Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 286
January 26, 2013
On Talking like Brian Sewell, Mobile Phones and the Polish Guarantee
A couple of responses. To the reader who upbraids me for my threats made to mobile phone users during my talk to students at Cambridge, I thought it was me who had no sense of humour. Now I realise there are others even more deprived. As it happens, I used to like the sound of my own voice, but now (especially when I hear it in broadcast recordings) I feel uncomfortable and critical. My voice, like those of many middle class people of my age, is not the one I grew up with, but is a subconsciously or unconsciously modified version, deepened to mask what would otherwise be socially unacceptable. It never seems quite right to me, but if I reverted to the expensively-educated vowels of my youth, I’d be even more unpopular than I already am, with no matching gain that I can think of. Brian Sewell may be able to get away with it, but he’s Brian Sewell.
To the reader who asks about ‘lefty’ students, I think this is a misunderstanding. At the better universities, there are many undergraduates who are not formally leftist, and even belong to ‘conservative’ political groupings, and these are more likely to invite me to speak, though they are seldom as conservative as I am. A few are, though I often wonder how they survive amid the conformism of their generation, which is a good deal worse than it was when I was at university 40 years ago.
In any case. I’d be glad to argue with any leftists who wanted to argue with me. The problem is that so few of them do, because they believe I am so wicked that nothing further needs to be said.
And here are a few thoughts on the Cult of World War Two. Mr J.B. Johns comments ‘you say that Britain would have been better to wait until conditions were more advantageous rather than stumbling into the war unprepared, as it did. Roosevelt's example was more sensible, you say. But isn't it the case that Hitler was working feverishly all the while to improve his army? So even if Britain had waited and built up its armed forces, would its relative position have changed very much after 2 or 5 or 10 years? Given the many first rate scientists and physicists at work in Germany, it might even have gotten worse. We saw at the very end of the war the astonishing new sorts of weaponry Hitler was able to deploy - fortunately Germany was on its knees at the time, and the new weapons made little difference. But had we taken your advice, this situation would have been reached much earlier, when Germany was still alive and strong. And given Hitler's global designs, written in his own hand and including a desire to conquer the US (see his second, unpublished book), would waiting longer, as you would have done, really improved Britain's prospects, or just made them even bleaker?’
This is a very good example what we are up against when we try to consider this question. It contains so many assumptions which need to be questioned. The first and most important of these assumptions is the frankly bizarre idea that Hitler was particularly interested in Britain, let alone the USA. I believe his policies and actions (whatever his rambling tomes may say) show quite clearly that he was not interested.
Germany, even more than France, and comparably to pre-1918 Austria-Hungary, and to Russia then and now, is a European continental power, not an Atlantic or maritime let alone a global power. Its interests, economic, territorial, diplomatic and military, lie in the Balkans and in central and eastern Europe. You can see this from the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1917, a clear statement of its territorial desires, neatly replicated in 1941-2, and now interestingly echoed in EU-expansion ( an NATO explansion) diplomacy towards the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus and Ukraine.
It is interested in France only as a threat in its flank, a threat which it has more than once felt it desirable to eliminate with swift strokes, and has now permanently eliminated through the means of the EU, under which France is a German vassal, but is not publicly humiliated and is allowed to maintain the outward trappings of an independent country.
But even when France was prostrate before German power, in 1870, Germany did not seek to make a colony out of France itself. What for? The country could be stripped of wealth and manpower without being absorbed (the only country interested in absorbing, or rather unifying itself, with France at this stage was Britain, which began discussing such a plan in the early months of 1940).
Even in 1940, a large part of France was initially unoccupied, and much of the administration of the occupied parts was in French hands. The 1871 German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine (controversial in Germany and largely insisted on by the generals against the wishes of the politicians) was not particularly shocking. The area contained many German speakers, or at least speakers of a Rhenish dialect closer to German than French, and large chunks of it, especially Strasbourg, had been annexed just as aggressively by Louis XIV only 150 years before. There is a strong case for saying that it was Bonaparte’s conquests, rampages and general misbehaviour in Germany that gave birth to German nationalism in the first place (a rather plangent Conan Doyle short story in the ‘Brigadier Gerard’ series – ‘How the Brigadier played for a nation - and lost’, makes this point rather well, written as it was in an era when British people were rather sympathetic to German national feeling).
I don’t know of any evidence that Germany wanted to possess most of France, let alone take on the management of the United Kingdom. It just wanted to ensure that Russia didn’t have an ally on its Western frontier.
There was also, in the 1930s, a strong popular German desire, by no means restricted to Hitler, for retribution against France for Versailles and for its occupation of the Ruhr in the 1920s, an act believed by some to have precipitated the great inflation which led in the end to the rule of Hitler. I think in Graham Greene’s very left-wing youth (is this recounted in ‘A Sort of Life’?) he was among those protesting against the French mistreatment of Germans in the Ruhr. It was a popular left-wing cause in Britain.
If Hitler had known how feebly-led and ill-equipped the French armies were (I believe they had no functioning radios at that time) , I wonder if he would have bothered invading France in May 1940 at all. He only encountered British troops there because we had unwisely sent them to France, thus weakening our island defence at no gain to ourselves. A small army such as the BEF cannot advance or retreat independently, but must fall back when its allies do ( or even faster than they do, as happened).
Hitler also cannot have been impressed by his earlier encounters with our army in Norway, where we came off quite badly (though the Royal Navy , and the Norwegians, did serious damage to the German fleet, thus deterring any talk of a cross-Channel invasion).
Both expeditions were a sort of displacement activity, as we had utterly failed to do anything to fulfil our notoriously worthless ‘guarantee’ to preserve Polish independence, the original folly of the whole period. If we had been seriously worried about a German invasion of Britain( and the historical evidence, suggests that this was never seriously considered in Berlin) then the last thing we should have done with our army, having just expensively re-equipped it with motor-vehicles and artillery, was to send it to France (where we lost all that equipment, and much of it fell into German hands).
Hitler’s army was designed, trained and equipped for what he hoped would be a quick victory in the East. He never built a deep-water Navy of any size, or any aircraft carriers. The Luftwaffe never possessed a heavy bomber comparable to the Lancaster, because it was never intended as an independent bombing force, just an adjunct to the Wehrmacht, and never inflicted on Britain anything like the damage our bombers inflicted on Germany (nasty though the Blitz was).
The Farm Hall tapes (look them up) reveal that Hitler never came close to developing a viable nuclear weapon, and certainly was nowhere near such a development in the first three years of the war (any more than we or the USA were) . In the end, ‘advanced weapons’, unless they are coupled with a land-army capable of meeting the enemy in the field, are just unpleasant nuisances.
What I can’t get people to think about is this: If Poland had given Hitler Danzig and the corridor, it is highly unlikely that he would have made his pact with Stalin. Hitler plainly had no clear idea what to do with the occupied areas of Poland, way beyond his territorial demands, which he gained through the joint conquest of that country, and hadn’t planned. He had no willing accomplices, as he had in Slovakia, nor a population reasonably willing to live under German rule, as he had in Bohemia-Moravia.
Without the pact with Stalin, he would probably have attacked Russia through Hungary and Romania. He would possibly have done this in 1941, possibly earlier (though I doubt that he was ready) .
Would he have won? Well, Stalin would not have been convinced that Hitler was his ally, and might have been better prepared against an attack than he actually was when Barbarossa was launched.
Would the wars in Scandinavia have taken place? What would Italy have done in the Mediterranean? Would Japan have risked Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Malaya? Would Russia have invaded Finland? The fact is that, if there had been no Polish guarantee by Britain and France, and no Anglo-French declaration of war in 1939, Hitler would have had no excuse to move Westwards, and no real reason to do so. Italy might have been detached from the Axis. The whole position is thrown up in the air and cannot easily be reassembled. But, whatever the case, Britain could have retained what she lost in April 1939, a choice as to when and how to enter, in whose company and under what circumstances. Begin to consider this, and you see that the guarantee was not just foolish, but terribly limiting, and that is its major fault. We could not have gone to war under worse circumstances than those we endured in September 1939.
January 24, 2013
An Interview with a Maltese Newspaper
Once more, for those who like that sort of thing, here is an interview I gave to the Malta Independent. Some of you may know that I was born in Malta when it was still the headquarters of the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet (now disbanded) and proudly styled itself Malta GC, having been awarded the George Cross for the extraordinary courage and indomitable spirit of its people, who suffered under a terrible bombardment by both Germany and Italy, and endured whatwas effectively a severe siege, and who remained the good friends of Britain and the British.
I still treasure my Maltese Birth Certificate, a document the size of a pillowcase, sigend by a Sliema Police Sergeant and bearing stamps of King George VI, then still on the throne.
The interview can be found here.
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2012-12-18/books/interview-with-peter-hitchens-551878678/
And an Argument in Cambridge
And here's an account of a talk I gave to a (very hospitable and satisfyingly argumentative) group of students at Peterhouse in Cambridge on Tuesday evening (bizarrely illustrated by pictures of me speaking against the introduction of identity cards at Trinity College , Oxford about three years ago) .
Another Student Interviews Me
For those that like that sort of thing, here is another interview with me, conducted by a student journalist, Will Bordell.
http://willbordell.co.uk/an-interview-with-peter-hitchens-shouting-into-the-wind/
I agreed to do it and so cannot complain. People who interview you can always make it look as if they won arguments that they in fact lost. It's too wearisome to put these things right. But if he'd asked me about Henry VIII I could at least have put him right on the historical fact that Henry sought (and obtained) an annulment, not a divorce. To this day, the Church of England does not officially recognise divorce, as its Prayer Book makes it clear that a properly solemnised and valid marriage cann only be ended by death. Those who can't tell the difference between divorce and annulment, or who think it unimportant, will never understand the events of Henry's reign.
January 23, 2013
First Thoughts on David Cameron's EU Speech
I thought some readers would find it helpful if I used the space I have here to analyse the David Cameron speech on the European Union. I will take significant passages of the speech and comment upon them
I am working from the text provided by 10 Downing Street at
http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/eu-speech-at-bloomberg/
He opens by saying he wants to talk about ‘the future of Europe’ but then gives the obligatory obeisance to the idea that the EU has helped to sustain peace on the continent.
‘But first, let us remember the past.
Seventy years ago, Europe was being torn apart by its second catastrophic conflict in a generation. A war which saw the streets of European cities strewn with rubble. The skies of London lit by flames night after night. And millions dead across the world in the battle for peace and liberty.
As we remember their sacrifice, so we should also remember how the shift in Europe from war to sustained peace came about. It did not happen like a change in the weather. It happened because of determined work over generations. A commitment to friendship and a resolve never to re-visit that dark past – a commitment epitomised by the Elysee Treaty signed 50 years ago this week.’
Europe’s avoidance of war from 1945 till the break-up of Yugoslavia is not attributable to the EU. There was no impulse towards war in the regions it controlled. The EU certainly never prevented a single nascent conflict. Nor as it happens, did NATO, though NATO’s existence made any physical attack on Western Europe immensely costly and dangerous. It also made any intervention on behalf of the crushed peoples of East Berlin (1953) Hungary (1956) Czechoslovakia (1968) or Poland (1980) impracticable. As for the Berlin Wall we all got so enraged about, we did nothing at all to prevent it being built, or to knock it down.
Europe was the static front line of a Moscow-Washington conflict which preferred to have its actual hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East and Africa. (though it still seems to me that the break-up of Yugoslavia, and especially the EU countries’ recognition of Croatia under German pressure, do have something to do with the fact that EU foreign policy is essentially German foreign policy, in a line going back to Bismarck).
The nod to the Elysee Treaty is a sort of apology, for having dared to plan the original delivery of the speech on the anniversary of that interesting, nay utterly fascinating agreement, which most people in Britain won’t even have heard of (though keen readers of this blog have).
The treaty is in fact quite specific to France and Germany, and it is significant that no comparable agreement exists between France and Britain, or between Germany and Britain. It embodies France’s reluctant recognition that the long military contest with Germany was over, and that Germany had won.
France suffered terribly to obtain the immensely costly, and very narrow victory of 1918. It was preceded by the horrors of Verdun, by army mutinies, huge cost and much appalling suffering. That is why in 1940, despite the undoubted courage of many French fighting men (a government minister had to be sent into the fortresses of the wrongly-derided Maginot line, to tell the soldiers to stop fighting) , France was not prepared to pay the price of that sort of victory again. And so she chose Vichy, a choice which has now been buried and forgotten, but which haunts the minds of French people to this day.
An interesting sidelight of this choice was the often very bitter fighting which took place in the Middle East and Africa between British and Vichy forces. The Vichy French were very far from being surrender monkeys on those occasions, and often fought with real passion and some vindictiveness against a country they regarded as France’s real foe.
The 1940 defeat has been partly buried by the myth of ‘Resistance’ . But it was never reversed, and even the truncated Federal Germany of Konrad Adenauer was so dominant in European affairs by the early 1960s that a formula had to be found to lock Paris and Bonn(then Germany’s capital) in a permanent, formalised, dignified and tolerable recognition of Germany’s supremacy, dressed up with plenty of tricolours, seat on the Security Council (and a French nuclear weapon) to look as if France were really on top. This would become even more the case when the USSR and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, Germany reunified and the supremacy of the Berlin republic was undeniable. Charles de Gaulle, though a mighty patriot, was good at recognising the inevitable, as he had already shown in Algeria.
This gives me the excuse to reproduce one of my favourite quotations from Keith Kyle’s majestic, indispensable book on Suez (still in print) . It recounts (on p.466) a meeting between Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the French premier Guy Mollet, after the failure of the Anglo-French Suez adventure, partly thanks to the USA torpedoing it. Our supposed best friends in Washington threatened to take actions which would have destroyed the Pound Sterling. There’s a certain anti-American complicity in the birth of the EU (which was taking place as the Suez expedition set off) which makes the USA’s anxiety to keep us inside it rather funny.
Adenauer said to Mollet: ‘France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States and the Soviet Union. Nor Germany, either. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world; that is to unite to make Europe. England is not ripe for it but the affair of Suez will help to prepare here spirits for it. We have no time to waste . *Europe will be your revenge* (my emphasis)’.
Churchill, of course, gets his obligatory, reverential mention, though the old Imperialist was often wrong about foreign and domestic policy, never really had much of a feel for continental politics and was given to sentimental gestures (such as his widely forgotten and luckily rejected proposal for an Anglo-French union in 1940).
The dead of two world wars are mentioned, though whether they would have recognised the notion that they fought for European freedom, I am not sure. They had been told that they were fighting for their own country’s freedom and security, a rather different thing. And in both great wars, they had eastern allies (whose young men likewise died in appalling numbers) who had no interest in freedom at all.
And then there is what can only be described as some guff about global whatever, put in for padding.
Then there’s more padding about the observable fact that Britain is an island, though Mr Cameron is ‘not an isolationist’, whatever an isolationist is. I am not sure he understands just how sepaarte our history is. Perhaps if he knew what 'Magna Carta' meant, he'd have a clue. Also the 1689 Bill of Rights, and the Protestant settlement, which he also plainly doesn't really grasp.
And there’s his regular pledge (worth how much?) that Britain won’t join the Euro. Why am I sceptical? Because he then goes on to recount the catastrophe of the Euro without in any way challenging the fundamental wisdom of the idea. It even appears to accept that the dreadful, destructive package imposed on Greece is rational medicine for the problems of a single currency imposed on diverging economies.
‘Third, there is a growing frustration that the EU is seen as something that is done to people rather than acting on their behalf. And this is being intensified by the very solutions required to resolve the economic problems.
‘People are increasingly frustrated that decisions taken further and further away from them mean their living standards are slashed through enforced austerity or their taxes are used to bail out governments on the other side of the continent.
‘We are starting to see this in the demonstrations on the streets of Athens, Madrid and Rome. We are seeing it in the parliaments of Berlin, Helsinki and the Hague.
‘And yes, of course, we are seeing this frustration with the EU very dramatically in Britain.
‘Europe’s leaders have a duty to hear these concerns. Indeed, we have a duty to act on them. And not just to fix the problems in the Eurozone.’
But far from advocating the abandonment of the failed experiment of the Euro, our Prime Minister talks airily about more competitiveness, reforms of EU institutions, spending controls, and something called ‘flexibility’ .
Hasn’t he noticed how the EU works? Its sclerosis is not the result of a failure of will. It is the consequence of it being the thing that it is, centralised, governed by dogma, lacking ( as Mr Cameron rightly notes) a ‘demos’ or people to whom its councils are responsible, hugely too big to be controllable, and so too distant from oversight of any kind, inevitably corrupt and wasteful. It is, like so many stupid, doomed human institutions, yet another attempt to build the Tower of Babel, though on this occasion they didn’t even have a common language when they started.
Nation states are as big as you can get without being unwieldy. The US constitution, by simply giving all powers, which are not specifically arrogated to the centre, to the States, makes some sort of effort to resolve this problem, and worked reasonably well while it had a common language, law and culture. The EU, which goes the other way. Just doesn’t.
To declare, as Mr Cameron does that ‘We need a structure that can accommodate the diversity of its members – North, South, East, West, large, small, old and new. Some of whom are contemplating much closer economic and political integration. And many others, including Britain, who would never embrace that goal.’
…is to invite a derisive chorus of my two favourite music-hall songs about wishful thinking :‘ If he had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs’ and ‘With a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the houses in between’.
Our Premier continues :’I accept, of course, that for the single market to function we need a common set of rules and a way of enforcing them. But we also need to be able to respond quickly to the latest developments and trends.
‘Competitiveness demands flexibility, choice and openness – or Europe will fetch up in a no-man’s land between the rising economies of Asia and market-driven North America.
‘The EU must be able to act with the speed and flexibility of a network, not the cumbersome rigidity of a bloc.’
To which one can only respond by laughing, helplessly and silently. As well to expect an Ostrich to spread its wings and take gracefully to the air, or an elephant to perform an entrechat at the Royal Ballet.
It is just wishful thinking, and if he doesn’t know this, he ought to.
And on and on he goes about the Single Market, as if we had to belong to the EU to take advantage of this (in fact rather dubious) benefit. Here I must draw his attention and yours to a recent article in the Sunday Telegraph by the excellent Christopher Booker.
‘… he [Mr Cameron] hopes to negotiate a new relationship with the EU, centred on our having continued free access to its single market: this is what he hopes to be able to put to the British people in a referendum, when such negotiations are completed in several years' time (very possibly after he is no longer in office). I have pointed out before that this shows so little understanding of the rules of the EU that it is no more than multiple wishful thinking.
‘Under the EU's treaty rules, there is no way powers, once handed over by a country, can be given back. Such negotiations as Mr Cameron has in mind would require a new treaty, a convention and an intergovernmental conference, which his EU colleagues would never allow. The only way he could compel them to negotiate would be by invoking Article 50 of the treaty, which can only be triggered by a country announcing that it wishes to leave. So the only way Mr Cameron could get agreement to the negotiations he wants would be by doing something he insists that he doesn't want to do.
‘But another very important point he keeps on getting wrong is his insistence that he wouldn't want the kind of relationship with the EU enjoyed by the Norwegians, because although they have full access to the single market, as members of the European Free Trade Association (Efta), they only do so at the price of having to obey rules they have no part in shaping: what is dismissively described as "fax democracy". Mr Cameron clearly has not been properly briefed: the Norwegians in fact have more influence on shaping the rules of the single market than Britain does.
‘Like many other people, he hasn't grasped that the vast majority of the single market's rules are decided by a whole range of international and global bodies even higher than the EU - from the International Labour Organisation, which decides working-time rules, to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, which agrees worldwide standards on food safety and plant and animal health. On these bodies, Norway is represented in its own right, as an independent country, while Britain is only represented as one of the 28 members of the EU.
‘A recent Efta report shows that more than 90 per cent of the laws of the single market in fact originate from UN or other global bodies. Norway has more influence in drafting these than Britain, which simply has to accept the "common position" agreed within the EU. My colleague Richard North has lately been describing on his EU Referendum blog numerous examples of such international "quasi-legislation", where Norway has more than once played a leading role in shaping rules which the EU members then have to obey. The EU countries are in fact more subject to "fax democracy" than Norway is. There have even been occasions when Norway has refused to obey rules that touch on its national interest, but which the British have to obey even though they are significantly damaging to us.’
This also deals partly with some later remarks by Mr Cameron in which he decries the Norwegian alternative. I’ll come to these, but first there’s some more ‘ham and eggs’ whistling in the dark about somehow changing the entire spirit of an organisation in which we are a minority of one.
‘The European Treaty commits the Member States to “lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”.
‘This has been consistently interpreted as applying not to the peoples but rather to the states and institutions compounded by a European Court of Justice that has consistently supported greater centralisation.
‘We understand and respect the right of others to maintain their commitment to this goal. But for Britain – and perhaps for others – it is not the objective.
‘And we would be much more comfortable if the Treaty specifically said so freeing those who want to go further, faster, to do so, without being held back by the others.
‘So to those who say we have no vision for Europe.
‘I say we have.’
Visions indeed. And dreams, too, no doubt. And, as Shakespeare put it in Henry IV, Part 1 :’Glendower: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep”. Hotspur :”Aye, so can I and so can any man. But will they come when you do call them?” .
Believing in a ‘flexible union’ and ‘that power must be able to flow back to member States’ is all very touching, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the EU’s principle – of ever-closer union and the permanent cession of power from the nations to the centre, is absolute. He later calls it ‘defeatist’ to acknowledge that such changes are not on offer.
Surely it is simply realist. A defeatist urges retreat in face of an unbeaten foe, who may yet be defeated by a new effort. A realist recognises that institutions and states have natures which he cannot hope to change, and with which he must live as best he can, or live without. The EU does not make us richer. It makes us poorer. The fact that we have squandered our North Sea revenues, unlike Norway, does not mean that we cannot be free of this thing, as Norway is (though it is a pity that we don’t have their Sovereign Wealth funds).
I note he also gives credence to the silly bleat that the British people voted for a ‘Common Market’ in 1975, and supposedly didn’t know , because nobody told them, that it was a nascent superstate. It is true that many of their leaders lied to them about this. But not all. They were told, they just didn’t listen, and so they got what they were warned against, but didn’t believe would happen. And one of the reason for that still exists today. No serious newspaper, let alone the BBC , is willing to give the case for departure. It is so now. It will be even more so if and when a referendum is actually held.
He even has the considerable nerve to say, as if he is on the side of such people :’ people also feel that the EU is now heading for a level of political integration that is far outside Britain’s comfort zone.
‘They see Treaty after Treaty changing the balance between Member States and the EU. And note they were never given a say.
‘They’ve had referendums promised – but not delivered. They see what has happened to the Euro. And they note that many of our political and business leaders urged Britain to join at the time.
‘And they haven’t noticed many expressions of contrition.’
Indeed they haven’t. One of those promised votes was pledged, in cast-iron form , by him, and then wriggled out of by him ( I watched him do it, and pretty shamefaced and nervous he looked) . Also, his principal Euro-mentor, Michael (Lord) Heseltine, and his principal exemplar and political mould of form, Anthony Blair, are keen and unapologetic Euro supporters. I do wonder how Mr Cameron would have acted, had he been responsible for this choice at the time.
Though I myself loathe all state-sponsored plebiscites, and regard them as (at best) worthless exercises in manipulation and (at worst) instruments of tyranny, I think his reason for not holding one now – that we can’t tell the future – is absurd. We won’t be able to tell the future in 2017 or 2018 either. But we have quite enough experience of the past to know whether we like it or not- 40 years of it. Its fundamental character, which will not change, is clear to us.
So when he says : ‘Some argue that the solution is therefore to hold a straight in-out referendum now.
‘I understand the impatience of wanting to make that choice immediately.
‘But I don’t believe that to make a decision at this moment is the right way forward, either for Britain or for Europe as a whole.
‘A vote today between the status quo and leaving would be an entirely false choice.
‘Now – while the EU is in flux, and when we don’t know what the future holds and what sort of EU will emerge from this crisis is not the right time to make such a momentous decision about the future of our country.
‘It is wrong to ask people whether to stay or go before we have had a chance to put the relationship right.
‘How can we sensibly answer the question ‘in or out’ without being able to answer the most basic question: ‘what is it exactly that we are choosing to be in or out of?’
‘The European Union that emerges from the Eurozone crisis is going to be a very different body. It will be transformed perhaps beyond recognition by the measures needed to save the Eurozone.
‘We need to allow some time for that to happen – and help to shape the future of the European Union, so that when the choice comes it will be a real one.’
…this is absurd. What fundamental changes does he honestly expect to happen?
It’s blazingly obvious that his real reason for delay is that he hopes the referendum offer will stop the flow of ex-Tory voters to UKIP at the next election. It has to be in the manifesto, to be of any use in that effort. I wonder if anyone could be so easily fooled, myself. It is so blatant.
The core of it is here :’ The next Conservative Manifesto in 2015 will ask for a mandate from the British people for a Conservative Government to negotiate a new settlement with our European partners in the next Parliament.
‘It will be a relationship with the Single Market at its heart.
‘And when we have negotiated that new settlement, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice. To stay in the EU on these new terms; or come out altogether.
‘It will be an in-out referendum.
‘Legislation will be drafted before the next election. And if a Conservative Government is elected we will introduce the enabling legislation immediately and pass it by the end of that year. And we will complete this negotiation and hold this referendum within the first half of the next parliament.
‘It is time for the British people to have their say. It is time to settle this European question in British politics.
‘I say to the British people: this will be your decision.
‘And when that choice comes, you will have an important choice to make about our country’s destiny.
‘I understand the appeal of going it alone, of charting our own course. But it will be a decision we will have to take with cool heads. Proponents of both sides of the argument will need to avoid exaggerating their claims.
‘Of course Britain could make her own way in the world, outside the EU, if we chose to do so. So could any other Member State.
‘But the question we will have to ask ourselves is this: is that the very best future for our country?’
I don’t in fact see here an unambiguous commitment to abide by the choice of the people if this vote ever takes place. And experience tells me to read very carefully any promise made by Mr Cameron, whose oiling out of his Lisbon pledge is a text-book example of how it can be done. His dwindling group of supporters write to me sometimes with dense legalsitic, nay, algebraic explanations of why his broken promsie wasn't in fact broken. And they believe what they write, so perhaps he does too.
But there also seems to me to a very strong series of padlocks on the referendum door, which make the pledge worth as much as a gift voucher from a rocky high-street store.
One. The Tories will not win the next election. They are most unlikely even to be the largest single party.
Two. Even if they did win, it is clear that Mr Cameron and his Cabinet colleagues will not campaign for a vote to leave.
Three. There is no reason to believe that this vote, if it takes place, will be conducted any more fairly than it was in 1975, when the official package, delivered to everyone’s door, contained one pamphlet arguing for leaving, and two arguing for staying ( even the BBC couldn’t outdo that for impartiality) .
There may well be many ‘Eurosceptic’ voices in the press, and a few in Parliament (and ‘Euroscepticism’ , as I have pointed out, means criticism of the EU in opposition, acquiescence to it in office), but no serious newspaper favours withdrawal, I can’t think of any frontbencher in any party who could be relied upon to speak for withdrawal, and the BBC and the educational establishment will add their powerful voices to the ‘Stay in’ camp.
If by any chance Labour decides to match the pledge (the only way in which the vote can be guaranteed, and not impossible) I would expect that it would end with a substantial majority for staying in, and the subject closed for the foreseeable future.
This is why I think this is a risk which Lord Heseltine and the rest are quite prepared to take , in the hope that it will rescue the Tory Party from well-deserved doom at the polls in 2015. They may even rather long for a chance to dish the anti-EU movement for decades to come, by humiliating it as thoroughly as they did in 1975, and their confidence may well be justified.
I do hope that in both cases, they have underestimated the intelligence of the voters, though one always winces a bit when one expresses this hope.
The only proper or reliable way for this country to leave the EU is for a major political party to pledge unequivocally to leave the EU in its manifesto, for that party to be elected with a working majority and to proceed. We must continue to ask why a view so strongly supported, both by facts and logic and by large numbers of people, is so poorly represented at Westminster, and why we have political parties which speak for the elite and not for the electors.
January 22, 2013
Our nation is on its knees to the Church of Human Rights
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Human Rights are the State religion of Europe, the unpleasant new country in which we are now trapped. These supposed rights have expelled and replaced Christianity. They have shrunk the human conscience and vastly increased the power of the State.
That is why it was no use anyone going to the Strasbourg Court to win back Christianity’s lost status as the dominant faith of Britain. The Church has been humiliated. Britain no longer exists.
True, you can now wear a cross while working for British Airways. But you have that freedom because you are now just another protected minority, which has no more rights or standing than other faiths, such as Atheism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism or Hinduism.
In fact, the Christian religion is worse off than all the others because it has to be constantly reminded that it is not the national religion any more.
This means regular slaps and humiliations of the kind handed out by occupying powers to troublesome peoples not yet used to being subjugated.
The most devastating of these was delivered two years ago by Lord Justice Laws, who personally humbled Lord Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, before jeering at religious opinions as ‘irrational’.
He intoned: ‘The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other.’
I don’t like this judgment, but it is a deadly accurate statement of the position.
This country’s official faith, as people are slowly discovering, is a code of ideas called ‘Equality and Diversity’, based on several European Directives but put into law in Britain mainly through the Equality Act 2010.
The continued existence of a few rather wet bishops in the House of Lords, and various other baubles and trinkets in odd corners of the constitution, means nothing against the Equality and Diversity bulldozer, enacted by Harriet Harman with the willing help of her Tory counterpart, Theresa May. Its demands are written into the contracts of public employees, and supported by the politically correct public-sector unions.
Private firms that do business with the State are roped in. So are (as we have learned in recent years) the owners of small hotels and cafes, adoption agencies, housing associations and councils that have prayers before they meet.
It controls thought and speech in a new post-modern way. Today’s liberal bigots don’t crudely threaten to throw people in prison for saying things they disapprove of. That might result in protests even from the increasingly spineless people of this country. Instead, they menace our livelihoods. Speak out and you lose your job, with little hope of ever getting another.
This is, of course, tyrannical and brutal. But because it is not the Gestapo, the Stasi or the Gulag, we don’t recognise it for what it is.
And because it is done in the name of ‘Rights’ – which sound reassuring and friendly – we do not realise that it is, in fact, a deep and shameful wrong. And so it grows worse each day.
Spirit makes great TV – not scenery
Please don’t be put off Alan Furst’s marvellous, twilit spy novels after the disappointing BBC TV version of his work The Spies Of Warsaw, which starred David Tennant and Janet Montgomery. As so often, the makers have spent a small fortune on clothes, cars and steam engines, but somehow failed to capture the spirit.
Furst is a former journalist whose books are intelligent, realistic and full of historical knowledge and understanding.
They have plenty of sex, steam trains and drama, too – but rather better done than they were in the BBC’s script.
The Great War: A bloodbath we should never have waded into
As the centenary of the modern world’s greatest and most avoidable tragedy creeps closer, some people are trying to make out that the First World War was worth fighting. Twaddle.
The generals were useless. The politicians were worse. The methods of both sides – from poison gas and the bombing of homes, to the deliberate starvation of civilians through blockade – were barbaric. The whole thing led directly to both Stalin and Hitler.
And we would have been far better off if we had stayed out. Germany was bound to dominate Europe anyway. Yet we sacrificed legions of our best young men, and lost our wealth and our Empire, in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable.
Which is why, when Germany finally did take over Europe through the EU, we were among the countries that lost their independence. If we’d stayed out in 1914, my guess is that we would still be rich, independent and free, rather than as we are, supplicants of Berlin and Washington.
I wouldn't dare guess whether the horrors in Algeria are connected to the wild French adventure in Mali, which we so oddly backed. I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. Like anyone else, I just grieve for the dead.
But I would ask how our flailing foreign policy can possibly make sense. We cheer on chaos in the Arab world and then complain about its results. And we mobilise against Islamist militants in Mali, while actively encouraging and equipping such groups in Syria.
Is there something they’re not telling us, or is our foreign policy, in fact, as moronic as it looks? History suggests that the second explanation is the right one.
Another thought about free speech in modern Britain. It seems as if there is a ‘report’ or a ‘commission’ calling for feebler drug laws almost every two or three weeks. All these are given wide publicity in the papers and on the BBC.
But when I wrote my recent book on the subject – The War We Never Fought – which takes a different view and contains many important new facts, most major newspapers disdained even to review it, and there has been almost no interest from the BBC.
You can tell the truth. But will anyone hear? Or listen?
Personally I can wait until the end of time to learn the contents of Mr Slippery’s Great Speech on Europe. We all know what will be in it – a cunningly worded promise of a referendum, non-binding and conditional on him winning the next Election, which he won’t.
It’s mainly designed to fight off the UKIP challenge. Amazingly, he continues to claim that we can win powers back from the EU without leaving it. I sometimes wonder if he actually knows that this is impossible. Which would you rather – a Prime Minister who was ignorant, or one who was dishonest?
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War Without End, Forever and Ever, Amen
Today (Monday 21st January) is the anniversary of the death of George Orwell (Eric Blair) in 1950, at the painfully early age of 46. One does wish so very much that he had lived on to see Suez, the Hungarian uprising, the Chinese Cultural revolution ( and its pale British imitation), the coming of the European Union and the speech codes of political correctness.
But today we should remember, above all, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and one of its central (and least noted) predictions about the modern state’s need for a permanent war against someone.
As I’ve said before, Orwell was completely wrong about the future, and above all about sex. He was so annoyed by the repression and inconvenience of his own age that he decided that a future IngSoc tyranny would include an anti-sex league and a general loathing of sexual liberty. This is nonsensical. Slaves have often been allowed to copulate, but seldom to marry. The Nazi elite were sexually libertine and had little respect for marriage, especially Goebbels. One of the Bolsheviks’ earliest actions (then considered shocking) was to make marriage about as easy to dissolve as it is in modern Britain. There is no connection that I know of between sexual licence and liberty of thought, and rather a strong connection between sexual self-discipline and puritanism, and political liberty (see the Roundheads and the original American Pilgrims).
Actually Orwell partly contradicted himself by predicting that this would only apply to the Party elites. The non-party proles would be bombarded with pornography and the sort of trashy ‘bread and circuses’ rubbish we are very familiar with : ‘There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section — Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.’
Julia, Winston Smith’s lover and companion in rebellion, has actually worked in this dingy part of the Ministry of Truth: ‘There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls’ School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal. “What are these books like?” said Winston curiously. “Oh, ghastly rubbish. They’re boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes.”’
Men are believed by the Party to be in greater danger of corruption, so most of the work is done by unmarried women. But I digress. Actually, as Aldous Huxley warned, a truly repressive modern state would happily encourage untrammelled sex, while destroying marriage and parenthood , as part of its general effort to make men ( and women) love their own servitude.
But Orwell got closer to the truth when, from Goldstein’s secret book, the mysterious text which he is given in the course of being entrapped by the Thought Police, he learns in Chapter III (‘War is Peace’) that war between the three great states of the world is permanent . In 1984 this war has an economic purpose (Which I suspect comes from James Burnham’s works, now I think shown to be fallacious) but also a political one .
‘All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires
of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared
ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink.’
Readers of the book will remember that one of the most oddly worrying passages in it concerns the huge amount of work needed in the Ministry of Truth when Oceania , having been at war with Eurasia, suddenly switches sides and goes to war against Eastasia instead. The whole Ministry is in turmoil as every single published work needs to be altered to pretend that this has always been the case. The canteens work day and night, exhausted people, shattered by the ignoble effort of inserting lies into every file and archive in the country, and deleting the truth from them, sleep on mattresses in the corridors.
‘In so far as he had time to remember it, he [Winston Smith]was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the Speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect.’
Despite the utter squalor of the work, there is a sort of warm comradeship – the comradeship of shared adversity, very hard work and wartime, well evoked, thanks to the intensity and urgency of the task. It is one of the paradoxes of the book that this wicked episode should be one of the few more or less innocent moments of the narrative.
How very fitting that we should remember the author of this mighty book on the day that our Prime Minister is recorded in most of the newspapers as declaring that we shall now begin a new war in North Africa, which, he warned, could last for decades. It is a ‘new front’. I am told that some media in France are describing the Algerian episode as ‘Europe’s 9/11’.
Well, I yield to nobody in my disgust and loathing for murder, and for the individuals and organisations responsible for murdering workers at the Algerian gas plant.
But haven’t we taken leave of our senses here, just a bit?
Two weeks ago, I doubt if David Cameron could have found Mali on a map, or that he had heard of the one-eyed cigarette smuggler, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, whom we are now invited to regard as the very embodiment of wickedness and a Major Threat to our Way of Life (whatever that is, apart from eating too much, driving about in cars, watching too much TV and voting for politicians who despise us ) .
We are told repeatedly that this individual is ‘linked to Al Qaeda’ or ‘Al Qaida’ or ‘Alky Ada’ (as Gordon Brown used amusingly to call it, in the long tradition of British politicians pronouncing foreign words so hopelessly badly that it was almost magnificent, as in Churchill’s reference to the Nazi - or, as he would say ‘Narzee’ - secret police as ‘the Jesterpo’ and Ernie Bevin’s frequent request for ‘A Bottle of Newts’ when he desired to drink a few glasses of Nuits St George).
As a statement, this claim that someone is ‘linked with Al Qaeda’ automatically arouses suspicion. To the extent that Alky Ada exists at all, which is a murky area of epistemology, it lacks a central secretariat, a treasury, an address, a telephone number, a membership list, a headquarters, a constitution or a leadership structure. I don’t know how anyone could prove he was *not* linked to it, if enough people said he was. Some people in the Arab world have taken to using the name mainly to annoy and challenge the West. I don’t think men with briefcases turn up demanding a fee from those who seek to use it. There are many fast food franchises which are more coherently organised.
Mokhtar Belmokhtar is ‘linked to’ Alky Ada largely by the fact that dozens of newspapers and 24-hour TV channels have linked him to it. Also he looks sinister and is undoubtedly a nasty piece of work. I would have thought that the late Osama bin Laden, or indeed any serious Islamist, would have been pretty sniffy about associating with a cigarette smuggler. But what do I know?
But whether he and his fellows are really an ‘existential’ threat to our civilisation (whatever that means) has to be open to doubt, as is the idea that Britain or its people should care in the slightest about what goes on in Mali. As for this episode committing us to decades of conflict, perhaps we should be asked if we actually desire this, and have it explained to us why we should. I am afraid I have long had this feeling that incompetent and unsuccessful political leaders enjoy having ( and magnifying the importance of) frightening foreign foes, because they think it will make us trust them more. It also takes our minds off more inconvenient subjects, such as our total inability to control arrivals from Bulgaria and Romania, itself the result of our membership of the EU, a fact which Mr Cameron would love to be forgotten.
Spies and ‘security’ agencies also love this sort of thing, a new villain menacing us from afar, as it is good for their expenses and their budgets. So do the rather sad journalists who become the mouthpieces of these outfits.
In any case, if we are really so appalled by ‘Islamists’, as we endlessly say we are, then why have we given them so much help, in terms of BBC cheerleading , diplomatic encouragement and logistical help, in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and now Syria, where the main actors in the ‘Free Syrian Army’ are generally acknowledged to be fiercely militant Islamists.
I might add that, as Mark Almond cogently pointed out in the Mail on Sunday this week, Algeria loathed the ‘Arab Spring’ which was so much praised and supported here. Why? Because the Algerian state crushed a (democratically backed) Islamic revolution of its own, and with quiet but firm Western support, some years ago. And having done so, its leaders were highly alarmed to see their neighbours being given over to the naïve hopes of Hillary Clinton and William Hague – who must be two of the least qualified foreign ministers ever to have headed the policies of their respective countries.
Mark Almond (who I should note does not share my complacency/ studied calm( you choose which it is) about the dangers of North Africa to us ) wrote :’ Unlike Gaddafi, the rulers of Algeria are not a flamboyant lot. They are mainly generals in and out of uniform. They regarded the Arab Spring as a threat to their regime. To them democracy is a bad idea not just because people might vote them out of power, but because it could mean chaos.
‘In 1990, when fundamentalist candidates looked set to win, the generals stepped in to stop the elections. A decade of horribly brutal civil war followed.
‘This explains why there was such a disconnect between Whitehall and Algiers over how to handle the hostage crisis. Our Government was bewildered by the Algerian decision to open fire without consulting us or other foreign leaders.
‘But the Algerian army had - and still has - three simple reasons for cracking down at once: it wanted to stifle the crisis quickly and to destroy the terrorists; they wanted to show their own people that the regime is still firmly in charge and they were also desperate to avoid any chance of Western special forces getting to play a role on their territory.’
He added: ‘From Afghanistan via Iraq to Libya, the West has shown it can knock down tyrannical Humpty-Dumpties, but putting the societies back together again has eluded us - which is why Algeria sees the Arab Spring as part of the problem, not part of the solution.’
In the ‘Independent on Sunday’ the astute Patrick Cockburn wrote : ‘The speed of the jihadi retaliation [to France’s intervention in Mali] has led to doubts that the two events are connected, but the likelihood must be that French action in Mali precipitated a pre-planned assault on this target. It is a typical al-Qa'ida operation, in the tradition of 9/11, geared to attract maximum worldwide attention by a suicidal act of extreme violence.
‘Foreign leaders were swift to back the French action and pledge to pursue the perpetrators of the hostage-taking to the ends of the earth.
‘This is the sort of reaction al-Qa'ida intends to provoke, whereby a small group of gunmen is presented as a threat to the rest of the world. Recruits and money flow in.
‘Local disputes - in this case between the Tuareg of northern Mali and the government in the capital, Bamako - become internationalised. Foreign military intervention may restore order and even be welcomed by the local population in the short term. But the presence of a great power can be destabilising.’
He also wrote, with that depth of knowledge which is so important in these affairs: ‘Tuareg nationalist insurgency, not radical Islam, is at the heart of the crisis in Mali. What, for instance, are AQIM [(Al Quai’da in the Islamic Maghreb)] doing in northern Mali, which has never in the past been a bastion for fundamentalists? AQIM is in origin an Algerian movement that emerged from the civil war of the 1990s. Formed in 1998, its members moved to northern Mali in 2003, where the government saw it as a counterbalance to Tuareg separatists.
‘For all the French rhetoric about AQIM being a threat to Europe, the group made no attacks there over the past decade, being more interested in raising money through hostage-taking and smuggling cigarettes and cocaine. Algeria's links to AQIM are cloudy, but not so the movement's past connection with the Malian government. The strange truth is that it was the Malian government which, over the last 10 years, tolerated AQIM in northern Mali and allowed it to operate, taking a share in the profits of its kidnapping and drug-running operations. International military aid for use against al-Qa'ida was diverted for use against the Tuareg.’
Patrick also notes that 'The latest Tuareg uprising of 2012 was precipitated by the fall of Gaddafi in Libya a few months earlier. He had long kept a sort of order in the states in and around the Sahara. His defeat also meant the region was awash with modern weapons. Tuarge in the Libyan security forces, who knew how to use them, were coming home'.
Patrick Cockburn’s full article is here
and Mark Almond’s is to be found here
Given that the whole history of the Western world since September 11th 2001 is the history of supposedly adult governments rushing off into what are now almost universally recognised as doomed conflicts in largely irrelevant countries (Iraq anyone? Afghanistan, anyone?), I really do urge caution on this matter. I’d add that the paradox of Algeria, where the ‘democratic’ countries silently acceded to the very cruel suppression of a democratically legitimate, but very unwelcome, Islamist movement, makes a complete nonsense of our policy in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and above all, Syria.
Finally, this gives me another opportunity to recommend one of the best films ever made, which anyone who is at all interested in the subject of terrorism really has to see - ‘The Battle of Algiers’ , Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 account, very close to the facts, of the failed French attempt to keep hold of Algeria between 1954 and 1962. Nobody is romanticised. Anyone who sees it will be immune ever afterwards to the rhetoric of any side in such a conflict. War is hell, and don’t you forget it. It is readily available on DVD.
January 21, 2013
The Past is Another Country - the Great Freeze of 1963
James Taylor has sent me a link to this programme,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01q9d86/Winterwatch_1963_The_Big_Freeze/
which contains an extraordinary film from the Britain of 50 years ago. It’s interesting in itself as well as for the things it describes. The documentary is clearly in a tradition going back to the 1920s and 1930s, and the country is still a place of railways (watch for the snowplough, 13 minutes in) , doorstep milk deliveries, bowler hats and coal fires, and £7,000 was a lot of money, but with modern Britain striving to be born, and Harold Wilson(its midwife) striving to become Prime Minister. .
With some reluctance, the BBC uses the Fahrenheit temperature scale throughout, not to mention the customary measures they now try so hard to stamp out. The voices of the presenters are unashamedly ‘educated’ , that is to say, you would now be mocked for speaking like this in a public place. (How enjoyable it is for someone of my generation to see Cliff Michelmore again, the trusted face of the old ‘Tonight’ programme, not to mention Derek Hart and Kenneth Allsop). I remember the sea freezing near where we lived at Langstone Harbour in Hampshire, and some of my fellow pupils successfully building an igloo in the grounds of my school on the edge of Dartmoor.
January 20, 2013
Out nation is on its knees to the Church of Human Rights
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Human Rights are the State religion of Europe, the unpleasant new country in which we are now trapped. These supposed rights have expelled and replaced Christianity. They have shrunk the human conscience and vastly increased the power of the State.
That is why it was no use anyone going to the Strasbourg Court to win back Christianity’s lost status as the dominant faith of Britain. The Church has been humiliated. Britain no longer exists.
True, you can now wear a cross while working for British Airways. But you have that freedom because you are now just another protected minority, which has no more rights or standing than other faiths, such as Atheism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism or Hinduism.
In fact, the Christian religion is worse off than all the others because it has to be constantly reminded that it is not the national religion any more.
This means regular slaps and humiliations of the kind handed out by occupying powers to troublesome peoples not yet used to being subjugated.
The most devastating of these was delivered two years ago by Lord Justice Laws, who personally humbled Lord Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, before jeering at religious opinions as ‘irrational’.
He intoned: ‘The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other.’
I don’t like this judgment, but it is a deadly accurate statement of the position.
This country’s official faith, as people are slowly discovering, is a code of ideas called ‘Equality and Diversity’, based on several European Directives but put into law in Britain mainly through the Equality Act 2010.
The continued existence of a few rather wet bishops in the House of Lords, and various other baubles and trinkets in odd corners of the constitution, means nothing against the Equality and Diversity bulldozer, enacted by Harriet Harman with the willing help of her Tory counterpart, Theresa May. Its demands are written into the contracts of public employees, and supported by the politically correct public-sector unions.
Private firms that do business with the State are roped in. So are (as we have learned in recent years) the owners of small hotels and cafes, adoption agencies, housing associations and councils that have prayers before they meet.
It controls thought and speech in a new post-modern way. Today’s liberal bigots don’t crudely threaten to throw people in prison for saying things they disapprove of. That might result in protests even from the increasingly spineless people of this country. Instead, they menace our livelihoods. Speak out and you lose your job, with little hope of ever getting another.
This is, of course, tyrannical and brutal. But because it is not the Gestapo, the Stasi or the Gulag, we don’t recognise it for what it is.
And because it is done in the name of ‘Rights’ – which sound reassuring and friendly – we do not realise that it is, in fact, a deep and shameful wrong. And so it grows worse each day.
Spirit makes great TV – not scenery
Please don’t be put off Alan Furst’s marvellous, twilit spy novels after the disappointing BBC TV version of his work The Spies Of Warsaw, which starred David Tennant and Janet Montgomery. As so often, the makers have spent a small fortune on clothes, cars and steam engines, but somehow failed to capture the spirit.
Furst is a former journalist whose books are intelligent, realistic and full of historical knowledge and understanding.
They have plenty of sex, steam trains and drama, too – but rather better done than they were in the BBC’s script.
The Great War: A bloodbath we should never have waded into
As the centenary of the modern world’s greatest and most avoidable tragedy creeps closer, some people are trying to make out that the First World War was worth fighting. Twaddle.
The generals were useless. The politicians were worse. The methods of both sides – from poison gas and the bombing of homes, to the deliberate starvation of civilians through blockade – were barbaric. The whole thing led directly to both Stalin and Hitler.
And we would have been far better off if we had stayed out. Germany was bound to dominate Europe anyway. Yet we sacrificed legions of our best young men, and lost our wealth and our Empire, in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable.
Which is why, when Germany finally did take over Europe through the EU, we were among the countries that lost their independence. If we’d stayed out in 1914, my guess is that we would still be rich, independent and free, rather than as we are, supplicants of Berlin and Washington.
I wouldn't dare guess whether the horrors in Algeria are connected to the wild French adventure in Mali, which we so oddly backed. I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. Like anyone else, I just grieve for the dead.
But I would ask how our flailing foreign policy can possibly make sense. We cheer on chaos in the Arab world and then complain about its results. And we mobilise against Islamist militants in Mali, while actively encouraging and equipping such groups in Syria.
Is there something they’re not telling us, or is our foreign policy, in fact, as moronic as it looks? History suggests that the second explanation is the right one.
Another thought about free speech in modern Britain. It seems as if there is a ‘report’ or a ‘commission’ calling for feebler drug laws almost every two or three weeks. All these are given wide publicity in the papers and on the BBC.
But when I wrote my recent book on the subject – The War We Never Fought – which takes a different view and contains many important new facts, most major newspapers disdained even to review it, and there has been almost no interest from the BBC.
You can tell the truth. But will anyone hear? Or listen?
Personally I can wait until the end of time to learn the contents of Mr Slippery’s Great Speech on Europe. We all know what will be in it – a cunningly worded promise of a referendum, non-binding and conditional on him winning the next Election, which he won’t.
It’s mainly designed to fight off the UKIP challenge. Amazingly, he continues to claim that we can win powers back from the EU without leaving it. I sometimes wonder if he actually knows that this is impossible. Which would you rather – a Prime Minister who was ignorant, or one who was dishonest?
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January 19, 2013
Professor Mary Beard should visit Boston, Lincs, as I did
I see the distinguished Cambridge Classics scholar Mary Beard has been involved in an argument, on BBC Question Time, about the effect of mass immigration on the Lincolnshire town of Boston. She seems to have been persuaded by an official report that all is well there. A member of the auidence took her up on this pretty volubly. I strongly recommend that she visits and sees for herself, as I did in 2011. My account is here
For reasons that still escape me, the Boston council took umbrage at what is a simple, factual description of an undoubted problem. What is it about the liberal middle class that makes them so uninterested in the problems of the British working class, as it used to be known? Why do they nervously imagine that it is ‘bigoted’ to draw attention to the huge and lasting effects of mass immigration?
Boston is a beautiful place set amid spectacular big skies, and everyone who can should try to visit its lovely church and its soaring tower, one of the glories of England and in my view one of the sights of the world (and I’ve seen a few). It’s a fairly short journey from Cambridge, and still on the railway network. If Professor Beard wants to go, I can put her in touch with a comfortable and convenient Bed and Breakfast establishment close to a rather good pub serving excellent food, and she will find many local people happy to guide her round the district and talk to her. She’s obviously an intelligent and thoughtful person, despite her standard-issue flat-pack leftist views which probably aren't really her fault. It would be gratifying if she could revise her opinions in the light of the facts, as we are supposed to do.
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