Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 287

Human Wrongs and the Long War Against Christianity

As I wonder how long it will be till I am arrested and locked up for some breach of the new speech codes,  I muse about how - when they come and get me - I will take the case to the Human Rights Court.  There is a sort of satirical joy at the thought of using the other side’s favourite weapon against them. But in my heart I know it’s a waste of time.

 

Human Rights, as the Strasbourg Court showed this week, are fundamentally not on my side. The supposed victory of Nadia Eweida over British Airways was the least important by far of the four cases heard this week. My own view is that she should certainly be able to wear a cross if she wants, but I can  sort of see why BA might have objected, without it being a big issue of religion or conscience. There’s no scriptural obligation on a Christian to wear a Cross, and a company that asks its staff to wear uniform for corporate identification purposes might reasonably argue against such variations in dress. It was much more a case of how much liberty a person gives up in certain sorts of job than a question of religious faith.

 

The problems of Shirley Chaplin, a nurse who was told her crucifix was a health and safety issue in hospital, are subtly different. First, the whole idea of a hospital, and of the disciplined profession of nursing, are Christian in origin, which you can’t really say about the idea of airlines.  A nurse’s uniform doesn’t have the same purpose as an airline uniform, and a crucifix does not disrupt its message of reassurance and charity.  Secondly she had worn the crucifix for nearly four decades without any difficulty, until a ‘risk assessment’ ruled that there might conceivably be a safety risk if a patient pulled it.

 

There’s something infuriatingly niggling -and retrospective -about this which would make any free person bridle. Why go to all that trouble over a crucifix that someone had worn for years? Hospital wards must be full of tiny risks which might, in immensely obscure and unlikely circumstances,  lead to problems. But to get rid of all of them, staff would have to dress in all-in-one bodysuits, masks and goggles, and most of the furniture would have to be removed. As it is, we know all too well that the main risk in most hospitals comes from the fact that they are not very clean, rather than from crucifixes round the necks of staff. And the second greatest risk seems to be the unwillingness of some nurses to feed or tend to the patients  - an outcome less likely, it seems to me  when the nurses are crucifix-wearers than when they are not. But what would I know?

 

Gary McFarlane’s problems go even deeper and I’m not inclined to discuss them at length, as I am troubled by the whole idea of ‘relationship counselling’ . What is it anyway? How can there be right answers in such matters? As for discussing other people’s sex lives, can this even be a job?    I have long argued here that Christians waste great amounts of time and energy on the tiny issue of homosexuality, when they should really be worrying about the demolition and abolition of heterosexual lifelong marriage, which affects millions of people rather a few hundred, and which continues unhindered, to the peril of countless children yet unborn (and in many cases as yet unaborted) .

 

Relate,  for which Mr McFarlane worked, was founded by a parson in 1938 as the National Marriage Guidance Council, and was intended to lower the divorce rate (negligible by today’s standards, but alarming by the standards of pre-war Britain). When it was renamed, in 1988, the various Destruction of Marriage Acts of the 1960s were going about like a roaring lion, seeking whom they might devour, marriages were dissolving all over the place, many people weren't getting married at all, and I can only suppose the leaders of this charity decided there was no point in limiting their services to the married any more. 

 

The Christian objection to working for Relate (and Relate’s problems with Christians) surely began when the name changed, not when they started offering counselling to homosexuals. I gather that by the time Mr McFarlane joined , Relate had already openly embraced the new ideology of ‘equality and diversity’ under which Christian sexual codes were abolished and replaced.

 

Mr McFarlane, it seems to me, had a broad case against modern British law, morality and society in general, but not particularly against Relate. It was just that the conflict took on a clear shape while he was working for them and found out what a post-marriage, post-Christian society really meant, in detail. And since the Human Rights Court is the main source of this legal and moral revolution, he could hardly turn to them for relief with much hope of getting it.

 

Lord Justice Laws at the Court of Appeal had earlier made a judgement of great harshness against Mr McFarlane, using language which bruises the ear if read out loud. But he was giving a true account of the laws of England as they now stand, an country which is, by law and custom, no longer Christian. The continued existence of a few symbolic baubles – the Cross on the Crown of St Edward, the figure of Jesus Christ still retained on the front of the Law Courts,  the diffident presence of a few hesitant prelates in the House of Lords, a few Christian services on the radio, some anthropological examination of Christianity in the schools, do not make a nation or a people Christian. On the contrary:

 

‘The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary. We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. 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. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens; and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic. The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments. The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law; but the State, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself.’

 

I personally regard these words as profoundly mistaken about the nature, origins and purpose of English law itself,  for reasons I have often stated here.  But they are a true explanation of our laws as they now stand and as people must learn to expect them to be interpreted by our most senior judges. If you don’t like it, what are you going to do, exactly ? Vote Tory? Ho,  ho.

 

 

As for Lillian Ladele, the registrar who would not conduct civil partnership ceremonies,  I have never seen why her employers could not have accommodated her convictions. A little judicious swapping of shifts could have allowed her to continue working without any conflict. Why was this not done?  I also tend to think that the retroactive removal of the rights of registrars (whose employment status abruptly changed when they became local government employees) was unfair by almost any principle of justice.  

 

But let that pass. For me, this episode was a test of the tolerance of the new rulers of our society. Having, in the name of tolerance, secured major changes in the laws and customs of the nation, would they then show tolerance to their defeated opponents? No, they wouldn’t. Nothing would do except total acceptance of their beliefs. And this is what we repeatedly find. Christian conservatives are lured into conflicts where they can be classified as ‘phobes’ or as suffering from some other pathology, and are then punished for it.

 

Two of the seven Strasbourg judges, to their credit, saw some justice in Lillian Ladele’s case. But this is a Human Rights Court, and Human Rights are not really about justice, but about a new post-Christian dogma, and it is necessary, as that dogma takes charge, for it to show a particularly harsh face to its defeated enemy. This is particularly satisfying for the new ruling class, as they tend to be sycophantic and apologetic when confronted by Islam in Western societies, so it's nice to feel a bit macho when telling Christians to get lost.

(It’s true, they can be very militant towards Islam in foreign wars, but the very people who support such wars tend to be the most active in conciliating Islam at home, an interesting paradox not often enough examined).  

 

Christians, whose ideas once ruled, must be repeatedly and rather angrily re-educated into understanding that they are now just another minority. If they attempt to act as if their beliefs are still the accepted national religion, they must and will be humiliated. Eventually, they will learn, as subjugated peoples do eventually learn, often some years after their formal subjugation takes place. And as our nominally free society has decided that the main method of controlling speech is the threat of unemployment, it will be in the workplace that these clashes will almost always happen.

 

As a recognised, registered and duly patronised  ‘minority’ (the patronising laid on thick so that they can never forget their reduced standing)  Christians may be able to wear crosses on their clothes provided an officious health and safety officer doesn’t rule them unhygienic. Indeed, it crosses my mind that it may be useful to the authorities, one day,  when ‘human rights’ have progressed  a bit further, if Christians can be *required * to wear a visible sign of their commitment, but, hang on, doesn’t that remind me of something?

 

It was once suggested to me, in a long-ago debate on Human Rights at some party conference, that the whole idea of Human Rights was in fact an attempt to replace Christianity with a new code. I think there’s something in this. My Roman Catholic friends tend to say that ‘Human Rights’ may have an origin in the idea of ‘natural law’. But I don’t see this. The whole thing appears to me to have been made up by people who thought that, because Kepler and Laplace could predict the motions of the planets, God was no longer needed to explain the universe. This has always seemed to me to be an odd confusion of ‘how’ and ‘why’,  but people believe what they want to believe, as I never tire of pointing out, and the 'enlightened' men of the 18th century wanted to believe that religion was a childish folly, best left behind. They then proceeded to prove, by repeated effusions of blood (mostly other people’s, but quite often their own too) , that they were wrong, but they still haven’t learned the lesson.

 

The original scripture of this movement is really the 1789 Declaration of the ‘Rights of Man’, adopted by the French revolutionaries who sought to begin the world over again (new calendar, new weights and measures, new morals, new beliefs, all arising from their fancy that they had risen above the supposed superstition and mumbo-jumbo of Christian belief). It was quite unlike previous documents with confusingly similar names – the American and English Bills of Rights, which meant by ‘right’ a wholly different thing. Both these fine documents placed specific, non-negotiable limits on the power of government, and treated human power, correctly, as a thing to be suspected and bound in chains of terse, real law.  They didn’t, in vague and grandiose clauses,  quarrel with God, or suggest a new source of authority, let alone arrogate that purpose to the state.

 

But the 1789 revolutionaries did, as you can see when you read its text here

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen

 

 

See how bendy and subject to the will of power its vain and florid clauses are. Ask yourself what is the origin of the claims it makes? The whole thing has been made up out of someone’s head, and its interpretation will undergo the same process. Remember that it launched a revolution which drowned in its own blood amid pyramids of severed heads, as the ideal new law swept aside due process and all the safeguards of the crabby old reactionary law.

 

And so we go, onwards and downwards, tripping merrily down the slopes of the liberal Avernus to whatever fate we have in store.  Human Wrongs will follow, by the tens of thousands. 

 

 

   

A Particularly Stupid Comment

A person who hides behind the pseudonym of 'Kimpatsu' writes :'As to Lillian Ladele, you are therefore saying you would find shift-swapping acceptable if a registrar did not wish to conduct interracial marriages because of their religious or political conscience'.

No, I am not. As any reader of this site must know, I would be disgusted by, and would certainly under no circumstances defend, any refusal of any kind under any circumstances to conduct marriages between people of different coloured skin. That would be bigotry, the product of unreasonable prejudice.

There is no comparison between an objection to civil partnerships, which is a moral opinion taken about a public act of choice with implications for the morals and customs of our society, and racial bigotry, which is a logic-free discrimination between equal persons, on a matter of no significance about which there is no choice.  

The introduction of a category called 'interracial marriage' is done only to confuse the matter, on the usual bait-and-switch method of the unscrupulous debater.

No such category as 'interracial marriage' exists in law or morals, nor ought it to. No case involving an unwillingness to conduct such marriages exists or is under discussion.

Such a concept would in any case imply that there were (as there are not) differences between people whose skins were of different colours. The law in this matter correctly recognises that there is one race, the human race. 

The issue under discussion is not marriage, but to do with the freedom to hold differing and unconventional opinions on sexual morality, according to conscience.  

The same person asserts 'If you would accept the one, you must accept the other, or you are a hypocrite.'

Since there is no such connection in fact or logic, this is factually false, and his or her comment is a particularly stupid smear, and I draw attention to it as a striking example of how not to argue, if you wish to be considered a civilised person. I would say "Here is our old enemy 'Liberal Bigotry' at work again."

 

This sort of thing explains why I don't in general even attempt to engage in the civil partnership/homosexual marriage argument - because of the wicked, dishonest and disreputable filth and slime that is directed against anyone who takes a conservative Christian position.

I was discussing the behaviour of Lillian Ladele's employers and colleagues, quite independently of the merits of the issue of civil partnerships (about which, as it happens,  I expressed no opinion of my own). I reflected on their unwillingness to offer her the tolerance they demanded for their own opinions, and also on the unilateral introduction of entirely new conditions of employment for registrars, in my view unfair under any concept of natural justice.

Yet Detective Sergeant Kimpatsu of the Thought Police burrowed into the text,  to confect a baseless suggestion that conservative moral opinions are equal to racial bigotry. In the case of Lillian Ladele, this allegation is of course particularly absurd.

 

 

 

The Exeter Cannabis Debate

I'm pleased to say that the video of last November's debate on cannabis legalisation at the Exeter University Debating Society is now available here

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znABP-mcm90

 

 

My old opponent Peter Reynolds leads for the pro-cannabis side, supported by Stephen Davies. My ally is David Raynes.

 

Longstanding readers will know the result of the vote. Others are warned that it is a bit of a cliffhanger.

Actually, I have met Nick Griffin

Our resident BNP bore writes that, as far as he knows,  I have never spoken to Nick Griffin, leader of that party. Well, as usual with this person, the expression ‘as far as he knows’ doesn’t cover a great deal of territory in any direction. I am fairly sure that this contributor was among my readers when, on 24th February 2009, I published the following:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/02/please-listen-to-me-or-youll-get-something-much-worse.html

 

 

 

Observant readers will see that it contains a reproduction of a lengthy interview which I conducted, some years ago, in a Shrewsbury pub, with a person called Nick Griffin, who led me to believe he was leader of the BNP and certainly bore a strong resemblance to pictures I had seen of this person.

 

Mr Slippery Woos the Nitwits - Britain can leave the EU, but not via a Referendum

The European Question is a very simple one. The EU is, and always has been, a plan to integrate its members into a single supranational state. The idea that Britain ‘originally joined a Common Market which was just a free trade area’ is the most abject tripe.  There was never any such organisation.

 

The poor boobies who write letters to the papers claiming that this what they voted for back in 1975 are just that, boobies. They refused to listen to the correct warnings they were given at the time. Then, when the warnings proved to be true, these boobies forgave themselves by pretending that they didn’t know, when the truth was that they knew, but preferred to ignore the knowledge.

 

The readiness of supposed ‘Eurosceptics’ to believe obvious falsehoods, peddled by blatant charlatans, while dismissing the cogent warnings of the informed,  is amazing. Do bluebottles fly into their open mouths as they walk along? This is one of the reasons why I increasingly believe Britain deserves its fate as a bankrupt ex-power. Tribal voters prefer their comfortable habits to any sort of thought. In that case, why be surprised when you are betrayed and spat upon, repeatedly?

 

Here we are again, with Mr Slippery going on and on about a referendum of some kind or other which he will offer, in the impossible future after he has won a general election. What kind of nitwit would be wooed by this stuff?

 

First,  the Conservative Party is not going to win the next election, or any other national election,  so the referendum, in the form put forward by Mr Slippery,  will never be held.

 

Secondly, if the Slippery pledge leads the other parties to match it, and a referendum is in fact held, the government will control:

The rules

The timing

The question

 

Thirdly, if even after all that,  the people of the country come up with the “wrong” answer, the result will be ignored or circumvented or used as a pretext for ‘renegotiation’ of our position in the EU, which will lead nowhere.

 

As for the idea that we can somehow repatriate powers we have handed over to the EU this (with the one bizarre and unique anomaly of Home Affairs, which this government ignored for years before realising that Lisbon had given it an opt-out) is not in fact available.

 

As my friend Christopher Booker ceaselessly points out, the only way in which we can truly vary our treaty with the rest of the EU is to activate Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, the one which allows us to leave the EU.

 

Otherwise we are subject to the EU’s binding principle of the ‘Acquis Communautaire’, which insists, quite understandably (given the EU’s true nature and purpose),  that powers given up by nation states to the EU can never be given back. This is organically linked to the matching principle of ‘ever closer union’ (or ever narrower union, to translate it more literally) under which the original states, slice by slice, merge themselves into a new supranational body which will eventually swallow them entirely and stand on its own as a nation.

 

It already has the ‘legal personality’ to do so, and it will take surprisingly few more steps to complete the process. It is because of this that the leadership of the EU have not abandoned the single currency, despite the immense costs and dangers imposed by this utopian project.

 

Can we leave? Yes, we can. Though it is wise for secessionists, such as me, to accept that this will involve costs and difficulties. The ‘Economist’ magazine went into the detail a few weeks ago ( from a pro-EU point of view, which readers should take into account, while being grateful for the thoroughness of the examination) . It was quite clear that departure is technically, politically and economically feasible.

 

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21567914-how-britain-could-fall-out-european-union-and-what-it-would-mean-making-break

 

Much would depend upon negotiations, but pessimists on this score always overestimate (as they did when trying to scare us into the Euro) the supposed effect on foreign businesses which might or might not locate here. The truth is that in the era of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) the EU can put up few trade barriers against us, and would have no sane reason to do so. EU members sell vast quantities of goods to us, and have no desire to lose those markets . Companies locate here not because we are in the EU but because of a culture which makes it easy to set up business.

 

We have very little say in EU lawmaking as it is. And we might well, as an independent power, have more influence on EU lawmaking from outside than we do from within.  There’s absolutely no axiomatic progress which says that one member out of 27 has more power than a valuable market that isn’t a member. The EU’s trade negotiations aren’t necessarily devoted to our interests (what do you think happens when the interests of France and Germany conflict with ours?) and have been known to drag us into disputes with the USA on which we have no interest. Also, remember the EU beef export ban, which came close to destroying  large part of our agriculture.

 

We would certainly need to pay some sort of fee for access. But it wouldn’t be anything like our current net contribution.  Many of the things we’re told are only available to EU members are in fact available to Norway and Switzerland. Why not to us, if we want them?

 

Look at it for yourselves.  Work out how much you value the freedom to control your own borders, make your own laws, decide on your own agricultural subsidies, control your own fishing grounds. If these things don’t matter to you, then the undoubted difficulties of departure won’t appeal. But if they do, then those difficulties are a price well worth paying.  

 

But they will not be payable until we have a political party, committed at a general election, to withdraw if elected. All our major parties (and the Tories most of all)  are deeply committed to staying in. When they offer referenda, they are toying with you and your vote. First, we must destroy the Tories. Then there will be hope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My articles from the 'American Conservative'

Many of my British readers do not know that I occasionally write for American publications, and so I’m pleased to be able to provide this link

 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/peter-hitchens/

 

to an archive of articles by me, published over several years by the interesting and courageous American Conservative, a small magazine which has resisted the temptation to join modern mainstream ‘neo-conservatism’ – because it doesn’t think that economic liberalism at home, and aggressive intervention abroad are conservative.

 

I’ve had my quarrels with the American Conservative.  But, as you might expect from proper conservatives, they’re happy to air such disagreements. For example, I don’t agree with their hostility to the state of Israel, and – typically – they published a lengthy conservative defence of that country, by me. (The link to ‘older posts’ doesn’t currently work, but it would lead to that article, and , if the link isn’t fixed and it proves necessary, I’ll dredge it up from my own archives and post it here for those interested).

How Shall we Mark the Centenary of The Great War?

A strange argument has broken out in Whitehall about how we should mark the centenary of the First World War next year. An advisory committee of authors, historians and soldiers is split . Should we commemorate Germany’s defeat as a triumph for good? Should we emphasise the futility and loss? Apparently Sir Hew Strachan, the eminent military historian, wants a frank celebration of victory. The novelist Sebastian Faulks says it should be modest, inclusive and reverential of others’.

 

First, I’m not sure this is or should be a political decision or a government matter. Let those who take part in solemn commemoration find their own thoughts, rather than be told what to think.

 

I’d like, most of all,  a series of memorial services in the nation’s churches, using only the language, liturgy and music that would have been familiar to those who died and were bereaved (thus making sure that expressions such as ‘inclusive’ didn’t feature). Almost all of them were serious Christian believers, and we owe them a serious Christian ceremony even if we cannot live up to their levels of faith and devotion.

 

Part of me would like to see an immense, sombre, dawn-to-dusk  march-past through the centre of London, representing the time it would have taken for the British dead to pass through the capital.

 

And I would urge a national effort  to get by heart Edward Thomas’s ‘Easter 1915’ (the one that opens with the words  ‘The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood’), which I have long thought was the best of all the war poems, because of the way it gently takes you by the hand and then suddenly, fiercely makes you weep, when you understand what the words ‘now far from home’ actually mean. It dates from the moment the people of Britain began to understand the unique, terrible scale of the losses they were undergoing.

 

I also think it’s time for a new discussion about Lord Lansdowne’s ignored letter, calling for a negotiated peace which – if heeded – might have prevented the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Hitler. Perhaps someone could write a counterfactual thriller on the subject.

 

As someone who never watched a single episode of ‘Blackadder’, and wouldn’t have done if you’d paid me, and as a person who instinctively loathes everything connected with Joan Littlewood, I ought to be on Professor Strachan’s side.   But I’m not. It grieves me to admit that this rather crude agitprop drama is broadly right, that the war was a terrible mistake, fought by generals and politicians who had no idea what they were doing for most of the time, and involving the stupid and wasteful deaths of legions of fine men.

 

But somehow I’d like to separate it from dreary unthinking pacifism. It isn’t always wrong to fight. It is sometimes vital to carry on fighting even when all seems lost. What we need to examine is the competence and abilities, and the thinking, of our political leaders who (as this week’s African adventures illustrate) never cease to be childishly keen on rushing into war, unable to learn how hard it is to get out of wars once you are in them.

 

Something also needs to be said about journalists, equally willing to rush other people into combat, and to rejoice in reporting it when it happens. The horrible mess we now have in Syria is at least partly the fault of reporters who have oversimplified and romanticised events there.

 

I am currently plodding through the foothills of Christopher Clark’s majestic new book on the outbreak of the war ‘The Sleepwalkers’ , but I don’t think it is going to persuade me that Germany didn’t start the war (I’m told by Nigel Jones of the Spectator

(http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2012/09/lets-not-be-beastly-to-the-germans/)

 

…that everyone who wanted to know, has known for years (thanks to hard evidence uncovered by Kurt Eisner and Fritz Fischer) that the German Kaiser wanted war and set out to get it, thinking he could win as quickly as Bismarck had done in 1870.  And I have to say the ( historically well-known) mysterious destruction of some important German and Austro-Hungarian archives does make you wonder what it was they sought to hide).

 

I still think the real problem was the rivalry between Germany and France, which could only end in the victory of one or the other, and which, as far as I can see, was bound to end in the triumph of Germany sooner or later. And so it has, and nobody now complains.

 

I’m amused by the fact that modern liberal opinion ferociously and rather righteously supports the current European Union settlement, which is in all but name the defeat of France by Germany, formalised into a mysterious headless ‘Union’ which never mentions its chief purpose, the institutionalisation of German dominance of Europe, whiel France is allowed to pretend to be a great power.

 

Germany has learned many things since 1914, but one of the most important of all the things it has learned is tact. Otto von Bismarck had both tact and skill and was able to cement and increase German power without endangering his country, but when Wilhelm II got rid of him, things moved rapidly towards war. German politicians and diplomats couldn’t see the point of Bismarck’s bizarre and sometimes contradictory treaty entanglements with Russia and France which prevented a slide into war.

 

I suspect they also thought that Russia, rapidly modernising in the pre-1914 age, might one day become a much more effective ally of France, and that they had better got on with their war if they were not to risk a combat on two fronts. And it may also have been that they saw the chance (taken at Brest-Litovsk in 1917) to seize the Ukrainian wheatfields, the Baltic states and the Crimea, which Hitler would later covet and invade. I don’t know. But it seems to make sense.

 

As in 1939, I cannot for the life of me see why Britain needed to get involved in this, or what good our intervention actually did, to us or to those we claimed to be saving or helping. Clark’s book suggests that the supposed German threat to British naval supremacy was never that serious, which seems to me to have a ring of truth (Why did Germany want supremacy over the oceans anyway? Her interests were eastward and landlocked. The USA were our rivals in that struggle, and the ones who defeated us, too, while we were looking the other way and considering them as our allies). And, once that is taken out of the equation, I really cannot see why it mattered to us that the military verdict of 1870 should be reversed. France alone could not withstand Germany alone. Wouldn’t a clear settlement of this fact have been far more civilised in 1914 than it was in 1940?

 

France, despite sentimentalism about the Entente Cordiale, had many times been our chief enemy and was our natural rival in the Middle East (fighting between Britain and Vichy France in that region was among the bitterest combat of the Second World War.  Anglo-French rivalry in Syria and Palestine was a diplomatic nightmare between the wars , and during the last years of the Palestine mandate,  see ‘A Line in the Sand’) . I believe the British chiefs of staff were worried about war with France as recently as the early 1920s, and my former home town, Portsmouth, is amusingly ringed with gigantic, vastly expensive Victorian fortifications built against a French invasion threat of the 1850s. What was our interest in preventing a resolution of the Berlin-Paris quarrel?

 

Germany’s main interests were continental, and lay to the East. In 1914, Poland and Czechoslovakia, not to mention the Baltic states,  didn’t even exist, and Britain didn’t much care whether they did or not. Nor was Britain especially concerned about the Balkans. If Germany did push east, that would weaken Russia, which we did in those days regard as a threat in the Mediterranean and in India. Had we been able to see into the future, we would all have been keen on maintaining the dear old Austro-Hungarian empire, so much nicer than what came after it.

 

And, as usual, we had no continental-style land army of any size. Lord Roberts, Rudyard Kipling and (through his enjoyable book imagining a German invasion of Britain ‘When William Came’) ‘Saki’ (H.H.Munro) all campaigned for such an army. But they didn’t get anywhere. I used to think they had a point, but I don’t any more.  It was too expensive, conflicted with our traditions,  would have weakened the navy ( and so exposed the empire to danger) and  compelled us to lock it into some sort of formal continental alliance.

 

Our supposed guarantee to Belgium was not as clear-cut as you might think, nor did our fulfilment of it do much good to Belgium, which would have been a lot better off if it had let the Germans pass through on their way to Paris (almost nobody even knows that Sweden let German troops cross its territory after the occupation of Norway) . It seems to me, too, that France would have been a lot better off if it had been permanently and swiftly defeated in 1914.  It would have been spared Verdun, Vichy and the murder of its Jews. Germany would have been spared the blockade, Versailles, Hitler, the Holocaust,  the bombing , partition. Russia would have been spared the Bolsheviks, the civil war, Stalin, Barbarossa and all that followed. The Middle East might have remained slothful and untroubled, under a slowly decaying Ottoman rule. And who can say that would not have been a better outcome than the one we have?

 

 

 

The Netherlands, Italy, Scandinavia, Greece and above all (from my point of view) Britain would have been spared many losses and tragedies. The peoples living in Eastern Europe would have passed under different rulers, perhaps, but would probably have survived the century much more happily and more prosperous . The horrible forces released by Bolshevism and by Wilsonian national self-determination would have stayed buried at the bottom of Pandora’s Box.  Whatever it was, it was a mistake.  Whatever we do, we should not pretend otherwise.

 

We dole out £207bn in benefits. Even lemmings aren't that dumb

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Britain cannot possibly afford its welfare state for much longer. Most people do not realise that state handouts (£207 billion a year) mop up every penny we  pay in income tax (£155 billion a year).

Everything else, the NHS, schools, transport, police, defence, interest on the debt (nearly £50 billion a year, by the way) must be paid  for by other taxes, including the vast sums raked in by  so-called ‘National Insurance’, or by more borrowing.

As we are more or less bankrupt as a country, such generosity is not noble but plain idiotic. Yet we will not stop doing it. Change is politically impossible.

Last week’s fuss about supposed cuts in benefits was a sign of the swamp we are in.  

There were, as usual,  no actual cuts. A hesitant plan to cap future increases was met with angry hostility by many in politics and the media.

Emotions were immediately engaged and slammed into top gear. That is because this immense and unaffordable attempt to substitute the State for the married family is at the heart of the political revolution which began 50 years ago and is  now reaching its sad and bankrupt end.

The very idea that people should provide for themselves has become a horrible heresy, a barbaric view that no civilised person can hold. We’ll see.

My own guess is that a hurricane of inflation will, over the next ten years,  rip the welfare state up by the roots and leave us impoverished, diminished and baffled, wondering what happened to us. 

Here’s what we spend.

One wholly justifiable payment is the old-age pension, which is startlingly mean but still takes up almost £80 billion a year, more than a third of the welfare budget.

Disability Living Allowance (3.38 million recipients) costs £13.43 billion.

Housing Benefit (5.04 million recipients) costs £23 billion; its close cousin Council Tax Benefit (5.9 million recipients) costs £4.92 billion. 

Incapacity Benefit costs £3.22 billion; Income Support costs £5.3 billion. Jobseeker’s Allowance costs £5.26 billion.

I might add, because I continue to believe that this particular form of welfare very often hurts those to whom it is offered, that there are now 567,000 fatherless households being subsidised by the taxpayer.   

Look at these figures and gasp. Where is the cash to come from? Think what else we might do with it.

I am sure a lot of welfare money goes to people who need and deserve it, whose problems are no fault of their own.

But I am just as sure that a lot of it goes to people who do not deserve it.

And on top of that, I know from my letters and emails how many people there are who have worked and saved all their lives, and who are therefore excluded from the most  important benefits, when they need them most.

The working poor, who live next door to  people whom they know to be cheating, are the most outraged by these abuses, and the most powerless to change them.

The new political elite, who hope to buy votes and power through handing out other people’s money, will not stop doing so until that money runs out.

And so we ramble merrily towards the edge of the abyss, making lemmings look responsible and far-sighted.

Pick on REAL collaborators, not Enoch

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Enoch was wrong. Mr Powell was nearly a great man, but demeaned himself with his rash and foolish catch-penny speech about ‘piccaninnies’ and rivers foaming with blood.

It is a special pity because of his many more important actions, including his brave denunciation of mistreatment of prisoners in colonial Kenya, his academic brilliance and his strong principles. Whatever he was, Enoch Powell could not have been a collaborator with Hitler, nor could he have been part of a government that rounded up Jews and sent them to certain death in National Socialistconcentration camps.

He actively hated Neville Chamberlain’s policy of making concessions to Hitler, and joined up to fight in 1939 as soon as he could.

But modern Leftists, who like to insinuate that all conservatives are Nazis at root, can’t understand that. I think this must be why the author C. J. Sansom thought he could get away with portraying Powell as a Nazi collaborator in his new thriller Dominion.

It’s all very well making up historical episodes that never happened but might have done. But if you bend the truth too far, you betray your craft.

Actually, many prominent Left-wing people in British public life did collaborate with Stalin’s communist tyranny.

If I ever take to writing thrillers, I could have a lot of fun – and stay within the bounds of truth – by taking their actions to their logical conclusion.

In the meantime, I suggest that Mr Sansom says sorry to Mr Powell’s family for this babyish, historically illiterate slur, before the book goes into paperback.

Police shouldn't act like a celebrity squad

Personally, I hope that the judge is not too hard on Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, who seems to have rung up the papers in a moment of madness, and now faces prison for doing so.

If this is enough to get a police officer locked up, then who shall escape?
DCI Casburn was quite rightly appalled by the ridiculous celebrity-worship of the modern police. She saw how her colleagues were pathetically excited about meeting the actress Sienna Miller, to discuss her problems with phone hacking.

These cases are so much more interesting and urgent than a burgled pensioner, or a persecuted and lonely family such as the late Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francecca, whose miseries were ignored by police until Mrs Pilkington killed herself and her daughter in a blazing car.

May I volunteer to teach BBC staff our lovely, customary English measures, which they seem so keen to abandon but which are now to be brought back into schools?

The poor things are floundering with the foreign metric system, recently claiming that some cliffs in the Falklands (actually 600 feet high) towered to a height of ‘2,000 metres’.

This is because metric measurements are inhuman, and hard to memorise or imagine.

I am besieged by unhappy citizens distressed by the BBC’s decision to move a favourite programme, Sunday Half Hour, from its evening slot on Radio 2 to a pre-dawn timing.

One writes: ‘It is obviously a move to kill off one of the few Christian programmes.’

I suspect he may be right. The BBC’s right-on executives tend to treat older listeners as if they are already dead.

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

 

Friends Like These

It has been curious to watch as an American official and a German Bundestag member have boldly interfered in British internal affairs, more or less telling us to stay in the EU. Well, there’s no particular surprise that an establishment German politician takes this view, though I have the impression that many of the brighter Germans have realised that it is in the interests of Britain, Germany and the EU that we negotiate an amicable departure.

 

The standard German view is that German’s eternal interests should be dissolved into the European Project, and that the whole of Europe should therefore be enfolded in the sticky-sweet embrace of Brussels. Dear old Helmut Kohl used sometimes to rumble, between slices of cake and generous plates of stuffed cow’s stomach ( a favourite Rhenish delicacy), that war might result from any frustration of this objective.

Of course, he didn’t mean it *that* way, only that the road to peace on the continent was through integration – a perfectly reasonable view if you are trying to neutralise the centuries-old Franco-German conflict. It is always difficult, when trying to explain to the innocents of the modern age, who think that the world is a harmonious place without conflicts of interest, that Germany still has powerful economic and diplomatic desires, and that these must be served, not be accused of whipping up anti-German sentiment or of raving about a ‘Fourth Reich’.

 

It is far better that Europe falls under German influence by peaceful, benevolent means than through conquest. Who could doubt it? But Germany is simply so big and so rich that she will inevitably dominate the continent, now that Russia has been pushed back beyond the River Bug ( and in fact even further than that, thanks to the current unsustainable independence of Belarus) . It is a fantasy to say that the EU has prevented war in Europe since 1945. The old Cold War stand-off achieved that, and there is an argument for saying that the EU’s need to break up Yugoslavia may have *led* to the first modern European war.

 

 (I cannot resist a small digression here, to say that one of the least attractive-sounding establishments in Europe (though as far as I know it is in fact entirely desirable and comfortable ) is the Hotel Bug in the fascinating city of Brest, currently on the Belarus-Polish border, though where it will be ten years hence, I wouldn’t like to say).

 

But the EU has without doubt institutionalised and stabilised the many conflicts which previously seethed in the continent, most especially the Franco-German one, but also those between Germany and the Scandinavian countries, Germany and Italy and the curious position of the Low Countries. We’ll see how it works out with Poland and the Baltic states, who would fly into almost anyone’s arms to stay out of Russian control. I still don’t see, myself, why British membership of the EU adds to this.

Because of Britain’s separate and global history, and because of its wholly different traditions of law and government, it could never be integrated into any Continental system without a terrible struggle. And precisely because it hasn’t been invaded or taken over by some dictator, it will continue to be resistant to such change for the foreseeable future . Ireland, which has inherited many British legal and political traditions, is so anxious to differentiate herself from Britain that she will do almost anything to prove that point. I still think an intelligent German government would readily make a generous trade agreement with us, and wave a cheerful goodbye.

They don’t need us in the EU. We’re not really part of the continental system . Why pretend we are?

 

But the Americans, well, I suspect they were involved from very early on in trying to shove us into the EU, partly to support US interests there, partly because they were frankly sick of the slobbering, servile ‘special relationship’ and the absurd assumption that Britain and the USA were in some way old comrades, apart from the rest of the world.

 

Some of you will recall me mentioning, some years ago, a legendary BBC radio programme, called ‘Document – A Letter To The Times’, broadcast on February 3, 2000. It recorded persuasively that the Corporation came under pressure from pro-Market lobbyists to sack Jack de Manio, widely believed to be an opponent of the Common Market, and that he was soon after removed. I wrote ‘Coincidence? You may believe that if you wish. I don’t. The Labour peer Roy Hattersley creditably recalls his personal disgust when he attended a high-level pro-Market breakfast meeting at which similar actions against anti-Market broadcasters were openly demanded by pro-Brussels conspirators.’

 

I seem to recall a faint suspicion that the USA were not unhappy with British integration in the EU, at that time (the early to mid-1970s) . This seems odd, given the anti-American attitude of the EU in many areas. But there it is. They still want us in it rather than out of it, and they’ve just made that very clear.

The Question Mr Slippery Still Cannot Answer

Some of you may recall my long-ago brush with Mr Slippery, during what I think was his sole press conference of the general election campaign in 2010. Laughingly, but reluctantly, he eventually took a question from me , jeering that it was ‘The Peter Hitchens Memorial Question’. He didn’t answer it then, and he can’t answer it now.

 

A full account of this (from this weblog on 3rd May 2010) can be found here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/05/who-made-a-fool-of-whom.html

 

Here’s the relevant excerpt: “There was a bit of banter at the beginning which went (as far as I've been able to piece together):

 

David Cameron (after I'd had my hand up since the start of questions): ‘Let's take the Peter Hitchens memorial question.’

PH: ‘Will there be only one?’

 

DC: ‘No, we'll be happy to take lots of questions from you - actually that was the first lie of the campaign.’ (Laughter)

PH: ‘Would you say you were politically closer to Norman Tebbit or Nick Clegg?’ (Laughter, but more nervous)

DC: (summarised) ‘Blah blah, Norman's written a great cookery book, very much like Norman Tebbit, blah blah, Nick Clegg always changing his position, blah blah blah.’

PH: (summarised, trying to hang on to microphone while DC hopes to move to another question) ‘But you change your position - notably on the Lisbon Treaty - and you haven't answered the question.’

DC: ‘I thought I answered it very well.’ “

 

Now a very similar question has been asked of Mr Cameron by Philip Davies MP ( who I suspect is well aware of the fact that I asked the same one all those months ago) .

 

This is from Column 313 of Hansard for the House of Commons, 9th January 2013

‘Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con): Just in case anybody is in any doubt, will the Prime Minister confirm who he is closest to, politically? Is it Lord Tebbit or the Deputy Prime Minister?

 

The Prime Minister: I managed to get through Christmas without spending any time with either of them. I would remind my hon. Friend that I am closer to all Conservatives than I am to anyone from any other party.’

 

 

This gives me some satisfaction (though also makes me a bit jealous) for two reasons. One, when I asked it the Coalition was not – as far as we know - even a twinkle in Mr Cameron’s eye, though it was in fact just days away. I knew Mr Cameron couldn’t win the election,  and I had suggested a hung parliament and a Con-Lib coalition as possibilities, but I think the question I asked now ranks as quite prophetic, whereas Mr Davies’s version was asked after the fact.

 

The other reason is that while my question was born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air, as my fellow reporters couldn’t be bothered to mention it in their accounts of that odd, rare occasion, Mr Davies’s near-identical question was transmitted at the beginning of the BBC’s ‘Yesterday In Parliament’ report on the ‘Today’ programme this morning. It also attracted  quite a lot of attention in the Internet, and was reported in the Independent by my old friend Don Macintyre.

 

By the way, Mr Macintyre also correctly chided Mr Cameron for dismissing John Spellar MP as a ‘red pest’, a silly mistake which shows that Mr Cameron knows nothing of the recent past and was, to all intents and purposes, born yesterday.

 

Mr Spellar, now the last surviving ‘right-wing’ Labour MP in captivity,  was in fact the chief lieutenant of Frank Chapple, the ferocious battler who destroyed Communist party control of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) and exposed the left’s ballot-rigging.  I believe it was Mr Spellar who wrote the devastating speech at the TUC conference,  in which Frank Chapple’s successor, Eric Hammond, attacked Arthur Scargill, who had led many members of the National Union of Mineworkers into a disastrous self-defeating strike.

 

Mr Scargill had to listen as Mr Hammond described the poor miners as ‘Lions, led by donkeys’. (The phrase, attributed by Alan Clark to the German general Erich von Falkenhayn, was also applied to British soldiers in World war One, and seems to have been first used by a Russian officer about British troops during the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimea).

 

There was no doubt who the chief donkey was. Mr Hammond was howled down, despite the fact that what he said was absolutely true.  Given this, it was particularly dim of Mr Cameron to call Mr Spellar a ‘red’ . I always thought that one of the points of the clubby atmosphere of the House of Commons, with its many bars, libraries, cafes , corridors, lobbies and terraces, decorated with scenes from British history, was that it gave a chance to rising to young MPs to get to know and meet their opponents, and find out the history of their country through the human beings who had themselves experienced it. For most of my life, for instance, the House of Commons still contained men who had fought in war, or had actually seen the fall of Chamberlain in 1940, and the great wartime speeches of Churchill. I can myself claim to have watched from the gallery some of the clashes between Margaret Thatcher and Denis Healey, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock , and also the moment when Norman Lamont more or less slew John major with the jibe that he was ‘In office, but not in power’, a barb so deadly and unforgettable that you could all but hear it penetrating Mr Major’s flesh.

 

A note on ‘GPI TV’. I am asked for an explanation of this jibe. Very well then.  ‘GPI’ is ‘General Paralysis of the Insane’, the old name for the appalling tertiary stage of Syphilis. I think that when I discovered this reference I understood for the first time the stinging fury that lay at the back of the wit of ‘Peter Simple’. The column may often have seemed elegiac, partly because of Michael ffolkes’s lovely, wistful illustrations, but in fact it was grounded in a sort of rage of loss.