds in a small sweatshop in Canton.   Few of my critics could endure for a minute the sort of stuff which is directed at me all the time without limit, and all the more so if I ever stand up for myself. I’ve said it before – anyone who went to an English boarding school in the 1950s and early 1960s really has little to fear from this sort of thing. I have experienced the worst that childish spite can come up with. The point is, that what happened on WTPS was not done by feral prep-school boys. It was done by a huge national broadcaster, financed by a licence fee levied on the basis that it has an absolute duty to be impartial.

 

Therefore *if it hoses me with slime, it must hose my opponents with equivalent quantities.  Selective slime is partial slime.* How hard is this to communicate? Abuse is fine on the BBC, provided that it’s equal opportunity abuse. But it’s not.

 

If the BBC used caricaturists, of the modern kind, who portray leading politicians as rotting corpses, or as animated contraceptives, or as drowning in excrement, they would absolutely have to find cartoonists who were prepared to do the same thing to all sides. As such cartoons in fact appear in independent newspapers, with no commitment to impartiality it doesn’t matter. But itnwould, on the BBC. The key distinction is over *the official commitment to impartiality of the licence-funded broadcaster*.

 

The point is that the BBC has a duty of impartiality, clearly stated in its own founding documents and often referred to with pride by senior BBC executives.

 

So, if it uses a gross caricature of me, and if it alters my words to change their meaning , and if it also (not long before) staged an on-air show-trial of me and my views on drugs, and my competence to hold them *in my absence*, then one has to ask the following question.

 

When did the BBC ever do anything comparable to a prominent commentator of the Left? The answer is that they didn’t. never have, and won’t now. Take my old friend Jonathan Freedland, whose career is in some ways a parallel of mine – former foreign correspondent, author of books of social and political commentary, writer of comment articles in a national newspaper. Jonathan has for some years been a  regular presenter of programmes on BBC Radio 4.

 

Some people will sneer that I am no good at presenting. Well, I have written and presented several substantial programmes for Channel 4, including one on the threat to Civil Liberty and one on David Cameron which were reasonably well-reviewed at the time.

 

I did, once, long ago, present a very brief programme on crime and punishment for Radio 4 (before that ‘never’ was uttered) which was quite well-received at the time but which predates Internet radio and which is lost to posterity.  I did once apply and get shortlisted for a BBC News job, reporting foreign affairs,  many years ago. I had no problem with the screen test and the rest and was only eliminated at the final stage of interviews, despite a rather nasty whispering campaign against me. I’ve made a number of short films for Andrew Neil’s Thursday night show ‘This Week’.  I was for some time the co-presenter of a rather successful (in audience terms)  radio commentary programme on the then Talk Radio, in which I achieved genuine balance  by the novel method (invented and asked for by me) of having a left-wing co-presenter who disagreed with me about everything. It ended because my co-presenter had a falling-out with the station chief and it was hard to find anyone else to fill his role, and also (I suspect) because a double-headed programme was a bit expensive. The BBC , around the same time, came up with a programme which had some similarities with our format,  but their version inserted an ’impartial’ presenter in the middle, and the two opponents were only really foes in a party-political sense, not in the far wider moral, social and cultural way in which I and Derek Draper differed. The BBC never could understand that bias was very little to do with party politics.

 

I also presented a TV programme on Britain’s entry in the Common Market for BBC4 (which I was asked to do at very short notice after the original presenter was suddenly unavailable) , and it can’t have been that bad, or why was I soon afterwards asked to present another documentary  by the station’s then boss, about grammar schools?  The person involved invited me to a lavish dinner, took me to one side, showered me with praise and said they longed for me to undertake this important task, to which they were personally committed. After I had lined up a production company and a director, as asked, this plan mysteriously dematerialised without explanation. A programme on the subject eventually emerged, with another presenter.  Likewise a producer’s wish to have me as a regular panellist on the ‘Moral Maze’ was vetoed at a high level, and a very senior BBC executive later told me to my face (over a lunch to which I had invited that executive)  that I would ‘never’ present a programme on Radio 4. That was the word this person used. They felt no reason to explain why. It was self-evident to them.

 

I was, and this is crucial, to be allowed to make occasional appearances on ‘Any Questions’ (the radio equivalent of ‘Question Time’), and as a guest in discussions in which I could be ‘balanced’ by at least one person with differing views.

 

But the executive understood – as so many readers here don’t seem to, and as Jonathan Freedland on Twitter today seems not to, though he really ought to know better – that  the panellist or guest is far, far weaker than the presenter. The panellist does not choose what he discusses. He does not choose the timing.  He does not get the last word. He doesn’t even know how long it will be before the presenter stops him from speaking (though in my case he can safely assume that it will be pretty soon). He has to compete for time with other panellists who disagree with him, and with a presenter who is almost invariably in the grip of an unconscious bias made far worse by his conviction that he thinks he is impartial.

 

I also remember when a BBC executive wrote in the Spectator that BBC2’s Newsnight - then on the look-out for new presenters – would of course consider conservative journalists for the job. There had been some talk of David Aaronovitch being hired, which raised questions about impartiality in some minds.  I immediately wrote in to suggest myself, and my reward was a nice lunch with a man called George Entwistle, who I seem to have come across somewhere since. But I was not considered for the new presenter’s job.

 

Leave that. It’s the task of Sisyphus to explain the obvious to my critics, who don’t know because they don’t want to know.

 

The problem remains that the BBC simply cannot grasp that it is not impartial. Even Andrew Marr’s statement that : ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.’ Has not reached the minds of most BBC people (though its former DG, Mark Thompson, was beginning to see the point shortly before he left) .

 

 

Hilariously, it has only recently begun to grasp that some people think that Jeremy Hardy may be a bit left-wing, and the Radio 4 News Quiz also a little less than impartial on the British political divide.  How one copes with such semi-consciousness, I am not sure. In this case, the BBC has so far been judge and jury in its own cause. I hope to take it further, and if I succeed, I shall let you know how I get on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mystery of Theresa May

Now that the Cameron Delusion has exploded in a miniature mushroom cloud of dead ducks, rusty wind farms, broken promises,  and the bristling moustaches of infuriated activists , the doomed Tory Party are once again looking for a new false hope. They have got the sticky-backed plastic and the old washing-up bottles out, plus a few bowls of papier-mache, and are trying to construct a new hope out of the Rt Hon Theresa May MP. The media voices that once told us that Mr Cameron could lead the Tories out of the Wilderness of Zimmer, or wherever it is they have been wandering since the fall of Mrs Thatcher, are now proposing Mrs May as the New Mrs Thatcher. This would be very funny if it were not also very sad.

 

I suspect this has a lot to do with Mrs May’s attractive, resourceful and hard-working special adviser, Fiona Cunningham, who in my limited experience is a good deal more animated and adventurous than the Home Secretary.  I have noticed Ms Cunningham appearing recently in news pictures with her boss. This is a development frowned upon in the civil service. Officials who get into the picture generally have to buy cakes all round for the whole private office. But I applaud it.  We should know more about these important figures. Special advisers (Spads for short) are often hugely significant people, whose influence is often forgotten. They are also, in many cases, the Cabinet Ministers of the day after tomorrow. This is partly because they are often the main link between senior politicians and the national media and so understand very well the important relation between these two elites, explored in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ but largely unknown to the public.

 

I cannot say if this is the case with Ms Cunningham, since I have not made any great efforts to ( as the phrase goes) 'get alongside' .  I have the impression Mrs May doesn’t much like me, and I can quite understand why that mioght be so. Fortunately, I have no great desire to be liked by politicians.

 

I have often pointed out that Mrs May is in fact hugely politically correct. I have compared her to Labour’s Harriet Harman, and pointed out that the two women got on rather well during the passage of Labour’s Equality Act, which Mrs May was meant to be opposing. The Act pretty much set in concrete European Union directives on ‘Equality and Diversity’ which have turned this slogan (a polite expression for Political Correctness) into Britain’s official ideology. This profound change has led very quickly to the official dethroning of Christianity in English law, as the ultimate source of law, and the ultimate test of good.  

 

It is not just me saying this. In ‘The Times’ of 24th November 2011, we read (in an article by Anushka Asthana) :

‘Britain's equality chief has praised Theresa May, the Tory Home Secretary, arguing that she fights just as hard for women's rights as Labour's fiercest advocates on the issue.’

 

The article said that Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, had (like me) compared Mrs May to Harriet Harman . It recounted ‘But Mr Phillips said that he was just as impressed by the Tories' most senior female figure. “Theresa May, in my opinion, is just as aggressive as Harriet Harman was on women's equality,” he said. “Equality is an issue that can transcend politics, and we should judge people not on their political label but what they are doing and what they deliver.” Mr Phillips is also recorded as having praised Mrs May for resisting pressure to do a U-turn on the Equality Act and fighting off attempts to remove workplace protections for women.’

 

Somehow or other this person is now being portrayed as a ‘New Iron Lady’, because of some neo-liberal stuff on privatising helath and education (which, whatever it is, is not conservative) and because she is making promises (on which she must be pretty sure she will never be tested ) to repeal the Human Rights Act.

 

Is this credible?  Back in December 2009, Mrs May was puffed by the Guardian in an admiring interview, during which she let slip that she now favoured all-women shortlists for the selection of Tory candidates This was the same Mrs May who, in an earlier incarnation, had said (in 2002): ‘: 'I'm totally opposed to Labour's idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I've competed equally with men in my career, and I have been happy to do so in politics too.'

 

I would also like to harp on here about Mrs May’s curious portrayal of her own education.  She repeatedly says in official reference books that she went to Wheatley Park Comprehensive School, a reasonably well-regarded rural comp, based on an old manor house outside the samll town or large village of Wheatley, a few miles to the East of Oxford.

 

Actually, it is not quite that simple. She attended a private convent school till she was 13. Then in 1969, she went (presumably after passing a selective exam) to Holton Park, a girls’ grammar school. In 1971, two years later, this was merged with Shotover School, a nearby mixed sex secondary modern, and became Wheatley Park Comprehensive. It was normal practice, during such mergers, for the existing grammar school pupils to continue in a ‘grammar stream’ until the end of their education.  I cannot say for certain that it was the case during Mrs May’s schooling, but it is highly likely.

 

Now, I know of at least one former Labour MP who described his school (in reference books)  as a ‘comprehensive’ even though the city in which he was educated had no comprehensive schools at the time, and the school involved was a secondary modern. He was so keen to emphasise that she had undergone this egalitarian baptism, that he overcame this little detail( and in truth there’s not much difference between most comps and most secondary moderns). I can see why a committed socialist might want to blue the boundaries.

 

But why would a Conservative MP, in describing her schooling, choose to describe it so? The Tories say emphatically that they won't build any new grammar schools, but they sort of acknowledge they were a good thing and won't (for now) destroy the few remaining ones.  I think it is at least interesting, and not very encouraging to those who fancy that Mrs May is some sort of  saviour from the right.

 

Then of course there is her description of the Tories in 2002 as ‘The Nasty Party’. Few doubted that she intended to strike at those who were resisting the moral,  social and cultural revolution launched by New Labour, then very much under way. As for the praise she gets for avoiding the political traps into which previous Home Secretaries have fallen, let us note here that the main source of those traps was always the old Home Department’s responsibility for prisons , Judges and courts – which has now been handed over to the Ministry of Justice. (Just as all countries which have Ministries of Culture tend to be cultural deserts, countries with Justice Ministries tend to be pretty short of justice, but that’s a discussion for another time).  

 

Now, what has such a person got against the Human Rights Act, or the Court? In my view, I can’t see why she should quarrel with it on any principle.  

 

What did she actually say? I haven’t so far been able to obtain a full copy of her speech. But this is one key passage : ‘We need to stop human rights legislation interfering with our ability to fight crime and control immigration. That's why, as our last manifesto promised, the next Conservative government will scrap the Human Rights Act, and it's why we should also consider very carefully our relationship with the European Court of Human Rights and the Convention it enforces. When Strasbourg constantly moves the goalposts and prevents the deportation of dangerous men like Abu Qatada, we have to ask ourselves, to what end are we signatories to the convention? Are we really limiting human rights abuses in other countries? I'm sceptical.’

 

She also said : ‘By 2015 we'll need a plan for dealing with the European Court of Human Rights. And yes, I want to be clear that all options - including leaving the Convention altogether - should be on the table.’

 

Now, those who were diddled by Mr Slippery’s ‘pledge’ of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty should recall how important the detailed language turned out to be. The Slippery Team managed to argue that Mr Cameron’s pledge was annulled by the fact that the Treaty had been ratified (I always note here the very interesting fact that this ratification was not achieved until after the Tory conference of that year, so sparing the Slippery Team from having to make this rather tattered defence in front of a hall full of actual Tory Party members).

 

Now, Mrs May here speaks of ‘The next Conservative Government’. Well, when will that be, say the Bells of Old Bailey? Even if Mr Nigel Farage is silly enough to offer the Tories some kind of pledge in 2015 (and if he does this he will drive his party straight over a cliff), the Tories cannot win the next election (or the one after, or the one after that). As I have been pointing out now for at least seven years, the Tories will never again form a majority in a United Kingdom Parliament. So pledges of this kind are not just post-dated cheques. They are cheques signed in invisible ink, drawn on a non-existent account. We all know what happened to Mr Cameron’s ‘British Bill of Rights’ (he seems not to know we already have one) and the commission set up to look into it. Mrs May’s pledge is from the same dodgy shop, the sort which, when you take your wonky goods back a week later, has whitewash smeared on the window and a sign saying ‘Closed!’ upon the door.

 

As for the ‘option’ of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, an option is presumably a choice. Thus, what she has actually said is that a *choice* of leaving or not leaving the ECHR (in which she might take the choice of staying in) will be *on the table* (which does not mean that it would be adopted, or that she would adopt it, or that it couldn’t also be snatched *off* the table at a later stage) and all this would only happen  *if the Tories win the next election*, which of course they will not do.

 

My goodness, this is not tough talk. Cloud Cuckoo Land, or the summit of Kanchenjunga, seem accessible by comparison with these remote and unattainable conditions, as does a nice slice of Pie in the Sky, and an attractive  holiday in a Castle in the Air (paid for in full, in advance).  Anyone who is taken in by it deserves everything he gets.

 

We are back with my favourite derisive rhymes – ‘With a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the houses in between’,  and ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs’. Indeed we could.  I think it is best summed up by pointing out that, if Mrs May were a verb, she would be no more definite or reliable than her pledges. Why do people take this sort of thing seriously? For the same reason people believe all kinds of daft things – because they want to.  Why do they want to ? Because they’d rather not realise how bad things really are.  And so on. Thus universal suffrage democracy marches onward to the cliff-edge, singing as it goes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is Always Something - 'All the King's Men'

Long ago in Moscow, I was stuck in a hotel waiting for an appointment that might never come, and a phone call that might take six hours to get through, or might also never happen at all.  It was winter and coming on to snow, hard. I had run out of books. I was quite alone. Late in the darkening afternoon, I slogged across town by metro to the old Foreign Languages Publishing House bookshop, in the hope of picking up a cheap classic in English. Some sort of providence had directed me. By then (it was the mid-Gorbachev era) the money was running out and the shelves were mostly bare. But there was one, slightly-foxed edition of ‘All the King’s men’ by Robert Penn Warren. I had never, to my shame, even heard of this book, which doesn’t have anything like the reputation in Britain that it ought to have.

 

The Soviet version, in pale khaki board covers, was crammed with dense footnotes, going deeply into the corrupt nature of American politics. You could see why they would like that. It was rather like those old British wartime standard volumes, poorly printed on bad paper, and all the more fun because of that. I wish I still had it, especially those old Marxist-Leninist footnotes.  I have no idea what became of it. Twice, since then, I have packed up my life and put it in a lorry or an ocean-going container, and you just lose things, try as you may to hang on to them. It is sad, but then so many things are.

 

I carried it back to the National Hotel, then a place of dingy grandeur, only accessible through bribes ( a bottle of Chanel No 5 to the reception lady , promised in advance on the phone, worked well),   had a frugal supper and retired to my huge, shadowy bedroom with its deep, wrecked armchair and its sagging, Tsarist-era bed, looking out on to what was then Gorky Street, and the great fleets of snowploughs going past every ten minutes in formation, passing the snow to each other across the broad highway like rugby forwards.   

 

Then I opened the book, and I did not stop reading it till morning. The phone call never did come through.   That was, what?, 22 or 23 years ago, and I have in a way, been reading it ever since.  I am not sure how many times I have read and re-read it. I sometimes think I know it by heart, but I never do. Each time I read it I find something else. My head is full of pictures – the big car thundering dangerously through the night, the sad houses it visits, the rending descriptions of country solitude and loneliness, of sad, failed parents - and the simply superb brief evocation of how individuals can be left behind by a close relative who achieves greatness, and who is both still present physically in the lives of those close to him, but also gone forever.

 

Penn Warren is a poet who restrains himself into prose. Sometimes the prose is a bit too lush even for me, though it is a good, justifiable lushness which has much to do with the fecund, swampy, steamy deep , deep deep South with which it deals. It drives on, for most of the time, much as Willie Stark’s four-ton Cadillac drives relentlessly down Willie Stark’s’ brand new concrete highways, with the endlessly pathetic figure of Sugar-Boy, the chauffeur and bodyguard, intent at the wheel. Even he will have his hour, fierce and sweet.

 

Willie Stark is so obviously based upon the Louisiana Governor Huey Long that nobody even bothers to pretend he is not. Look him up. Many,  at the time,  feared he might be a sort of American Fascist (another reason why the Soviet publishers brought out the book) . Others just decried his open corruption and his use of unrestrained blackmail to get his way. Others genuinely loved him for the things he did. To this day I think his memory is complicated.

 

But the book also comes quite close to making a case for him. If you want to study the argument about ends justifying means, or original sin, or whether you can do good things by bad methods, or make good buildings out of rotten materials ( a metaphor that goes back to Stark’s beginnings) , here is all the material you need, closely observed, and involving  small group of believable and likeable characters, of whom my favourite will always be Sadie Burke, with her pockmarked face and her massacred hair, the Governor’s almost permanently furious mistress and manager, who complains that he is two-timing her (which he does)  though of course she can hardly do so because she is herself two-timing Willie’s wife. Sadie is the person who – without meaning to – changed Willie Stark’s life forever in a scene of mingled farce and revenge which is one of the most enjoyable reversals of fortune ever written down.  As for the narrator, Jack Burden,  once a journalist, you will have to get to know him yourself. I have come to assume that his name has something to do with Christian’s burden in the Pilgrim’s Progress, amongst other things.

 

Penn Warren does not try to hide his purpose. The book is a terrifying statement (over and over again)  of the fact, discovered too late by most of us, that actions have consequences, that by simply brushing carelessly against the great spider’s web of the universe we can bring about the most terrible results.

 

There is a book within the book, concerning an adulterous affair in the ante-bellum south, which utterly destroys first one, then two , then three human beings (and ravages the life of a fourth, whom we never see). It simply reeks of the pain of remorse. The remembrance is grievous; the burden is intolerable. It also contains the shortest (and the most potent) illicit love-letter I have ever seen, and the most savage denunciation of hypocrisy.

 

But all the time the great black train of Penn Warren’s plot rumbles on across the sad Louisiana landscape,  towards its conclusion, in which all secrets shall be revealed. And what secrets they are. Willie Stark (the beneficiary of , among other things, a sound Presbyterian theological schooling  when theology still had some grit and muscle to it) is fond of saying ( as he prepares to blackmail an opponent or an obstacle)  ‘Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie (nappy) to the stench of the shroud. There is always something’.

 

There always is, too.  My goodness, yes there is.  You’ll have to read the book to find out how true it is. And once you have, you’ll never get it out of your head and, if you’re lucky, you’ll always be reading it, ever afterwards. There are two films based on it – the older one better, though neither really gets within half a mile of the power of the real thing.  The book is the thing. Everyone should read it. That’s something else I owe to Moscow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nick Clegg claims his son's new school is a comprehensive? That's like calling No 10 an inner-city terrace!

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Almost all scandals have consequences. The law is changed or people are punished. Only one enormous scandal goes on happening again and again, and nothing is ever done about it.

It is the way in which our new elite seek selective education for their own children, while ruthlessly denying it to everyone else. Nicholas Clegg is the latest of these revolting hypocrites, and he too will get away with it.

So have Anthony Blair, Diane Abbott, Harriet Harman and Ruth Kelly, and several others who have never been publicly found out.

This unpunished disgrace has been going on since the political class abolished the grammar schools, a terrible act of vandalism which is still damaging  the country every day, 48 years after it began. I cannot understand why the British people have put up with it for so long.

You might think the elite did this because they at least thought it would produce better schools. On the contrary, the idea’s inventor, Sir Graham Savage, admitted from the start that it would hold back the ablest children.

He just thought it would be more ‘democratic’. That has always been the point of it, to create a more socialist society, to impose compulsory equality of outcome.

It is a million times more important, in the Left’s armoury, than nationalisation or even taxation. It is Labour’s real Clause Four, never abandoned and now adopted by the Tories and the Lib Dems as well, as their pledge of loyalty to the socialist state they all support.

Why else is it that a perfectly sensible idea – selection by ability – is actually banned by law from our state schools? Imagine if businesses, or the Armed Forces, football, cricket or Olympic teams were also barred by law from choosing on the grounds of ability. Everyone would think it mad. Yet, when the same unhinged rule is applied to schools, all the major parties agree that it should be so, and remain so for ever.

The barmy idea – that egalitarian state education is in some way noble – infects the Tories too. The grimly politically correct Home Secretary, Theresa May, tried to pretend she had a comprehensive schooling, when in fact she went to a private convent school and then to a grammar, which went comprehensive later.

And the Prime Minister and his Education Secretary – quite able to afford school fees – wangle their children into an oversubscribed and distant Church primary. This is supposed to make them look like men of the people. In fact all they have done is to deprive some poor families of places at one of the few genuinely good state schools in the area. How is thatnoble, exactly?

The same is true of Mr Clegg, who last week more or less got away with announcing that he would be sending his son to the London Oratory, a Roman Catholic school which is a comprehensive school much in the way that 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terrace house.

Being hugely oversubscribed, and having a religious character, the Oratory is really a selective school. It has to be. But the selection is subtle and hard to penetrate. Most who are rejected will never really know why others were preferred to them. And so it benefits the well-off, the influential and (it seems) the politically well-connected.

The same is true of several London schools favoured by the Left-wing elite, superb, unofficially selective academies with tiny catchment areas that most people cannot possibly afford  to live in. Some of the smuggest leftist power couples in this country have spent fortunes buying their way into these catchment areas, while pretending that they have not bought privilege for their young.

Did Mr Clegg’s spin doctors soften us  up for this shabby moment? You decide. We were told that  Mr Clegg was thinking of schooling his children privately, nowadays regarded as a terrible sin.

So, when he didn’t do that, it was reported as a sort of anti-climax. It is nothing of the sort. It is a contemptuous smack in the face for tens of thousands of families who have to take what they are jolly well given, a bog-standard comprehensive which will offer their children no way up.

I lived for a while in the Soviet Union, an officially equal society. It had exactly the same system we now have – official equality and secret elite privilege. In the end, everyone became so disgusted by this arrangement that they refused to tolerate it any more. Why do we continue to stomach it?

We promise freedom – and deliver chaos

Two years ago, Syria was an imperfect but reasonably happy place. Most people got on with their neighbours, went to work, raised their children and – almost uniquely in the Middle East – there was harmony among rival religious groups.
 

Now it is a war-ravaged hell, in which blameless people have been bankrupted, had their homes destroyed and been forced to become refugees. The red-eyed monster of religious hatred has been awakened  and stalks the streets and villages doing  dreadful crimes, which will of course be avenged with new crimes.

We, that is to say the British Government, helped to achieve this filthy thing. I suspect we did it because we expect some sort  of favours in return from the fanatical  despots who run Saudi Arabia, and who hate the Damascus government for being the wrong sort of Muslims.

Now the abject William Hague plans to make it even worse by stepping up our supplies to the rebels. Mr Hague’s pitiful performance in government is so hard to bear precisely because he is an intelligent and informed person who ought to know better.

But once again, are there no MPs willing to defy the official line, to say that, however bad the Assad government may be, war and chaos are worse for the Syrian people, and that we cannot possibly claim to be the friends of freedom in the Arab world if we ally ourselves with the Saudis?

Speak now, please, before it grows any worse.

A big dose of drug firm hype

In a way it is a surprise that there are not more Hollywood films about ‘antidepressant’ drugs, a huge revolution in American and European medicine which has changed the way people think and behave, and which is one of the most lucrative industries in human history.

Now comes Side Effects, which at first seems to be sceptical about these controversial pills and their, er,  side effects. But (plot spoiler here) the drugs end up  being vindicated and the doubters end up looking silly.  How interesting. How did that happen?

You might like to know that The New York Times wrote back in January: ‘From the beginning, Side Effects was constructed to avoid potential conflicts with the giant companies that make and sell real drugs.’

The writer of the script, Scott Burns, told the NYT: ‘I spent more time on the phone with my lawyer on this than on all my other movies combined.’ I can believe that.

If drug ‘addicts’ can
give up their drugs by using self-control, then ‘addiction’ doesn’t
exist. They can stop if they want to. Obvious, isn’t it? Not to my old
foe Russell Brand, now pontificating grandly on the subject in the
Spectator, the Guardian and the Sun. This alleged comedian, in his
designer rags, is fast becoming the voice of the Establishment. Perhaps
the Tory Party – in its endless quest to be fashionable – could skip
another generation, and make him its next leader.

 

What About the 11-plus failures, then, eh? eh?

Mr
Charles says that I seldom address the fate of those who did not pass the
Grammar School exam, the eleven-plus. I believe that anybody who searches the
index under ‘grammar schools’ and ‘comprehensives’ will find that this
accusation is flat out untrue. I address it frequently, and Mr Charles has been
writing here for quite a while. Has he been reading, though? There is a
frustrating group of contributors who write but do not read, and these – for
obvious reasons - are usually the ones who accuse me of silence on subjects
which I have addressed.

 

Anyway,
let me repeat here what I have often said. 1. Those who went to Secondary
Modern schools often did better than is generally thought. Some secondary
moderns got pupils into university even in the 1960s when there were many fewer
university places than now.

 

2.
There is no reason to believe (that I have ever seen) that those who are
nowadays excluded from the better schools, by their parents’ lack of money or
influence, do any worse than those who were sent to secondary moderns before
the 1965 change, on the grounds of ability.

 

I
believe the collapse of the old GCE ‘O’level exam (first diluted, then abolished
because too few people could pass it ) suggests that the general level of
secondary education is higher in a system that selects on merit (such as the
one we used to have, and the one which still just about exists in Northern
Ireland) , than it is in a system which selects on wealth, such as those in
England, Scotland and Wales.

 

 

3.
As I have often said (via the old Evelyn Waugh –Randolph Churchill
‘non-malignant’ joke, which you will have to look up), there is no doubt that
the pre-1965 system had many serious faults. The Secondary Moderns lacked a
clear purpose. The technical schools intended by the 1944 Act were, for the
most part, never built. They were not cured by destroying the one part of it
which worked well. A more intelligent reform, based on reason rather than on
egalitarian dogma, would have been to open many more grammar schools (they were
very unevenly spread), and particularly to expand the number of girls’ grammar
schools. A serious attempt could also have been made to set up the Technical
Schools which are still so badly needed. The sums involved would have been tiny
compared with the vast construction and bureaucratic costs of going
comprehensive, let alone the price of the absurd University expansion which was
launched by John Major and made even more bloated by New Labour.

 

As
for the eleven-plus itself, I have many times said that I prefer the German
system of selection by assessment and mutual consent, combined with at least
one second chance (at 13) and perhaps more such chances for pupils whose
talents develop later. 

 

I
have said all this before. I suppose I should be grateful for the chance of
saying it again, but honestly I find it exasperating that people such as Mr
Charles can come here and brazenly complain that I haven’t addressed it when I
have. I would appreciate his personal acknowledgement that he has read this
posting, so that, if he once again claims I have not addressed the issue, I can
simply reproduce it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can This Be Love?

Can this be love? Those of you who enjoyed my recent argument with the Roman Catholic journalist Damian Thompson will undoubtedly have fun with his latest contribution to a national newspaper, here http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100206194/fake-moon-landings-lib-dem-kool-aid-and-my-row-with-peter-hitchens/ , in which he says : 

 

‘Did you know that the late great Christopher Hitchens … had a younger, less talented, journalist brother called Peter? Me neither – until I was asked by the Spectator to debate the subject of addiction with this gentleman, a chap in a blazer who reminds me of the Viz character Major Misunderstanding.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Well, as Rudyard Kipling once noted ‘The dog returns to his vomit, and the sow returns to her mire, and the fool’s burned, bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire’. Having lost his argument with me while I was there, he seeks to rerun it elsewhere, but in my absence. This is quite understandable, if silly,  but  I can only wonder if Mr Thompson isn’t perhaps overly concerned about me,  or even perhaps in some way beguiled by his first actual meeting with me after contemplating me from afar for so long.

This encounter has, for instance, so confused and discombobulated him that, though - when we met - he appeared to recognise me on sight, and said he had read at least one of my books, he now says he had never heard of me before our encounter last Wednesday. He has also imagined my apparel. I last wore a blazer when it was a compulsory item of school uniform, at the age of 14.

 

Perhaps this is all just an excuse to publicise his new book (what is it called, again?). But amid all the flattery which he heaps upon me personally, he accuses me of being ‘scientifically illiterate’ on the subject of ‘addiction’. To this, I must object. In our discussion, it was plain that Mr Thompson, like so many other advocates of this bogus concept, is also  deeply confused about it. He refers to behaviours as ‘compulsive’, while admitting that in fact they are matters of choice. I am not sure what Mr Thompson’s *scientific* qualifications are (I have none) but , as in so many questions where pseudo-science is used to muddy the waters, the problem is a simple one, of facts and logic. Compulsion cannot co-exist with freedom to choose.

 

Someone who chooses to take an illegal drug, with a reputation for being habit-forming and also for being rather damaging,  may well alter his brain and body chemistry by doing so. But he still did so as an act of choice. What’s more,  every cigarette smoker knows that, while it is very hard to give up something which is habit-forming, it is not impossible to do so. And as long as it remains possible to give it up by an act of will (and there is much evidence that this is the case) the resort to some implacable, uncontrollable force called ‘addiction’ is not permitted to anyone who respects either truth or logic.

 

I’d also note a very striking thing about the article – the use of my late brother, Christopher, as a weapon against me.  The heart sinks at this feeble, playground stuff.  I am accustomed to the screeching, foam-flecked fanatics of the Christopher Hitchens Fan Club, who openly call for my death and make invidious comparisons between me and my sibling to which it is of course impossible to make any reply save silence, as they know instinctively (rather than intellectually – they’re usually not very bright) .

 

But what do we make of the fact that some supposedly conservative and even religious commentators (in many cases people who would not give me the time of day) pile such praise upon my brother , who was a Bolshevik to his last breath and who hated and mocked the Christian religion which Mr Thompson espouses; and who reserved a special loathing for the Roman Catholic church to which Mr Thompson belongs.  One day I must sit down and think this through. I’m sure Mr Thompson hasn’t.

 

The funny thing is that I enjoyed my meeting with Mr Thompson, and still enjoy his articles. I was rather disappointed that he made his  scene, as I had thought it would be pleasant to chat to him over coffee after our discussion. This currently seems unlikely. But he’s welcome to get in touch, at any time. So far, my sense of humour has survived the encounter.  

 

 

 

 

'The Methods of Stalin - The Presentational Skills of Richard and Judy', my report on Hugo Chavez's Venezuela from 2008.

The death of Hugo Chavez prompts me to reproduce this article, my report from Caracas , which was first published in the Mail on Sunday in April 2008. 

 

 

OUT OF the grave we thought we’d shovelled it into all those years ago, revolutionary Marxism comes climbing once again. Most of us were pleased to see it go, but not all of us.

 

No wonder the world’s incurably fashionable Leftists, who hate their own countries, love Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. They have been homeless since the USSR fizzled away in a cloud of rust, and even more bereft since a trembling Fidel Castro laid down his combat fatigues and went off into the twilight in his pyjamas.

 

Comrade Chavez has given them back a fatherland, and provided them with a hero – a strangely lovable, smiling one, with a sense of humour and a good line in teasing mockery of the United States. He also has some of the biggest oil reserves in the world.

 

Castro, of course, never had any oil. But Venezuela is overflowing with it, which changes everything. In this increasingly sinister country, oil money sustains a more or less unhinged regime that mixes the methods of Stalin and the presentational skills of Richard and Judy to impose socialism on the Caribbean’s southern shores.

 

It also makes global mischief, flirting with Iran and the rest of the outcast and stroppy nations of the world. Does it matter? Yes. Venezuela is now an important global focus for trouble; a rallying point for the enemies of Western society and lawful democracy, a new source of hope for every silly idealist, from London’s Ken Livingstone upwards.

 

And it is a menace to the wobbling economies of the world. Chavez has been busily nagging Opec to keep up the world price of oil, while cunningly keeping down the cost at home to buy votes. Oil may fetch more than $100  a barrel on the world markets, but Venezuelans can fill their cars for just 75 pence .

 

Still, economic bungling of the standard Marxist kind can create bankruptcy and rationing out of the greatest abundance. What ought to be one of the most prosperous societies on earth is suffering grave shortages of the most basic things. This week in Caracas I have seen many queues for milk, which even the rich cannot get. If a delivery arrives at a supermarket it is gone in half an hour. Last week there was no lavatory paper. Before that, it was rice and meat you couldn’t get.

 

Inflation is terrible, and power cuts are increasingly common.

 

Amid this mess, the nation’s would-be despot rules largely through a curious weekly TV talk show – Hallo, President! – in which he harangues his people, argues with his audience, publicly humiliates and lectures his terrified ministers, invents policies, prophesies grandiose schemes which will never happen and occasionally breaks into song. Comrade Chavez fancies himself as a singer, a baseball player and a comedian.

 

As he himself says: ‘It’s a religious programme – because God only knows when it will end.’ Which is true enough. Dignitaries invited to join the studio audience take cushions, sandwiches and bottles of water to help them endure the hours of raging, reminiscence and chatter.

 

El Presidente’s unending rants have become a national joke. At a recent summit in Chile, King Juan Carlos of Spain snapped at Chavez: ‘Why don’t you shut up?’ Millions of Venezuelans downloaded the rebuke and use it as the ring-tone on their mobiles.

 

Sleepless and obsessive, Chavez pursues his revolutionary ends into the small hours, ringing his cabinet with his latest ideas, commandeering TV stations, descending on remote townships and ordering local officials to complete 17 impossible targets before breakfast.

 

They just hope he won’t come back and check, for his wrath can be terrible.

 

This might appear to be a fun revolution: student politics on a big budget. It must be the only country where the graffiti is done by the government, with the police standing guard over artists as they spray pro-Chavez murals. Activists are everywhere in their scarlet, slogan-covered T-shirts. In the squares of Caracas, little stalls called ‘Hot Corners’ blare out revolutionary speeches and hand out propaganda – which probably helps make up for the lavatory-paper shortage.

 

But it is not half so funny if you look closely. And it is not funny at all if you dare to stand up to Chavez. For this brilliant, impulsive and charming former parachute officer is also a ruthless seeker of power and true believer in revolution. And he does not really care how he gets control, or how he holds on to it.

 

He may go on about democracy, but he would have been perfectly happy to attain office with gunfire and tanks. His first attempt at the presidency was in 1992, when he tried a military coup. It was a clownish failure; the sort of putsch where people fail to turn up on time, get lost and cannot find the keys to vital buildings.

 

So much for Lieutenant Colonel Chavez’s military skills. But amazingly, before they took him away to prison, the authorities put him on TV so he could order his followers to lay down their arms. He did so, but added two crucial words: ‘Por ahora’ (For now).

 

Like Schwarzenegger’s ‘I’ll be back’ in The Terminator, this has become his catchphrase – it thrills supporters and frightens opponents.

 

From that day, his popularity grew. And it is easy to see why. Like almost every oil state, Venezuela has fouled up its inheritance. Needless poverty besieges Caracas in the form of squalid, chaotic, violent shanty towns that are so dangerous the police won’t go there at weekends. In this country of 28million people, there are 1,000 murders a month and guns are everywhere.

 

Yet these shameful slums lie within sight of the modern towers of the city. Chavez realised there were millions of votes in these suppurating places, so he scattered his oil bounty among them. Cuban medical workers have set up clinics in the slums. Smart new schools are being built there. Hundreds of thousands receive state handouts direct from Chavez, who has seized the state oil company and uses it as a private bank to reward supporters.

 

These supporters know which side their votes are buttered: pro-Chavez posters decorate their wretched homes. Standing outside his sister’s tiny three-room house – or shed – in the San Agustin shanty district, Juan, a security guard working for a state project, told me: ‘In all my 53 years Hugo Chavez is the best leader this country has ever had. Before him, this neighbourhood was abandoned. Now we have such good health care that doctors come to our homes on house calls.’ He adds quickly: ‘This is thanks to our Cuban brothers.’

 

Now I am sure some of what Juan said was intended for the suspicious-looking character who hung around nearby as we talked, ears flapping, plainly spying for the state.

 

But some of it was true. The San Agustin slum has been festering on its humid hillside for 70 years, and this is the first time anyone has done anything about it. That is why Venezuela’s ‘democratic’ non-socialist political parties are discredited and widely hated.

 

Chavez has proved that neglect of the poor is not inevitable, he speaks and thinks like them and has used the oil billions to build up an army of followers who will vote for him.

 

Nobody can claim Venezuela was ever a well-run, fair country. But it does have quite a strong civil society, independent of the state in a way Marxists cannot stand. Press and TV are free. The universities teach without state interference. The government more or less abides by the constitution. Private property is as safe as steel bars, guards and barricades at the ends of wealthy streets can make it.

 

Yet there is now a dark threat: last year Chavez moved beyond social reform and began to show his very sharp teeth. He began by shutting down the country’s oldest TV station, RCTV, because its criticisms had annoyed him. That’s when he encountered dangerous resistance for the first time.

 

It came from people he could not dismiss as plutocrats or supporters of the old regime. His opponents were middle-class students. One of their leaders was Geraldine Alvarez, a 22-year-old who does not look or sound like a would-be politician, but as if she would rather be out at a party. And that is what makes her so dangerous to Chavez. She is not a professional politician, she serves no vested interest and she is immune to all his nasty Bolshevik tactics.

 

When Chavez said he would close RCTV, she and some friends began a protest. The official TV station censored them. The police attacked their peaceful protests with tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets.

 

Geraldine said: ‘When we went to the National Assembly and asked for the right of reply, they said we were terrorists and trained by the CIA. They said on state TV that I was mentally ill. But most people did not buy these lies. Poor people in this country view students with sympathy. They could see the placards we carried were home-made, not mass-produced like those of the government.’

 

Nor did people believe it when Chavez sneered that the students were ‘spoiled rich brats’, since most came from modest middle-class or working-class homes.

 

WHEN censorship and smears failed, the regime re-sorted to the bully tactics familiar in Eastern European countries as they were dragged into communism in the Forties. Supposedly spontaneous ‘counter-demonstrators’ appeared, hurling stones and bottles at the students – from behind police lines.

 

Chavez supporters, firing guns, raged through the campus of the main Caracas university. The bullet holes can still be seen in buildings.

 

‘It was so dangerous at one time that we had to wear bulletproof vests,’ Geraldine recalls. But they never fell into Chavez’s trap, refusing to attack the President personally and ignoring calls from the opposition leaders: ‘We said, “We are students, not politicians.”’

 

By this time, Chavez had taken his next step: a planned new constitution that would have abolished the 12-year limit on his term of office, and which many believed would threaten private property.

 

Geraldine said: ‘We stopped people in the streets and on the buses and urged them to read these proposals. We wanted to wake the people up.’

 

Their courage and determination paid off. Chavez began to lose powerful support among his own oldest friends. General Raul Isaias Baduel, 52, had been a comrade from their early days in the army together, but he resigned as defence minister in protest at the planned constitutional changes. He is now trying to build a new opposition.

 

The desk in Baduel’s office – untypically for a paratroop commander – is covered in books on politics and philosophy.

 

The table behind it is crowded with Roman Catholic religious images curiously mingled with a Koran and an Israeli army camouflage skullcap. He and Chavez are no longer friends. ‘I feel he has cancelled our friendship,’ he says. Typically, Chavez was charming at first but later Baduel’s bodyguards were abruptly withdrawn and Chavez supporters began to smear him. Baduel’s actions, while commanding a paratroop unit based near the capital, saved Chavez from a Right-wing coup attempt in 2002. Yet, in 2007, Baduel accused his old friend of planning what was in effect a coup against the constitution. He says on both occasions he was acting according to the same principle.

 

Chavez’s admirers would also find it hard to dismiss Ismael Garcia, leader of the socialist Podemos party (the name means ‘we can’). Garcia shows me a picture of himself at a rally a few years ago, sitting smiling two seats away from his one-time comrade, Chavez. But he, too, has now split with him, refusing to merge his group into the single party Chavez wants, once again using Stalinist tactics from 60 years and 4,000 miles away.

 

Garcia says Chavez’s constitutional reforms would have threatened private property had they gone ahead: ‘He proposed the state model that failed in the Soviet Union, in which the state controls everything.’

 

Together, the student movement, the shortages and the defections of his old allies led to Chavez being narrowly beaten in a referendum on his constitutional changes. Many feared he would ignore the result and go ahead anyway, others suspected he would rig the vote, but with surprising wisdom and patience, he did neither. It is rumoured his old friend Castro called him from his sick-bed to tell him to bow to the verdict and play a long game. So he waits.

 

He continues to use oil money to buy the backing of the poor and – it is widely believed – arm them against the remote danger of another army coup.

 

He plans a slow revenge on the students: he is demanding that universities drop their entrance exams so he can pack them with his young, half-educated supporters.

 

Oil prices continue to climb, so Chavez will be able to buy off most trouble for the foreseeable future. And then?

 

To reassure supporters and intimidate critics, huge red placards have been placed on high points in the city, bearing those two words ‘Por ahora’ with which he once before promised to be back.

 

As the United States weakens and China grows in power, as the victories of the Cold War are frittered away and Russia slides back towards its ancient autocracy, what happened to all those brave hopes that free societies were here to stay and the mad experiments of the 20th Century would never be repeated?

 

Here we go again, red flags flapping, off to the same old disaster – and fashionable Leftists in the West are applauding, as usual.