Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 282

Cold as Charity

I’m told by Mr Charles ‘PH isn't too keen on the word 'compassion'. He really should go into a children's home and talk to some of these emotionally deprived kids. He might discover that there's a bit more to 'addiction' than his huffy dismissal of it warrants.’

I am all in favour of compassion. I just don’t mistake it for indulgence. I have no doubt that one of the things these ‘deprived kids’ have been most thoroughly deprived of in their lives is authority, and a clearly enforced set of rules.  How would I help them by making excuses for stupid drugtaking?

 

I have explained many times why drug abusers do not merely damage themselves , but many others as well, though it is of course perfectly obvious to any thinking person that the drug abuser destroys his family and does terrible things to those who love him, as well as forcing the whole of society to feed and house him because he has made himself incapable of doing so.    I do wish people would think before they write.

 

I am asked ‘If you don't believe addiction exists, would you care to explain what you think happened to China when we shipped them opium in the nineteenth century?’ I think that people bought and used Opium.  I believe that when the Chinese Communist regime later sought to stamp out Opium abuse, it was remarkably successful. The methods used would only be available to a despotic state, and I could not myself support them,  but that does not alter the fact that people can give up drug abuse if they wish, and that other , similarly determined methods are available to free countries, which may not be as swiftly effective but could even so achieve the same result in time.

 

The concept of ‘addiction’ is not needed to explain the habitual use of drugs, or of anything else. The question is essentially circular. If you believe ‘addiction’ exists, then  you will find it everywhere. If you don’t, you won’t. What is lacking, and what will always be lacking, is any objective proof of the presence of this mysterious force in the human body. And as long as that is lacking, addiction is a fiction and an excuse for a failure of self-control. This fact, or absence of facts, breaks the circle for anyone interested in scientific truth rather than propaganda.

 

Why is ‘experience’ of severe failure of one’s own will of any particular use? We have all failed, in thousands of ways, to control ourselves when we should have and ought to acknowledge this, as I do, and regret it and seek not to repeat it.  No doubt people differ. That is one of the reasons why I favour a strong deterrent law, to help the weaker individuals stay away from drug abuse in the first place.

 

I repeatedly make the following point, which none of my critics ever addresses. If they are right about ‘addiction’ and it forms an iron chain around the heart of the drug abuser which cannot be broken, then surely we should direct every possible effort to preventing him from taking the ‘addictive’ drug in the first place. In which case, a strong and credible deterrent law is the most effective possible weapon. Yet, oddly, the more people believe in the iron inescapability of ‘addiction’,  the more they oppose a deterrent law. This is utterly illogical, and suggests that they either don’t understand what they’re talking about, or don’t believe the things they say.

 

A person called ‘Martin’ says that Mr Thompson ‘won’ the discussion. Unless he can say what Mr Thompson’s killer point was, in fact and logic, this statement means no more than ‘I, Martin, agree with Mr Thompson’.

 

Once again, charity and compassion are not necessarily demonstrated by indulgence of wickedness. In  fact, I should rather say that true charity  (which is not puffed up, vaunteth not itself, behaveth itself not unseemly) is ready to be called rude names and be misrepresented in the cause of giving people genuine help. Any fool can give money to a drug-abusing beggar, knowing he will use it to buy more drugs, and give himself a warm feeling inside for his ‘generosity’. Any fool can call for ‘compassion’ for people who above all need authority, thus ensuring that others will follow them into the dreadful world of drug abuse.  And any fool can be praised for it, by himself above all others.

 

It is not ‘martyrdom’ to be called rude names for standing by principles. Far from it, and I have never said it was, or suggested it was. On the contrary,  I have come to enjoy it rather too much, as it happens, and should probably confess it as a sin. But I’m not quite sure what else to do.  

 

Somebody called Fraser asks someone (presumably me) ‘Didn't you spectacularly fail to give up alcohol for a month recently? So hypocritical it hurts’ . I’m unaware of this episode. Perhaps he could provide me with details.

 

Somebody asks me why I am so sure prison would deter people from abusing drugs. I cannot be wholly sure, though it seems reasonably likely, to put it mildly. Not many people want to go a punitive prison, and most would at least hesitate before doing anything which would put them in one. What I can be sure of is that more than 30 years of *not* sending drug abusers to prison has been followed by a steady increase in habitual drug abuse, to its current level of around 300,000 people in Britain. As I say, Mr Brand is arguing for what we already have, and doesn’t seem to realise it. Since this has failed so badly, mightn’t it make sense to try a different approach?

 

I am also asked this by Mr Rogers ‘I have my doubts, however, about the effectiveness of potential incarceration as a deterrent to any sort of crime. I think there must also be doubts as to the effectiveness of prison as a means to reform and treat drug users, though much would depend on conditions in prison. What sort of prison conditions would Mr Hitchens envisage for drug users? Should drug users be placed in the general prison population or does he think we should have special abstinence prisons?  ‘

 

My policy involves a general revival of the idea that people are responsible for their own actions, which also means that prisons would once again become explicitly punitive places, rather than what we have now -  purposeless warehouses maintained by a reluctant government which doesn’t believe in personal responsibility or its corollary,  punishment  - but fears public opinion too much to take its views to their logical conclusion, and abolish prisons altogether.  The prison conditions I recommend for all lawbreakers are austere but not squalid, involving a great deal of hard physical work concentrated into short sentences which no sane person will wish to repeat.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Killer Angels

I quickly learned, when I lived in the USA, that only two wars really counted in the American historical imagination – the Vietnam War and the Civil War.  The French expulsion of our German mercenaries, quaintly known as the War of Independence, has become a myth. The great conflicts which fascinate us, and fill our literature, are far less important. To my shame, I never made the time to make a proper study of the Civil War.

 

Years ago, hurrying for a train at Washington’s Union Station, and having nothing to read, I bought a book I’d vaguely heard of,  because of its connection with a film I had meant to see but hadn’t. the book was Michael Shaara’s ‘Killer Angels’ , the film ‘Gettysburg’ , is so long I still haven’t found time to see it. But I usually pack the book on any journey to the USA, in case I feel like re-reading it.  And, once again, thanks to the poor selection of in-flight films, I found myself doing so last week.

 

At the book’s opening, the reader is given a marvellous view of the war, as it were from the sky above it. The opposing armies, and the great differences between them,  are movingly and lyrically described,  in a way that explains the nature of the quarrel better than anything I have ever seen.  Shaara cleverly permits himself personal sympathy with the supporters of the Confederacy - a  cause he does not share.  He makes their motivation and undoubted bravery far easier to understand , as a result.

 

He  also notes, in a brief but surprisingly moving aside,  that the countryside in which the decisive struggle of the Civil War developed and resolved itself was (and is) extraordinarily lovely.  Why does this seem to matter so? In my experience wars are almost always fought over heartbreakingly beautiful landscapes, but there is something particularly idyllic about the America of the 1860s, modern yet still lost in a Sylvan peace that the Union victory would almost entirely end. Yiou can still find the ghost of it – particularly in Virginia, near Thomas Jefferson’s small but captivating house, Monticello. The eastward view in autumn, of wave after wave of wooded hills pouring towards the Atlantic, was called ‘My Sea View’ by Jefferson himself, and it is possible, while looking at it on a still afternoon, to think yourself in 18th century, when no man’s house was close enough for you to hear his dogs barking.

 

One of the joys of living in the Washington suburbs was being on the fringe of a far wilder, older America than the mess of malls, cineplexes, mass-produced housing and Beltways which choked the immediate capital area. You could easily escape to the Blue Ridge, that extraordinarily wistful and serene place, where you can still find unself-conscious flag-shaded small towns, white wooden houses amid trees, utterly American in the summer heat yet (beneath all the New World appearances) rather English too. But beyond all this lies the Shenandoah valley, as beautiful as its name, a dreamland of forest and slowly sliding river, the last intimate, small-scale piece of landscape before the country opens up into the great flatness of the Midwest, with the Mississippi beyond. . 

 

The beauty of the Civil War battlefields is a very moving thing. Apart from a fleeting glimpse of Manassas/Bull Run (the South tends to call them by the names of the nearest town, the North by the name of the nearest watercourse, where there’s a choice) ,   I have only properly been to one, at Fredericksburg in Virginia, and it is shocking to see how small the scene is, where so much dreadful death was inflicted, so much courage shown. You can still sometimes find spent bullets, and very ugly things they are too. Once one of those had ripped through you, the butcher-surgeons of 1860 would not be able to do much , except more harm. It’s one of the great tragedies of modern times that people didn’t see, in the industrialised carnage of the 1860s, a warning of the war to come in 1914.  

 

It was behind the Blue Ridge, and in the Shenandoah valley,  that Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia moved northwards towards Gettysburg in the sweaty June days of 1863. Meanwhile, the Union Army of the Potomac was heading northwards on the far side of the Blue Ridge. Both were destined to meet at Gettysburg, where we all – sort of – know what happened. 

 

What Shaara does, in his rather brief book, is to portray the most important figures in each army, generously and carefully, as they approach their rendezvous. He lets us know what they knew and understood, and what they didn’t know and couldn’t possibly have known.  He enters the minds of men of that age and time, not seeking to give the sensitivities and foreknowledge they could not possibly have, and trying as far as possible to sue the language they would have used. . He describes, with extraordinary power and economy, the effects on Lee of the heart disease that would eventually kill him, and which may well have affected his judgement and performance when battle came. I wonder if Shaara himself suffered from the same thing, since the description is so penetrating.

 

He inserts among them the rather comical figure of a British Guards officer (convinced that the Confederacy will win, and secretly appalled by the rough manners of the courtly Southerners – rough by Pall Mall standards, anyway  - they keep shaking hands, for goodness’ sake) , an enjoyable device for explain some things that might otherwise have been hard to get into the narrative. And there is a beautiful comment on the oddities of British manners from a gruff Confederate officer - ‘Talk like ladies – fight like wildcats’ – which contains a world of baffled incomprehension. Yet the British officer is overwhelmed to find that General Lee is more or less an English gentleman, right down to being an Anglican.

 

From the defence of Little Round Top to the useless, beautiful failure of Pickett’s Charge, he describes the decisive and often very moving events of this more or less wholly bungled battle in such a way that I felt I understood it properly for the first time. What amazed me was just how poor a job the legendary Lee actually made, how badly he was served by several of his generals and how he wrongly ignored James Longstreet,  who could have saved him from defeat, even if he couldn’t have turned it into a victory.

 

The emotions of battle, for some a heightened sense of being alive so joyous that they seek it again and again, for some an abrupt end, for some a welcome chance to pay a debt of honour through death, for some a storm of hopeless tears, are also well set down. And behind it all, he notes how in many cases those fighting had true friends fighting on the other side, whom they had to fight but hoped not to kill, and in many cases longed to meet again in friendship. Heaven spare any of us from another Civil War.

 

I would be proud if I could have written anything a quarter as good.  And I’m now determined to go to Gettysburg itself one day, and walk the haunted fields myself .  I foolishly dismissed it from my mind, when it was just a morning’s drive away, by persuading myself  that it would be a tourist trap – when in fact I know perfectly well that the USA’s National Parks are tastefully and intelligently preserved by people who care very much about their country.  There is always much to be learned in the places where history was made.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Me, Drugs and Russell Brand - Round Three

Some of you will have enjoyed, and others will have endured my clashes with the alleged comedian Russell Brand, first at a Google ‘debate’ on drugs and later during a ‘Newsnight’ discussion of Mr Brand’s BBC3 programme on the subject.

 

Now, Mr Brand has penned an article for the Spectator magazine, which can be found here:

 

 http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/03/the-only-way-to-help-addicts-is-to-treat-them-as-sick-not-bad/

 

As he specifically refers to me , thus:

 

‘Peter Hitchens is a vocal adversary of mine on this matter. He sees this condition [‘addiction’]as a matter of choice and the culprits as criminals who should go to prison. I know how he feels. I bet I have to deal with a lot more drug addicts than he does, let’s face it, I share my brain with one, and I can tell you first-hand they are total nightmares. Where I differ from Peter is in my belief that if we regard alcoholics and drug addicts not as bad people but as sick people, then we can help them to get better. By we, I mean other people who have the same problem but have found a way to live drug- and alcohol-free lives.’,

 

I felt I’d give a brief reply.

 

Here it is. For the ten thousandth time, I think people should be credibly *threatened* with prison for possessing illegal drugs. Most will then not take the risk. The purpose of punishments is to deter. Each time they are actually used is a failure of deterrence. Why is this simple point so hard for Mr Brand to grasp? Also, if Mr Brand is right about ‘addiction’ being a total loss of the ability to choose ( he says ‘They are completely powerless over their addiction’), then surely it is hugely urgent to prevent anyone becoming ‘addicted’ in the first place. Logically, therefore, he too should believe in deterrence, strongly applied before these people lose their wills.  Belief in ‘addiction’ as a fact is an even stronger argument for deterrent punitive sanctions than the argument I provide.

 

Next, he has cunningly smuggled ‘alcoholics’ into the discussion. This is a red herring. Possession of alcohol is not illegal in this country, for good or ill, and so it is not possible to use the law against it in the same way as it is to use the law against illegal drugs. As it happens, the laws controlling alcohol *sale* have been greatly weakened (a tendency I oppose and condemn) in the past 25 years. The result has been more heavy drinking, drunkenness and alcohol abuse. But that is the only relevance of alcohol to the subject under discussion.

 

Next, I simply challenge him to back up the following assertion with facts :  ‘…if we regard alcoholics and drug addicts not as bad people but as sick people, then we can help them to get better’.

 

As he really ought to know, the British criminal law does not generally visit severe punishments on people found in simple possession of Class ‘A’ drugs.  In 2010, 12,175 people in England and Wales were convicted and sentenced for simple possession of Class ‘A’ drugs. Only 779 of these, fewer than one in ten, were sent to prison. I have been unable to get a breakdown of these, but I would suggest that this minority were repeat offenders, possessed unusually large quantities or were in fact sentenced for other crimes at the same time.  Or all three.  Given that the British National Treatment Agency estimated that in 2009-2010 there were 320,000 people in Britain ‘dependent’ on Crack Cocaine or Heroin, this seems a remarkably small figure, if Mr Brand is right and we are adopting a severe and punitive approach. The truth is that the British government long ago adopted the policy Mr Brand is now absurdly urging it to adopt, because he hasn’t noticed.

 

And, as a consequence of this indulgent laxity dressed up as compassion, we have more and more drug abusers.

 

Simple, really. What Mr Brand advocates has been tried, and has failed. Yet any attempt to point this out is  ignored, as if it had not been made.

 

Oh, a small note. The criminal law in a free society does not treat the criminal as a bad person, who has to be ‘corrected’. That is a fundamentally totalitarian concept, which gives the state unlimited powers to interfere in the lawbreaker’s life. It treats the crime as a bad action, for which there is a set punishment, mainly to deter those inclined to commit it, but also to deter those stupid enough to commit the crime from doing it again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Further Reflections upon the Addiction Fiction

Some of you may enjoy a Spectator podcast (link below) in which I argue with Damian Thompson about the existence of ‘addiction’. If you can stick it out till the end, he is enjoyably rude to me. He then stomped out of the room, melodramatically. I’m told he does this sort of thing quite often, which is, in a way, a pity. I had thought it was personal.

I hadn’t met Mr Thompson before, though I have often enjoyed his witty and mischievous writings in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ . As we waited in the ‘Spectator’ offices to make the recording, he said to me (this is a rough summary)  that he used to like what I wrote, but then it became clear that I didn’t like homosexuals, and he changed his mind.

 Much interested by this, I asked him what exactly it was that I had written which had caused him to form this view. He blustered about a bit, but couldn’t come up with anything. Was he sure he hadn’t mixed me up with someone else? He was sure. Well, I said, do please get in touch with me and let me know, if ever you do find the offending material. The alleged dislike is a secret from me. I have always been careful to distinguish the act from the person, and the political from the personal, as I distinguish opponents from enemies , but perhaps I am deceiving myself. 

As we well know from the whole debate, the classification of the moral conservative as some sort of hater, suffering from a pathology or irrational loathing, is a short cut to victory in any debate, winning over most audiences even if it doesn’t win the actual argument. But I should have thought Mr Thompson, obviously intelligent and educated, was above that. I’d also have thought Mr Thompson was above the suggestion that compassion and human kindness can only be expressed through indulgence of bad actions. Yet his cross dismissal of me as ‘sanctimonious’ suggests that he isn’t that far above it.

One further thought on Russell Brand’s bizarre argument. Let us try another line of approach: Mr Brand says addicts are ‘totally powerless over [their]addiction’ But he has disproved his own argument by having himself resisted the temptation to take drugs for (he says) ten years. He says he is drawn to the idea of drugs every time he has a setback in his life, but equally, that he has resisted it. So he's not totally powerless. He is in fact totally powerful.

Responsible humans are attracted to things and decide on balance not to do them. My aim is to help people, especially the young, to resist the temptations of things that are demonstrably bad for them and for everyone they know,  and for the functioning of our society.

If Mr Brand had a physical illness like tonsillitis, or an injury such as a broken leg, it really wouldn't matter whether he wanted to give in to them or not. Whatever he thought, he wouldn't be able to change the fact.  THis is absolutely not so with 'addiction'.

 

Russell Brand has, in fact, agreed with me, though he still doesn’t realise it. The problem with drug users is not that they have some physical or even mental problem that they can do nothing about. They can do something about it. It's called having self-control. I have a dream that one day, Mr Brand will find the courage to say : ‘Yes, it's all about self -control. There is no such thing as  addiction’. Peter Hitchens is right.’ It may be a while, though.

The link to the debate with Mr Thompson is here:

 http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/03/the-view-from-22-peter-hitchens-vs-damian-thompson-and-osbornes-empty-budget/

 

Moscow Nights - a Debate on Same Sex Marriage between Andrew Sullivan and Douglas Wilson

Here’s a brief and impressionistic account of the debate I chaired last week (27th February) - on same-sex marriage in Moscow,  Idaho. I believe a recording will be posted on the web fairly soon, so anyone wanting to know exactly what was said had best wait for that. My general view remains that this topic is a diversion from the main issue – the survival or otherwise of heterosexual marriage. I rather think that this debate tended to support that point, especially the implications of a central part of Andrew Sullivan’s case (see what you think). And my main purpose here is to raise a number of questions which interested me both while preparing for the debate and while chairing it.

 

The really important thing was that this was an encounter between two people who might be thought to be so far apart that a civilised exchange between them would be very difficult.

 

Doug Wilson, a politically, morally and socially conservative Calvinist pastor was ranged against Andrew Sullivan, a British-born, New York-based  campaigner for homosexual rights. Mr Sullivan remains a communicant Roman Catholic ( I specifically checked this point with him) despite his Church’s position on the issue of homosexuality. Mr Wilson is the head of a large family and the leader, if the word can be used, of a pretty close-knit community of serious Bible Christians, he lives and works in the city of Moscow, Idaho, a university town set in the small, intimate hill-country (there are some modest mountains too) called ‘The Palouse’ (pronounced ‘Paloose’) in the northern part of the State, north that is, of the lovely Snake River and the astonishing natural battlements of the escarpment that rears up over the city of Lewiston.  I introduced him, cheekily, as ‘the Ayatollah of the Palouse’, and the audience mostly laughed. They knew what I was driving at. Among Moscow’s weapons-grade Calvinists,  I’m tolerated as The Soppy English Episcopalian, presumably in the hope that I’ll eventually see the light and head for Geneva, or for St Andrew’s (the late John Knox is a living force in these parts). It makes an agreeable change from being regarded as a religious fanatic.

 

Mr Sullivan is one half of a same-sex marriage and speaks proudly of his husband. I suspect that, like most British residents in the USA, he finds the uncompromising,  determined Protestantism of Mr Wilson and his followers a pretty tall order. There hasn’t been much of this sort of thing in England since the Civil War, and very little since 1914.

 

I hadn’t previously met Mr Sullivan, but I had read his excellent and thoughtful book ‘Virtually Normal’ to prepare for the occasion, and concluded that this was a reasonable, generous person with considerable skill at words. He doesn’t ever engage in the silly bigotry against religious conservatives, to which so many sexual revolutionaries resort. His response to the bigotry of others is (rightly) to point out that it demeans them, not him. His personal accounts of his experiences as a young man who realised he was homosexual and decided to live his life as honestly as possible are very moving. Before the debate, we talked over dinner at Mr Wilson’s hilltop house (with its view of snow-dusted, pine clad mountains fading into dusk) and I rather liked him.

 

I was (as I had told the organisers) pretty neutral in the debate (the motion was ‘Civil Marriage for Gay Couples is good for society’). As I’ve explained here, I think the issue is a trap for conservatives, who for daring to express any opposition to the idea at all will immediately be dismissed as teeth-grinding ‘homophobes’ and hurled into the outer darkness, where there is no influence to be had over events.

 

My differences with Mr Sullivan are of a different kind. I just don’t think he is typical of his cause. He has made a considerable reputation as the archetypal ‘Gay conservative’ arguing – as Mr Slippery does nowadays but hasn’t always – that same-sex marriage is actually a conservative objective.

 

But how many of his allies in this cause would have come to Moscow, Idaho and remained polite and generous (as Andrew Sullivan did) throughout nearly two hours of tough, unforgiving debate against an opponent who several times invoked the law of God as his ultimate argument, and in which he (by my guess and observation) put quite a strain on his emotions? I think everyone at the debate thought Mr Sullivan spoke with great eloquence, but many also felt he pulled the emotional levers too hard and too much. I doubt if he ever had any chance of winning the final vote, but I think he might have done better if he had been a little less personally passionate. Mind you, the liberal attendance at this meeting was smaller than I had expected. Perhaps the besieged left-wingers of Moscow, Idaho, surrounded on all sides by conservatives,  felt Mr Sullivan was too moderate for them.

 

How many supporters of same-sex marriage would say, as Mr Sullivan sincerely does, that they believe in marriage till death do them part, and entirely rule out adulterous relationships by the spouses in a same-sex marriage?

 

I ask because I don’t know, but also (obviously) because I suspect the answer might be ‘not by any means all’, in which case Mr Sullivan’s case is a bit different, and my response to it is too.

 

If the movement for homosexual equality in the marriage laws is *not* tolerant, and if its view of the marriage bond is significantly different from the previously accepted norms, then it is a much bigger change than Mr Sullivan says it is.

 

He is quite right to point out ( and I completely agree with him) that it is heterosexuals who have almost destroyed traditional marriage, with easy no-fault divorce and the universal use of the contraceptive pill.

 

Does he regret that change as much as I do, despite his Roman Catholic firmness on divorce? I did probe him on this, but didn’t feel I had a clear answer. Would modern metropolitan sexual liberals of *any* orientation want marriage as it was in, say,  1955 – expected to last for life,  with severe social disapproval for those who divorced, and for those who formed families outside wedlock?

 

Then there was the matter of being *excluded* from marriage, which Mr Sullivan powerfully complains about. I don’t think this is a true description of the previous position. In the Anglican Prayer Book, there is a ‘Table of Kindred and Affinity’, dating back centuries, which lists all the people you specifically may not marry. Some of them are quite surprising, and the reader is rather amazed that anyone could contemplate such a match.  It says absolutely nothing about men not marrying men, or women not marrying women. It is not that homosexuals were *excluded*. It is that they were *not included*. Some may think this is pedantic or annoyingly subtle. Actually it is very important. If there is a specific bar to entry, then it is reasonable to ask why it is there and, if the reason given is unsatisfactory, to press for its removal. But if the institution exists, and its guardians have not even conceived that it might be open to a certain group, then what we have is an argument for a change in the nature of the institution.

 

My own view, which I have recently come to after changing my mind,  is that the demand for same-sex marriage is not itself an attack on the nature of marriage, but a *consequence* of a general change in the institution, which was actually achieved by pressure from a post-Christian heterosexual society and (as Mr Sullivan rightly says ) by the contraceptive pill.  This assault on marriage is discussed in my much-derided, little-read book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, and especially in the chapter ‘Difficulties with Girls’ which I commend to anyone interested in the question.  

 

About 30 years ago, the influential Judge who is now Baroness Hale of the Supreme Court saw clearly what was going on when she said  ‘family law no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union. It has adopted principles for the protection of children and dependent spouses which could be made equally applicable to the unmarried’. She prophesied correctly that the ‘piecemeal erosion’ of the distinction between the married and the unmarried could be expected to continue.  And she concluded that we should be discussing ‘whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purposes.’ She did not foresee the limited but passionate desire for same-sex marriage that would later emerge.

 

Again, I tried to press him on this issue of non-inclyusion rather than exclusion, but never really got to the point. I think the claim of direct exclusion, as opposed to indirect non-inclusion, is a very powerful part of his armoury. I also think it’s mistaken. There really is no reason why homosexual couples could not be given,  in reforms of individual laws, most of the rights and freedoms on inheritance, next-of-kin privileges which marriage brings.  I can see that there could be problems over citizenship rights, but even those would, I think, be soluble with good will on both sides. I stick to the view that the desire for same-sex marriage is ultimately a cultural and moral revolutionary act, applauded by its many heterosexual supporters because it emphasises that we are no longer a Christian society.

 

Quite where that leaves serious Christian believers, who are also homosexuals, such as Mr Sullivan, I am not sure. My suspicion is that, like many who seek to be honest and fair, he will face more enmity from what is supposedly his own side than he will from his direct opponents.

 

 

 

 

Am I too soft on Anthony Blair?

A number of readers are asking why I am so soft on Anthony Blair. They should read the words that I used with more care . ‘I cannot feel anger at Anthony Blair over the Iraq War which he still absurdly defends. I am quite sure he never understood what he was doing. Those who created him out of nothing, and those who were willingly fooled by him, are the ones to blame.’

 

Surely, to say that a man who was at the time Her Majesty’s First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister,  *did not understand what he was doing* is a far more devastating criticism than to rail that he was a ‘warmonger’ or ‘mass killer’ or ‘war criminal’ or whatever the crowd likes to say?  What I am saying is that Mr Blair never really was a real prime minister, that he was a little squeaking figure , baffled by events, concealed inside a booming image of power.

 

I expect those who attack me for my supposed leniency are also the ones who keep asking (though I have answered it a dozen times) why I call him ‘Anthony’ instead of ‘Tony’. It is because it is his name. His own wife, Cherie Booth, described him as ‘the barrister, Anthony Blair’ in a leaflet issued by her, during her own failed campaign for a parliamentary seat in Margate in 1983. She surely ought to have known what he was called.  It wasn’t as if she didn’t know that people called ‘Anthony’ are sometimes called ‘Tony’. She made a speech during that campaign, of which only fragments are recorded, about ‘the Two Tonys’ who had influenced her on her path to socialism. As it happens they were both present on the platform of the meeting – ‘Tony’ Benn and her father ‘Tony’ Booth. The ‘Anthony’ who had not apparently influenced her in that direction at all was sitting not on the dais but in the audience, a nobody, undistinguished either in the law (his chosen profession) or in politics (the career he hoped to pursue because he could see little future in the law, as he had recently explained to her over a glum birthday lunch, recounted in her memoirs).

By the way, I repeat here my standing request, which has never yet received an answer, for anyone who was ever represented in court by Mr Blair when he was a barrister, to step forward.

 

But he played little part in her campaign after that for, suddenly, he too was selected, at the very last moment, for the completely safe seat of Sedgefield. Unlike his fiercely left-wing wife, he had until then failed to find a seat of his own to fight, despite a reasonably competent if awkward by-election campaign in Beaconsfield, smack in the middle of the Falklands War, during which he had been teased quite a lot by the Daily Telegraph’s then sketch-writer Godfrey Barker.  He had lost his deposit.  He had also won the warm endorsement of the then party leader Michael Foot, an endorsement he later did little to repay, when poor old Footy became an unperson, not to be mentioned in public, let alone honoured as a former leader of his party and (like him or not) a distinguished figure of the Left.

 

Now, the accepted account of Mr Blair’s selection for Sedgefield doesn’t really make sense. Somehow or other this privately-educated London barrister is supposed to have beaten the formidable left-wing brawler Les Huckfield, in a left-dominated seat, either because of his not very gritty Northern connections ( he told them he had grown up on an ‘estate’ in Durham, which as technically true. It just hadn’t been a council estate) or because of a letter from Michael Foot, supposedly saying he should actually be the candidate (It didn’t. It just praised his performance in Beaconsfield), the text of which was not read out at the crucial meeting. Or perhaps it was because of his membership of CND, something he would later get the party machine to deny on his behalf. Because the Blair of 1983 was in fact a standard-issue London leftist, whatever the legends now say.

 

In my view, he held those positions not out of conviction but out of protective colouration. I belonged to a London Labour Party at that time, and I opposed CND, the LCC (Labour Co-Ordinating Committee) , and the CLPD (Campaign for Labour Party Democracy), and the rest of the outfits then pushing Labour towards its current Euro-Communist, Gramscian culturally revolutionary position, madly misunderstood both by Fleet Street and by Labour’s own thicker old leftists as  ‘right wing’.  

 

And as a result I was in a very small, very disliked minority in my Labour Party at both ward and constituency level. I enjoy that sort of thing. Most people don’t. Most of the Labour Party members who felt as I then did were leaving to join the Social Democratic Party (SDP) around that time.  

 

Round about then I first met ‘the barrister, Anthony Blair’, thanks to my wife’s membership of a body called the Society of labour Lawyers. I think our first encounter was at a gloomy dinner at the old Great Western Hotel at Paddington. Soon afterwards, to my amusement, he turned up in Parliament, round about the time I began work as a Political (lobby) reporter for my former newspaper. It was my job to take such young, new MPs out to lunch. And, as we’d met and our wives were lawyers, and as our first children had been born about the same time, we had a sort of bond. But I couldn’t be bothered to invite him out.  I felt a terrible sense of boredom at the prospect. I had an overwhelming feeling  that the leader and the policy of the day would all be praised and glorified. And that, if I did the same thing a year later and the leader and the policy had altered completely, they too would be praised and glorified. And – worst of all – I suspected he wouldn’t be aware of having changed.

 

Was I wrong? I’ve sometimes wondered. But I don’t think so. I was never going to be part of any project to revive the Labour Party’s fortunes (by then I’d left, without regret, and rather hoped that Labour would be finished for good). Even if I had been I’d have been targeted and wooed by people more knowing than A.Blair.   I’ve watched him with interest ever since and I have never heard him say anything from the heart that wasn’t banal. I feel quite differently about Alastair Campbell, a heavyweight politician whose force of mind and conviction I can respect, and an opponent  I can take seriously.  But modern politics could never have found room for Alastair. He’d scare away the voters who buy governments the way they buy cornflakes, by looking at the pretty box. Alastair’s not pretty. But which of the two actually ran the government?

 

I can’t work out what Anthony’s  really interested in – you might think religion, thanks to the fuss he makes about it, but in what way? This is a man who, soon before he became a Roman Catholic, told the Pope off for having the wrong opinions on war – a subject on which the Holy See tends to speak with some authority. Well, many of us have disagreements of one kind or another with the Vatican. But we don’t then go and deliberately join the RC church, do we?

 

He has certainly *become* interested in money and property, as all can see. But I don’t think that was his motivation at the time. Perhaps his dreadful rock band, ‘Ugly Rumours’ (I almost had to waterboard him to tell me this name, during the one flaccid, tooth-grindingly tedious interview he ever granted me, back when he was Shadow Home Secretary) gives us a clue. Perhaps, what he really wanted was to be Mick Jagger, and had to settle for being ‘Tony Blair’ instead. Oddly enough, it turned out not to be that different. The warm golden glow of celebrity, an endless stream of first-class flights , flattery and nice hotels, with all the tedious tasks of life just smoothed away, came to him in the end. Both men, interestingly , take a great deal of trouble to keep fit.

 

But back for a moment to Sedgefield. What if he really got the seat because various forces in the Labour establishment wanted the opposite of Michael Foot. To their fury, Foot had just survived because the Labour candidate had unexpectedly won the Darlington by-election (which almost everyone in the whole Shadow Cabinet had been hoping the party would lose. I’m reliably informed that, had Labour lost the Darlington by-election, Michael Foot would the following morning  have been confronted by a deputation of Labour potentates, urging his immediate resignation to make way for Denis Healey, which would certainly have made the 1983 general election more fun than it was.  Great was the fury among the plotters when Labour won Darlington.)

 

But if they couldn’t get rid of Foot then, what about the future? What Labour needed was a long-term secret weapon – an anti-Foot – a telegenic young man, no walking stick, no ill-advised overcoat, no floppy white hair, no alarming sheep-like cadences in his oratory, no past, no opinions worth talking about, some acting ability desirable.  Get such a young man a safe seat. Talk him up in the press. Give him a chance in front bench shadow jobs.  Get him on TV. Perhaps by, oh, 1995 or so, he’d be ready to allow Labour to take revenge for all the humiliations of the Thatcher years.

 

Who was there? Well, nobody much. Most seriously ambitious people in the political world weren’t bothering with the Labour Party just then.  If it had a future, it was a very long way off. But the Labour lawyers, an influential network, had heard of young Anthony. And they could have told the trades unions, who tend to have a large say in the selection of candidates in seats such as Sedgefield, that this was a young man worth investing in.  And if that had happened, then the selection of Anthony Blair at Sedgefield (transformed into ‘Tony’ for Northern consumption) would make sense, as it doesn’t otherwise.

 

Would Anthony ever have come to anything without such help? Once he reached the top, would he have been anything without Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson? How much did he ever know or understand of the issues of the time? My own view (supported by one or two interesting pieces of personal information)  remains, not much. I just don’t think he’s very interested in politics, much as I am not very interested in sport, But whereas you can’t succeed in sport unless you’re good at it, you can succeed in *modern* politics without being good at it, in fact, precisely because you’re not good at it, but are instead good at the tricks of marketing and presentation that so many voters seem only too willing to be seduced by.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Red Meat for the Atheists

Here is a link to a review of A.C.Grayling's new book on God, which I wrote for  'The Spectator'

 

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8852611/intolerance-and-spite/

Readers here will be familiar with the arguments, but I don't suppose that will stop our dogmatic atheist community from expressing their angry contempt for all those stupid people who don't agree with them, yet again.

 

 







That Moscow Debate

Here is a link to the deabte in Moscow, Idaho, between Andrew Sullivan and Douglas Wilson, which I chaired last week.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhxteVaoLjY

 

It was soft policing that killed this boy, not being too tough

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Suicide is a deep well of grief, reproach and guilt. But it is not an argument.

When someone kills himself, we offer our deepest sympathy to those left behind, as I do to the family of Edward Thornber, the Manchester schoolboy who ended his own life after being caught with cannabis.

But we must not blame ourselves. In the end, those who take this sad step are the only ones responsible for it.

I know that some will accuse me of harshness and cruelty, even for discussing this. Please believe me when I say that this accusation is mistaken.

It is important that we do discuss it, rather than letting the argument be overwhelmed by emotion, however keenly felt.

I am disturbed by the portrayal of this case.

The story, as told in the papers, is full of signposts telling us what we ought to think. We are told the amount of the drug was small. So what? This is a drug usually sold in small quantities.

The suggestion is strongly made – in reports of the inquest – that the young man took his life because the police enforced the law against him. There may be actual direct evidence of this, but I have not seen it reported anywhere.

But what if this is so? Are the authorities to be paralysed into ceasing to enforce the law, by the fear that those they prosecute will commit suicide?

If a person dreads punishment so much, why would he freely commit the crime that leads to it?

If we follow this rule, it will be impossible to prosecute anyone, for fear that the defendant will be so distressed that he takes his life when arrested and charged.

Whatever caused this tragedy, it was not the fault of the police, who caught him, or of the officials who processed the case.

It is the job of the police to enforce the law, and it is the sad truth that Edward Thornber had knowingly broken that law not once but twice.

He knew cannabis was against the law. He had been detected with it once. He should have known that a conviction would threaten his freedom to travel to the US.

It is not the fault of the police that he still chose to take this risk – twice.

Most of us would be prepared to treat a single first offence as a silly mistake. But two?

The only criticism I would make of the police applies to their politically correct, defeatist leadership.

This whole affair was made possible by their unpublicised, sneaky, unofficial decriminalisation of cannabis by shirking their legal duty and not enforcing the law against it.

This policy, never placed before Parliament, gives many young people the impression that our drugs law is wholly dead, when in fact it is only  half dead.

If the law had been strongly and consistently applied during the past 40 years, schoolboys would never take the terrible risk of toying with this dangerous, mind-bending substance, increasingly correlated with severe and irreversible mental illness.

And many lives, not just that of Edward Thornber and his family, would have been  spared tragedies of many different kinds.

Weakness is not the same thing as compassion.

A perfect chance to terminate the Tories

You have to say one thing for the Prime Minister. His strategy of driving away the Tory Party’s traditional supporters is a roaring success.

The other bit of the plan, in which thousands of Guardian readers and Labour voters would flock to Mr Slippery’s rainbow banner, hasn’t quite worked out. It never will.

The Tories are now (in my view rightly) loathed and despised by people from all political viewpoints and all walks of life.

What next? Well, if I may make one suggestion to any remaining Tory diehards who think that this party is worth sticking to, you’re wrong.

What the Eastleigh result shows is not that UKIP is on the way to office.

It shows that (as I have been trying to tell you for about seven years) the Tory Party isn’t. It will never again win a UK Election.

Even if you’re still deluded enough to believe that a Tory government would be any use to you, nothing that you do will change the outcome of the next Election. It’ll either be a Labour administration or a Lib-Lab one, which is the same thing.

This is your chance to sweep away a party whose time has gone, which long ago ceased to be what it claimed to be, which despises its own supporters, which has now added failure to fraud and treachery as its chief characteristics.

Don’t work or vote for it. If you feel for some odd reason that voting is a duty, vote for UKIP. Britain’s Left-wing elite truly fear the destruction of the Tory Party that would follow a thumping defeat of the kind it deserves.

They rightly see its existence as a barrier to the birth of a truly pro-British party, one that could sweep New Labour, the Liberal Democrats and all their works into the sea.

I’ll be amazed if we get another chance of escape as good as this.

Fancy meeting one of these in your garden?

You think urban foxes are a problem? I've been spending a few days in Moscow, Idaho, where huge Canadian timber wolves can be heard howling on snowy nights, and sometimes wander into the suburbs.

You can get into big trouble if you shoot these hungry monsters, madly reintroduced to the area by environmentalists.

I asked a friend what I should do if I met one as I walked down the street. 'Climb a tree and hope for the best,' he growled.

Plans for a full-scale replica of the Titanic, intended to cross the Atlantic all the way without sinking this time (and how can they be so sure?), made me wonder what other appalling disasters mankind has tried to re-enact.

I could only think of the John Major government, which we are now having for the second time around, only without all the good bits.

While we gibber and squawk about a supposed threat from Iran, we foolishly ignore the stealthy, ever-intensifying transformation of Nato member Turkey into a repressive Islamic republic.

Proposed new uniforms for Turkish Airlines female staff, including fez-style hats and vast, enveloping skirts, might alert the slowest mind to what is going on, even the Economist magazine.

Then again, they might not.

I cannot feel anger at Anthony Blair over the Iraq War which he still absurdly defends. I am quite sure he never understood what he was doing. Those who created him out of nothing, and those who were willingly fooled by him, are the ones to blame.

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

Thoughts from the Other Moscow

A few small points. I’m told that when Lord Heseltine asked if I thought that 18-year-olds couldn’t tell right from wrong, I said ‘yes’ and so endorsed this idea. I’ve run the matter through my memory – in the place where I am at the moment I don’t have access to the recording.

 

I do, as it happens, think that 18-year-olds know right from wrong and – though my questioner will, for certain, not accept this because he does not come here to be friendly – here is what happened. When you are on live TV (or in the case of QT, virtually live TV, where they will certainly not edit out your blunders) you think and act much faster than you do in normal circumstances, which is why the time seems to go by so quickly. I have always thought this is why John Prescott gets into such a mess when he speaks in public. The things he is saying get tangled up with the things that he is going to say about half a minute ahead. It’s precisely because he is *thinking*, rather than reading out a script, that he gets into this trouble and is wrongly mocked for it. I have never subscribed to the view that he is a fool.

 

 I reacted to what I thought Michael Heseltine was going to say, and which would have made logical sense, which was something like ‘...judge guilt or innocence’. Jurors aren’t asked to decide right and wrong. The law does that. They aren’t asked to make judgements on the law. The Judge does that. They are asked to examine the facts and decide whether the prosecution has proved its case beyond reasonable doubt. His introduction of ‘right and wrong’ was bizarre, and caught me unawares. I may not even have heard his exact words. The acoustics that night were odd, and viewers will recall that I had to ask one member of the audience to repeat a question I hadn’t been able to decipher at all.

 By the way, what is it that motivates the people who come here and say that I’m trying to recover from a disastrous appearance etc etc? The whole point of this blog is that it is a place where I can discuss, with those who are interested, the things which have been engaging and interesting me in recent days. Most people will never appear as a panellist (or even an audience member) on Question Time, and I reckon they are at least a bit interested in knowing what it is like.

 

By the way, I note that the Heseltine smear still has some life in it. The old saying ‘A Lie is half-way round the world before the Truth has got its boots on’ is accurate precisely because so many people prefer to believe lies. Why so few people doubt the virtues of universal-suffrage democracy, I just don’t know.

 

I am writing from a reposeful café, (lots of hardwood, big old chairs and cello music, plus excellent coffee) named after a Protestant divine, in the pleasing main street of the city of Moscow Idaho. If I felt like it, I could also be in a nearby feminist café, or the liberal coffee shop further south. Moscow, home of the University of Idaho, is a joyous mixture of conservative rural America and liberal college America, pretty much evenly divided. I am here because I shall tonight (Wednesday 27th February) be moderating a debate (on same-sex marriage) between Andrew Sullivan, the prominent American-based blogger and campaigner for homosexual rights, and my old friend Douglas Wilson, a heavyweight Calvinist and former submariner who makes my milk-and-water broad church Anglicanism look like atheism.

 

As Andrew was brought up as a Roman Catholic, and counts himself as a conservative (and grew up in England), and Douglas’s antecedents are Scottish, all three of us spring from British roots, all three are professed Christians and all three think of themselves as conservative. Interesting to see how much variety can be contained by these words.

 

On the way here I encountered (or re-encountered) another feature of the endless, irritating growth of ‘security’, but it led to a good experience which I will come to in a moment. I don’t really enjoy reading on screens, but for someone who loves to read, and travels quite a bit, e-readers are a boon. You can load a dozen books, for all occasions, into the device, and it weighs no more than a middle-sized paperback. To begin with, the authorities ignored them. Then they discovered a new way to harass air passengers. Heathrow ‘security’ staff who, a few months ago, cheerfully waved my e-reader through the scanner, now demand that, like my laptop, it must be removed from my luggage. Why? I would love to have a convincing explanation for this fuss. The American airport security people still don’t do it and looked baffled when I asked them if I should take my-e-reader out my bag.

 

But it’s not just that. Entry into the USA these days involves a lot of queueing. On principle, I don’t object to this in any way. Countries have an absolute right to examine visitors carefully and good luck to them. Serious countries also give priority of entry to their own citizens or subjects, as we do not because EU law forbids it.  Most US immigration officials are, when politely approached, relaxed and humorous individuals just like anyone else. To make the wait bearable, I have something to read. The last time I visited the USA, I was happily reading my e-reader when an agitated Homeland Security official began barking ‘Sir! Sir! ‘ at me. Those familiar with the USA will know that the word ‘Sir!’ from an official is an infallible sign of danger. It means more or less the opposite of what it appears to mean. Anyway, it turned out that *all* electronic devices were banned in the waiting area. And that was that. You don’t argue. Once again, I’d really like to know what possible danger an e-reader could present in these circumstances.

 

But I wasn’t going to be caught again this time, and packed, for re-reading purposes in the immigration queue, a favourite John Wyndham book, ‘The Kraken Wakes’ Actually, I’d been planning to take ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’, but like all badly-wanted books, it had vanished from the shelf where it ought to have been. And (Wyndham always does this) it had me in its grip so completely that I forgot I was waiting. And I thought, once more, how strange it is that this superb writer has never really gained the reputation he deserves. I believe his centenary passed virtually unmarked a few years ago. And more ‘adventurous’ writers of so-called ‘science fiction’ have tended to dismiss him as ‘cosy’. This is of course absurd.His books do indeed begin in cosy 1950s Britain, sleepy villages, broadcasting offices, among middle-class people. But their cleverness consists of the way that these apparently stable, safe circumstances can be revolutionised by events observed but usually misunderstood.

 

He’s marvellous at describing the way the media miss the point, trivialise the important, and resist thought until the last possible moment. He’s also extraordinarily keen on women. By that, I mean, most of his books have highly intelligent, witty, self-possessed and resourceful female characters. His ‘Trouble with Lichen’ ( a word I still insist on rhyming with ‘Hitchin’ whatever the pedants say) understands quite wonderfully the female dread of ageing, and the injustice of it. His satirical dystopia ‘Consider Her Ways’ suggests that some sort of feminist revolution is inevitable because of female intelligence, but will also be disastrous for women, who need men more than they think they do. His short stories on time shifts, in one of which the Second World War does not happen, are disturbing masterpieces of imagination. I could go on. I suspect many of you will treasure one or more of his books, or will at least have seen the (often unsatisfactory) TV and cinema attempts to adapt them.

 

I’m pleased that he was obviously a commercial success. But it seems to me that he was more than that. In some ways, his books (with the exception of ‘The Chrysalids’ which stands entirely on its own) offer a rather good social history of educated, professional middle-class England in the tranquil years before Lady Chatterley. He has a wonderful ear for the way in which English people actually speak, and I have always treasured the moment where he says a female character ‘used the word “darling” with the edge uppermost’, which has a flash of really good Wodehouse in it. If you haven’t, read him. If you have, re-read him. Like all good writers, he is better each time.