Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 288

Has 'Private Eye' magazine lost its edge? And other matters

Now that we’ve crossed the frontier into a new calendar, and are used to the change of date, I thought it might be a good moment to reflect on some discussions here, but also to say a few words about ‘Private Eye’ magazine which this week makes the latest of its bizarre and rather pointless attacks on me (they seem to think there’s something self-evidently absurd about engaging with my critics on Twitter.

Why? If someone attacks you in a public place, is it unreasonable to respond? As for posting on Twitter, I have so far limited this to publicising my blog postings, having been urged by many people to do this for good practical reasons) . For many years now, I have for some reason been on this supposedly satirical fortnightly’s list of villains, so that if I do something normal, it is portrayed in a bad light, and if I do something good, a way is found of making it look bad, or at least flawed. As for when I do something bad … It’s true that in November 1989 they did say something reasonably complimentary about me, but it’s been all downhill since then.

 I find this amusing and enjoyable, but also rather odd, given that I am one of the longest-surviving regular readers of this strange magazine, which I have been buying since 1965 (I used to keep the first one I ever purchased, the cover of which was a fake competition announced by the headline ‘Women ! Win Mr Heath!”, offering a few days with the then Conservative Leader as first prize and ‘A Lifetime with Enoch Powell’ as its second prize. Heaven knows where it is now). In those days the magazine was printed in vile ink on viler paper, and – barred from the shelves of chain newsagents – could only be found in small backstreet shops (usually one per town), many days after publication . Headmasters banned it from school premises and confiscated it if they caught you with it.

 

But it still gave off a magic whiff of irreverence, in an age of genuine respectability and deference. It was adolescent, public schoolboy irreverence, but applied to national figures. I don’t now think it was very funny, but it seemed to be at the time. These were the days of ‘Mrs Wilson’s Diary’, the first never-to-be-matched imaginary account of the ludicrous home life of a prime minister . Subsequent efforts (Heathco, ‘Dear Bill’, ‘St Albion’s’ and the rather laboured and ill-aimed squibs directed at Gordon Brown and David Cameron) never measured up to the fictional Mrs Wilson’s gently desperate attempts to make sense of her ludicrous husband and his conspiracy-riven Cabinet.

It all seemed so very adventurous because we were not used to it. We took things seriously, and we took them at face value. Thanks to the Profumo affair, which genuinely did bring an era to an end, that was impossible. And ‘Private Eye’, to begin with, was the only printed publication which spoke about these things with the voice of knowing raillery. The BBC ‘satire’ programme ‘That was the Week That Was’ had lost its way when it sank into sentimentality at the news of the Kennedy assassination ( it would have been far better if it had been taken off the air that night – for when the irreverent slip into reverence it is not a pretty sight). And so much of its humour had been based on the fundamental risibility of Harold Macmillan that its successors couldn’t really cope with the equally laughable New Britain of Harold Wilson and Marcia Williams.

 

But bit by bit the ‘satirical’ way of thinking, in which everything was viewed ironically and nothing taken seriously seeped into every chamber of national life, until it lacked any sort of edge. Fleet Street diaries and mainstream weeklies had adopted the same register, as had much of the BBC. I doubt very much if Jeremy Paxman’s style of interviewing could have come into being had Private Eye not existed 20 years before. Also the original magazine’s now-forgotten preoccupation with homosexuals, and the silly eccentricities which probably came from the mind of Peter Cook – the Seductive Brethren, and all that sort of thing, ceased to amuse.

 

By one of the great paradoxes of time, Ian Hislop became part of the new establishment, presenter of weighty programmes on the BBC, and above all, panellist on ‘Have I Got News for You’, the Bench of Bishops of modern rectitude. The Archbishop of Canterbury can condemn you, and you will prosper. But if HIGNFY decides to do you in, you are finished. When I have looked back at old issues, I have often been reminded of the beginning of L.P.Hartley’s ‘The Go- Between’ In which the aged, broken Leo Colston uncovers his old pre-school diaries and finds he simply cannot crack the code of them any more. In the week that ‘The Times’ dropped personal advertisements from its front page and became like other newspapers, ‘Private Eye’ produced a witty cover made up entirely of fake personal advertisements in the style of the old Thunderer. I remember, that week, being rather pleased with myself for having understood every single set of initials and every reference. When I looked at it a few years ago, almost all of them had gone.

 

Sometimes, when I read the magazine, I get the impression that it would be happier defending various aspects of modern government and society. Far more lasting (and alas, far less well-known) were the intricately deft satires of ‘Peter Simple’ in the Daily Telegraph, from Alderman Foodbotham of Bradford and Bishop Spacely-Trellis of Bevindon, to Jeremy Cardhouse, the all-purpose Tory MP, Seth Roentgen’s appalling experiments at the Ohm Farm (which is no doubt now festooned with windmills and solar panels) , useless Stretchford University and its grenade-draped perpetual student union President Ken Slabb, Bog Lane Comprehensive, beautiful, sex-maniac-haunted Sadcake Park (also in Stretchford) , Julian Birdbath (the literary critic who lives at the bottom of an abandoned leadmine with his pet toad) , General Sir Frederick ‘Tiger’ Nidgett , hero of the Tailoring Corps, and the GPI Television network (look it up, GPI, I mean) , Dr Heinz Kiosk, the psychiatrist, Harry and Janet Nodule, whose heads come to a marked point, who seek out traffic jams so that they can become stuck in them (others have pointed out that J.Bonington Jagworth, the fanatical motorist, prefigured Jeremy Clarkson for decades), and of course Sir Herbert Trance, chairman of the British Boring Board of Control, which I have sometimes invited to adjudicate over the postings of Mr ‘Bunker’, though I believe the torch has now passed to UNESCO’s Global Tedium Commission. Peter Simple’s characters all live on, and have in fact taken over the country. They are more richly in need of satirising than ever, and I suspect that some of them may be running ‘Private Eye’.

 

Now to the recent threads. I’m grateful to contributors who have pointed out the rather obvious flaws in attempts to introduce race into the discussion of the modern attempt to elevate Mary Seacole into major historical importance. The objective of the original campaign, to create an equivalence between Mrs Seacole and Mrs Nightingale, was I think well-illustrated by the amazing events at the trade union conference which I described in my original article. I do not think any sensible person can maintain that Mrs Seacole was truly Miss Nightingale’s equivalent, in achievement or historical importance. If anyone can produce evidence of this, then I shall change my mind and join in the campaign for Mrs Seacole to be commemorated.

 

But how can anyone suggest that this discussion, about objective fact, has any racial content? Skin colour is entirely irrelevant to this assessment, as it ought to be. The only people who bring it into the discussion are the supposed ‘anti-racists’, who ( as I describe in ‘the Cameron Delusion’ ) long ago abandoned the struggle for integration and instead devoted themselves to making bogus accusations of ‘racism’ against their opponents. These charges, conveniently for them, require no proof, as these days (After the MacPherson Report) ‘racism’ is what any observer thinks is ‘racism’, it can be ‘unconscious’ or it can be ‘institutional’, where no actual evidence of racially biased behaviour can be uncovered in the organisation under investigation. Or it can be cultural, in which case an entirely non-racial belief, held by an unprejudiced person for rational purposes and on rational grounds, can be, and usually is, smeared with the brush of bigotry.

 

I have often dealt with the way in which the term ‘racism’ (subtly but importantly different from ‘racialism’) is used to demean and destroy people whose concern is culture. As for the question of the ‘superiority’ of cultures, I do not know how this could be objectively measured, and steer clear of judgements. I have (for example) found in many supposedly ‘primitive’ cultures high degrees of personal generosity and hospitality, not to mention family loyalty and the care of the old, which are coldly absent from some ‘advanced’ societies. Apart from the question of national sovereignty and the (desirable)freedom of peoples to live according to their own chosen and hallowed customs and laws without outside interference, what seems to me to be certain is that successful, cohesive and stable cultures tend to be monocultures, which insist that new arrivals adapt themselves to the existing language, customs, laws and manners. Therefore any project which sets out to weaken or dilute or alter the existing monoculture is an ambitious and far-reaching political change, whose supporters should be subject to question and doubt just as much as the supporters of any other radical political or social change.

 

They should not be able to silence their critics with false accusations of racial bigotry. Next, may I suggest that those who wish to reconsider the current view of the outbreak of World War Two be very careful not to be seduced into lines of argument which end up in some way defending or excusing the actions of Hitler’s Germany? That is absolutely not my purpose in reopening this question, though I know that my critics would love to claim such an aim (on the same assumption which makes so many bigoted left-wing people confuse conservatism with its loathly opposite National Socialism). I am concerned with my own country’s folly, the false beliefs which still flow from it, and the bad decisions (including our intervention in Iraq) which continue to flow from it. There is much to be said against the pre-1939 government of Poland (particularly against the ‘sanacja’ or ‘sanation’ governments which were more or less explicitly anti-Jewish) . It is widely forgotten among the modern Polish lobby that Poland and Hitler’s Germany had for some years a working non-aggression pact, which Hitler wanted to renew soon before the war. The Polish state behaved like a jackal over the partition of Czechoslovakia after Munich, seizing Czechoslovak territory and acting in a highhanded fashion towards the Czech-speaking residents. And the delusional behaviour of the Polish government in Summer 1939 (they were the only people to believe the British guarantee meant anything) remains one of the best illustrations of how important stupidity is in history.

 

But the idea that Poland opened hostilities against Germany is, I think, bizarre. People who try to argue against the grain often get so carried away that they fall into the trap of doing wild 180-degree turns and taking ludicrous sides in various quarrels. The critic of Nelson Mandela slithers into defending apartheid, the sympathiser with the Arabs becomes a militant anti-Zionist (or vice versa), the refugee from Communism becomes a fanatical free-marketeer, the person who doubts that the ‘West’ behaved well in Yugoslavia becomes a partisan of Slobodan Milosevic. This is futile and usually very wrong. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The huge barbarities of one side do not cancel out the still worse barbarities of the other. The only side to be on, in history, is the side of truth, which will often in time (Truth is the Daughter of Time) offer condemnations of both sides.

 

Once again, the question is not to re-enter and reform the past. The past is gone. What we need to worry about is repeatedly choosing the wrong future, by learning nothing from the past. By the way, I know and like John Cornwell, but I have always thought that the title and particularly the cover of his book about Pius XII (‘Hitler’s Pope’ ) were misleading. The cover of the original edition shows Pope Pius, as he then wasn’t, leaving the Presidential quarters in Berlin, its entrance guarded by soldiers in the distinctive coal-scuttle helmets of the German Army.

 

A casual reader would assume, from the words and pictures, that this was a meeting with Hitler. (an informed person would see, from many clues, that it wasn’t such a meeting, but how many of us are that well-informed?). But it wasn’t. It was, as far as I know, a meeting with President Hindenburg in 1927, when Pius was a mere Papal Nuncio. The role of the Roman Catholic Church (to which I do not belong) in the National Socialist era is mixed. For instance, Archbishop von Galen’s opposition to the murder of the mentally ill was an astonishingly courageous stand, and the publication and distribution of the 1937 encyclical ‘Mit Brennende Sorge’ was one of the most powerful opposition actions ever undertaken against the National Socialist Police State. These episodes have to be counted against other instances of collaboration and worse, and make a mixed story and a mixed verdict, but one particular story makes me hesitate to condemn, too energetically, the diplomatic silences and evasions that sometimes took place. It concerns Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, and notable theologian, who became a Carmelite nun in 1933 ( a moving stained-glass window in the glorious cathedral of Freiburg-im-Breisgau commemorates this remarkable woman).

 

She later moved to the Netherlands to escape persecution, as did so many others who could not have foreseen that Germany would invade that country in 1940. Until 1942, as a Jewish convert to Christianity, she and quite a few others had been spared from the round-ups of Jews in that country. Then, the Dutch Bishops made a courageous statement against racial persecution (read out from all pulpits) – a statement of the kind that we all tend to think the Churches should have made more often. The National Socialist Reichskomissar, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, immediately retaliated by ordering the arrest and deportation of all Jewish converts to Christianity. Edith Stein was immediately dragged from her convent by the Gestapo, shipped to Auschwitz and promptly murdered.

 

Now, it is almost certain that the SS would have eventually rounded her up and murdered her anyway. The diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jew married to a Christian in Dresden, who survived (though in miserable circumstances) because of his wife’s courageous loyalty and the thin legal protection this afforded, suggest that, as defeat approached, the National Socialists were ever more determined to find and kill all remaining Jews. Kemperer was saved from Auschwitz by the chaos which followed the bombing of Dresden. But the Dutch Bishops cannot have known that all would be murdered in the end, and it must have been very heavy on their consciences at the time that, as a direct result of their open protest, people who had until then been relatively safe were murdered. Would such an event have affected you, and your behaviour? If you can confidently say ‘No’, then it will be easier for you to judge the actions of others. If not, then I advise caution. Courage always looks simpler from a distance.

A Predictable and False Accusation

A person calling himself or herself ‘Sam’ obligingly gives the standard left-liberal response to any critical discussion of the treatment of Mary Seacole by modern educators.

 

He wrote : ’ Peter Hitchens getting all discombobulated over the inclusion of a non-white person in the National Curriculum? I can't imagine why. Several of the things you state are merely factually inaccurate: for a start, Mary Seacole was only included in the National Curriculum of primary schools in 2007, not in 1992, and, contrary to your hysterical, race-baiting reaction, is actually, in most schools, taught *alongside* Florence Nightingale. It really would be helpful if tabloid, gutter columnists would stop exaggerating and lying, but, then again, these are usually necessary devices in the discourse of racists. But don't worry about Mary Seacole - I'm sure Mr Gove will reinstate white supremacy to a level that you find adequate, Mr Hitchens.’

 

The absence of genuine thought, or any desire to debate seriously, is instantly revealed, as I shall explain in a moment. I doubt very much that ‘Sam’ will reappear here, as such people are usually hit-and-run attackers with a purely destructive purpose,  coming here to write but not to read . So there’s probably no point in seeking a retraction of the false allegation of racial prejudice which he or she makes.

 

My words were quite clear. I noted that the first history book ( the Ginn series, as I recall) to promote the story of Mrs Seacole was published as long ago as 1992. I should have thought that the words ‘then …she went into the national curriculum’ made it clear that I separated these two events. It’s actually an important distinction, which is why I made it. The commissioning and publishing of books for use in schools is itself a fascinating subject, as it is one of the main methods used to revolutionise the teaching of sensitive subjects ( see my book , ‘the Abolition of Britain’). I never said she wasn’t taught alongside Florence Nightingale.

 

So the accusation of factual inaccuracy rebounds on the accuser, who made no effort to read the text carefully, and whose attack is factually inaccurate.

 

I’m then accused of hysteria, race-baiting, coming from the gutter, exaggerating and lying.

 

As I say, I don’t think ‘Sam’ will defend his or her comments.  I more or less expected something of the kind, pointing out that few resisted the elevation of Mrs Seacole to such high status, precisely because they were scared of being called ‘racist’. As I am innocent of any such charge, and have opposed racial bigotry consistently since my teens, I decline to be frightened by this allegation.

 

But perhaps there are others who might like to explain, on his or her behalf, what the substance of these charges is, and how they are justified by anything that I wrote.  

 

The curriculum did indeed suggest an equality between Mrs Seacole and Miss Nightingale. The change was highly effective, as my account of the 1999 COHSE conference shows.

 

People such as Lord Soley of Hammersmith, who passionately defend Mrs Seacole’s reputation and desire that she be more widely commemorated, have a perfectly legitimate point of view (and do not, as they are civilised and decent, accuse me of bigotry). The sad truth is that many noble and worthy people are forgotten by history, and quite a few bad ones are too.

 

Most British schoolchildren have most of their country’s history entirely hidden from them, especially the decisive period which shaped us as a Protestant constitutional monarchy independent of Continental entanglements, namely the 17th and 18th centuries. I am more worried that they have not heard of John Hampden, or the Petition of Right, or the Monmouth Rebellion and Judge Jeffreys, and the Trial of the Seven Bishops,  than I would be if Mary Seacole remained obscure. This is not because of the colour of anybody’s skin, but because I think it possible to take an objective valuation of the importance of events and individuals, and Mrs Seacole simply wasn’t as important as Miss Nightingale.  

 

If this were merely a matter of correcting a historical wrong, then I would see no harm in it. It is the suggestion of equivalence between the two women that I object to, as this seems to me to be straightforwardly unjustifiable by the known facts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Odd People, Dad's Army and can UKIP rob the Tories of Victory?

Mr Slippery has been annoying UKIP again, calling them ‘Odd People’. Well, I can’t complain, having called them ‘Dad’s Army’ for some time myself, and jeered at one of their MEPs for saying women should clean behind the fridge. But then, I’m not trying to get UKIP votes, whereas Mr Cameron, at least theoretically, does want those votes.

 

Does UKIP want them? It seems to me that the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, doesn’t love his own members all that much. In an amusing and surprisingly sympathetic interview with Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian on Monday 7th January http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jan/07/nigel-farage-party-eccentrics-ukip, , Mr Farage comes pretty close to endorsing my view of his outfit.

 

Talking about the 1990s, she asked him : ‘But those were thankless, wilderness years – surely he must have wondered if the whole enterprise was mad? "Um, I didn't think the concept was mad. I thought the people, in many cases," and he starts to laugh, "were not to my taste”.

 

"UKIP in the 1990s, the people in it and who voted for it were in the main 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells'. I mean, you look down the membership list in 1994, anyone below a half colonel was a nobody," he hoots. "I used to say you could always tell it was a UKIP meeting by the number of Bomber Command ties in the room. It was that generation." Was it his milieu? "No! I was the odd one out. Which I loved, of course. I've always liked to be the odd one out, wherever I am."’

 

I wonder, myself, whether those members have all gone.

 

Interestingly, Mr Farage does a bit of back-pedalling on drugs, but it is so unprincipled that it doesn’t in any way soften my criticisms of him and his party. Here’s the passage. Ms Aitkenhead writes: ‘But his party's enthusiastic libertarianism goes out of the window when it comes to a pleasure its core members aren't so keen on – illegal drugs. Farage's own instinct would be for wholesale decriminalisation – which would almost certainly broaden UKIP's appeal among younger urban voters – but the policy isn't even up for debate. "It would be completely impossible for me to win that debate within the party. And a general doesn't try to fight every battle."’

 

But back to Mr Slippery and his ‘odd people’. From the point of view of a very rich, privately-educated stockbroker’s son, who is married to a wealthy sprig of the nobility and who has never suffered from inarticulacy or a feeling of inferiority in his entire life, any political activist is going to seem odd. People such as Mr Cameron have believed all their lives that those who have strong views about things are in some way eccentric and a bit barmy. His Eton schooling and above all his immersion in the Oxford School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics will have told him that it is only the little people, the excluded and the disappointed, who dare to care about politics, and engage their passions in it.  He has been taught that such feelings are beneath him, and that real commitment to any cause is mistaken and silly.

 

Party activists, from his Olympian position, can seem rather pathetic, odd and strange. Not for them the calm, opulent detachment of the elite. These are people for whom a new policy can spell bankruptcy, or penury , or wounded grief . Why, they feel their country’s woes as a personal pain.

 

 

In a world where normality means that the thrifty and hard-working end their lives in solitude and straitened circumstances, being ordered about by cruel care-workers, while the tricky, the violent and spendthrift are indulged by a complacent state, a bit of oddity is welcome.

 

To the disappointed inhabitants of New Britain , Mr Slippery and Michael Heseltine may seem unloveable, whereas more normal human beings, who have lived real lives of striving and disappointment such as Norman Tebbit, seem much more appealing (note how Lord Tebbit is still loathed and scorned by the liberal bigots).

 

 

By the way, I’ve noticed a growing tendency to suggest that in some way a vote for UKIP will aid a Labour victory at the next election. There is a very simple reason why people thinking of deserting the Tories for UKIP should not be influenced by it.   *The Tories will not win anyway*. This was the case at the last election, where even the wild, inflated campaign of nonsensical rage against Gordon Brown (who was in fact joint Saviour of the Poond Sterling, along with Ed Balls) could not get the Tories a majority.

 

Now that people have seen what the Tories are really like ( and spotted that , as Mr Farage says, the Liberal Democrats are not the reason for their failure, but a useful alibi for what they planned to do anyway) , they are bound to do even worse than they did in 2010.

 

Labour will form the next government, probably as a minority, perhaps with Liberal Democrat or even SNP support, though there is a faint possibility that they will get a majority and a chance that they will form a coalition with a purged Liberal Democrat party led  into the general election by Vince Cable.  

 

The old and usually reliable rule, under which a party  that can’t score 50% in polls in mid-term will not get a majority at the general election, seems to suggest that Labour will fall short of outright victory. But the Tories will do far, far worse. It simply won’t be possible to get people to loathe Ed Miliband the way they loathed Mr Brown. The idea of Mr Miliband as a hate figure is as unworkable as the phrase ‘feral guinea pig’ .

 

Last Sunday’s Mail on Sunday poll showed that, even without the UKIP surge, Labour would get a wafer-thin overall majority, if actual votes were based on current voting intentions. The idea that UKIP would therefore rob the Tories of a majority is not workable. The Tories have no majority of which they can be robbed, nor will they ever again achieve such a majority in the United Kingdom under anything approaching existing boundaries.

 

But  is the idea that we can get from the current mess to a revived British politics in the course of one election is equally unworkable. It’s a ten or 15-year project, which, alas,  has yet to begin. The real tragedy is that so many Tory tribalists insisted on voting for that awful, treacherous party in 2010, so postponing the necessary death of the Conservatives and their replacement. Let’s hope they are not similarly fooled again in 2015. 

Would Enoch Powell have collaborated with a Pro-Nazi Regime? Don't be Silly

How far can an author go in changing the past? I enjoy so-called ‘counter-factual’ novels, as they often help the reader to think about history in a fresh way. And this sort of thinking is not only to be found in novels.  

 

There’s a  fine collection of essays, if you can find it, called ‘If it Had Happened Otherwise’ ,  in which one Winston S. Churchill writes about ‘What would have happened if Lee had lost at Gettysburg’ , a clever double-shift which is *far* more interesting than the disappointing ‘Bring the Jubilee’, the only fictional work I know of which deals with the great riddle of how things would have been if the American Civil War had gone the other way.

 

The question arises because of a new thriller by C.J. Sansom, called ‘Dominion’. This has already stirred some controversy, here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2257859/Enoch-Powell-widow-furious-ludicrous-slur-portray-husband-Nazi-sympathiser.html

 

And so it should. Mr Sansom , some years ago, wrote a very fine historical detective novel called ‘Dissolution’, set during the dissolution of the monasteries, full of atmosphere and a delight to read. The idea and its execution were both superb and I envy him the achievement. Since then he has written a number of sequels to this, featuring the same central character, Matthew Shardlake,  sequels which I personally do not like and was not able to finish. Perhaps the fault is in me. I know people who feel the same as I do, and others who much enjoy the later books. There can be no objective judgement on such things. I just wanted to make it plain that I think Mr Sansom has it in him to write a good novel, and most of us will never be able to say we have done this.

 

Once before, Mr Sansom diverged from the Reformation to write what I thought was an unsatisfactory thriller about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, ‘Winter in Madrid’. I gained the strong impression that Mr Sansom had left-wing sympathies which he had allowed to romp free during the plotting and writing of this book. Perhaps that’s because I view the Spanish Civil War as a tragedy without heroes or winners, in which the Left did not distinguish itself with humanity,  magnanimity or even good sense .

 

 

This is not just because of ‘Homage to Catalonia’, though I am of course much influenced by Orwell’s experiences at the hands of the Spanish Communists.  Nor is it just because the Spanish Left undoubtedly committed horrible atrocities and would have engaged in an appalling murderous purge of its opponents had it won, just as Franco did when he won. A former member of the International Brigades, long disillusioned, once said to me that it was one of the great paradoxes of our time that, if the Left had won in Spain, Spain would have been part of the Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1940, with interestingly bad  consequences for France and for the Mediterranean Theatre of War. Franco, it will be remembered, stayed out of the war when he couldn’t wring enough concessions from Hitler.

 

Now Mr Sansom has written ‘Dominion’ , a counterfactual thriller about Britain in 1952. This Britain made peace with the Third Reich in 1940, after Lord Halifax succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister (instead of Churchill).

 

My objections to it are manifold. The first is that it swallows whole a load of clichés about the ‘Finest Hour’ , which intelligent people should by now have begun to question. The second is that it is unreasonably unfair to a number of real historical figures, and adulatory towards some others.

 

The third is that it is, frankly, unhistorical, using language and attitudes which simply aren’t believable in the period involved. A homosexual Scottish Communist emerges as an unlikely hero, as do the left-wing lads of the Fire Brigades Union.  Prosperous middle class people are almost universally assumed to be on the side of the collaborators. If they aren’t, their deviation from collaboration almost always has  to be specifically explained.  Churchill, whom I should have thought Sansom would regard as a deep-dyed reactionary, is retroactively sanitised  for left-wing consumption, by being converted (ludicrously)  to the cause of Indian independence – I’ll say why this matters in a moment . And the fourth is that it’s not actually very good.

 

Yet it will sell, because this sort of thing does. It has done so before.  Len Deighton’s  ‘SS-GB’  was I think the first such work by a major writer. The next was by Robert Harris, whose ‘Fatherland’ took the idea of a post-war world, in which Hitler had won, a good deal further into the future.

 

On those occasions (a few times a year) when I think I might try my hand at such a work, I tend to think that two possible plots would be very interesting to follow. But I won’t say what they are here, in case I one day get round to it. Even so, my interest in doing something of the kind makes me pay close attention to anyone else who does it.

 

Deighton wrote his book on the assumption that Hitler had invaded Britain. I think that,  when he wrote it, this was still considered a likelihood. Modern historical scholarship tends to think that ‘Operation Sealion’ was a hastily-assembled and poorly-planned exercise which would not have succeeded had it been attempted, and was never meant seriously. Sansom says in his bibliographical note that Richard Overy’s book ‘the Battle of Britain’ had persuaded him that a German-occupied Britain was not a likely outcome.

 

So he suggests instead a Peace of Berlin, in which Britain keeps most of the Empire, an Army and a Navy though (in a passing mention) it seems that the RAF has had to go. Britain retains formal independence though for some reason there is  German occupation (of all places) of the Isle of Wight.

 

The position of France is unclear. Although France has been defeated and presumably occupied as actually happened, a government led by Pierre Laval is said to be resisting the deportation of French Jews as late as 1952.

Switzerland (which survives as an independent country in Harris’s book) has somehow been crushed and partitioned in Sansom’s book, with defeated France bizarrely sharing in the territorial spoils.

 

The position with Russia is much the same as in ‘Fatherland’, undefeated, partly occupied, still at war, though Sansom has Stalin being captured, publicly humiliated and hanged, and the concentration camps of the Gulag opened to the world (though this mention is not exploited very much, oddly , given the generally accepted fact that it is precisely because nobody has seen films of the Gulag, equivalent to those of the Nazi death camps, that it has never gone into the world’s imagination in the same way).

 

Despite the fact that there has been no Pearl Harbor , and so no Japanese invasion of Malaya etc,  and also despite the fact that the Empire can be defended as Britain has no military commitments in Europe, Britain’s empire in the Far East is ablaze with rebellion. For reasons which escape me, Franklin Roosevelt has somehow lost the 1940 Presidential election (perhaps Sansom thinks Roosevelt was a sentimental friend of Britain, as so many wrongly do) and a Republican administration has been on reasonable terms with the Third Reich.  Perhaps the idea is that Roosevelt could never have done that. Well, he got on just fine (all too well, in fact) with Stalin, as the record shows.

 

Now we come to the extraordinary portrayal of Enoch Powell. Regular readers here will know that I don’t share the enthusiasm of some of my fellow conservative commentators for Mr Powell. I regard his ‘River Tiber’ speech as terrible lapse. Its use of language was bigoted. It contained irresponsible rumours. I believe it led to the mistreatment of loyal black subjects of Her Majesty.

 

In general, it did great harm and probably made it harder for any future government to act rationally to limit migration or prevent multiculturalism. In some ways this is made worse by the fact that Powell himself was a cultured, highly-educated man, not racially bigoted, who could not have been unaware of the forces he was playing with.

 

That having been said, the idea that he would, by 1952, have been the fanatical Secretary for India in a collaborationist government headed by Lord Beaverbrook (who, once again, is unfairly treated in this book. Wicked he may have been, but not that wicked) and containing Oswald Mosley as Home Secretary, is stuff and nonsense.

 

Powell was one of the first to volunteer for war in 1939. He was , as it happens, deeply opposed to the policy of ‘appeasement’ .  It is infantile leftism to imagine that there was anything in common between his conservative opinions and the exterminationist Judophobia of the German National Socialists. In fact, I think it typical of the unthinking modern Left, that they cannot see the difference, and indeed do not want to see it.

 

I think a similar blindness makes Mr Sansom allot a collaborator’s role to Rab Butler, an undoubted appeaser but a loyal and patriotic Englishman . I suspect Mr Sansom is unwilling to accept that the two could be combined.

 

He also divides up the Labour Party according to his own prejudices, giving Herbert Morrison a black mark but lauding both Nye Bevan and Ernest Bevin. Plus - of course-  giving a  starring role to Saint Clement Attlee. 

 

Actually it is rather hard to see how he gets to this stage. Had Britain accepted the sort of peace he suggests, I can see no particular reason why it should have developed into the para-Nazi Police State he portrays, apparently created after a rigged election.  I can’t myself see how we would have got from the sort of Treaty he posits to the sort of regime he suggests would have been in power by 1952. The conditions he suggests would have been unlikely without an actual military defeat and occupation, which he rightly recognises were highly unlikely in real life.

 

It is one of our major problems as a people and a nation that we still think we were far more important in 1939 than we actually were. Hitler genuinely did not much care what we did.  Had we stayed out of the war in 1939, he would have continued to ignore us. His interests lay elsewhere. The problem lay in our irrational declaration of war in September 1939, in support of a guarantee to Poland which we hadn’t meant and couldn’t fulfil,   and our largely incompetent conduct of it up till Dunkirk.  

 

Hitler was baffled by our quixotic intervention in the European war, especially since we had no army to speak of, with which to pursue our supposed aims. My own guess is that, had we actually made peace in 1940, the treaty would have been much more severe than Sansom envisages, because if an enemy who has declared war on you then sues for peace, you make very sure that his teeth are drawn for the foreseeable future. Hitler would have demanded humiliating reductions in the Navy (probably matching what we did to the German Navy at Versailles, Just as his humiliation of the French generally echoed their behaviour towards Germany in 1919 and afterwards) and some colonial concessions, plus a large and painful indemnity in gold and , quite possibly, demands fro British manpower for German industry.   It might even have led, as Mr Sansom suggests, to demands for the deportation of British Jews into German control, though the systematic extermination programme had still not begun in 1940.  It might well have left us in a  position so weak that we could not have resisted such demands when they arose. I think Mr Sansom’s portrayal of a Halifax-Hitler deal is wrong in that it makes it too acceptable at the beginning,  growing dramatically worse later. I think it would have been appalling from the start. Which is why it didn’t happen.  

 

That is almost certainly why Halifax didn’t get the job and Churchill did.  Having got to the point of the Fall of France, Britain had far more to lose by surrendering than by fighting on, and Churchill was the person best placed and best qualified to lead such a fight (though he knew very well that it would be a miserable business, as he made clear in his ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech’).   I think that Churchill, being a historian, understood the moment he came into office that Britain would have to become an American vassal to continue the war, and reluctantly accepted that, knowing equally well that being a German vassal would be immeasurably worse. Had Germany then successfully invaded the USSR, and defeated the Red Army, a miserable peace would still have come about. I do not think the USA would have felt able or willing to commit itself to a one-front war against a victorious Third Reich.

 

On the other hand, Mr Sansom simply doesn’t consider ( as almost nobody does) the point that the real moment of decision came much earlier than 1940. There are several points at which it might have been made. When Duff Cooper, as a defence minister, proposed in 1936 that Britain should construct a large Continental-style conscript army, and was over-ruled, the British government decided that it would not and could not confront Hitler on the continent. In the light of that, Chamberlain’s continental policy( minus the naivety of believing Hitler’s promise at Munich) was rational.  The decision was made to ensure that our islands were defensible (by the RAF) and that the Empire was defensible by the Navy. The Army came a poor third.  The problem with this decision was that it was then ignored by the politicians, who acted in March and  September 1939 as if we had built such an army, when everyone knew we hadn’t – thus fooling nobody but the Poles, who crazily believed our promises of help.

 

Eventually (as we had done in 1915-16), we did create a huge European army, at vast cost, though too late to save Poland or indeed to save the Empire. But by that time we had plunged into a European war in such a way, and at such a time, that we lacked enough forces to defend the Empire or to pursue an independent policy in Europe.

 

It’s worth adding here that the British Left which nowadays poses as the soul of righteousness in the era of appeasement, opposed British rearmament vigorously throughout the 1930s, even after it was clear that the Hitler regime had aggressive intentions which would require any sensible power to rearm vigorously, if only as a deterrent and a security.  Labour MPs voted against the defence estimates and against conscription as late as March 1939. They claimed to fear that any rearmament would be directed against the Soviet Union, or held to the bizarre belief that defence spending leads to war.

 

My question remains the same. What would have happened if Britain had taken the same view as the USA, that it was wise to wait till later before intervening in any European Continental war? It is hard to think of a worse moment for intervention than September 1939.  If Poland had made major territorial concessions to Germany in the spring or summer of 1939, which it probably would have done without the Anglo-French guarantee,  would there then have been a Nazi-Soviet Pact?  Without the Pact, would there have been war between Germany and the USSR on some other front, perhaps over Romania’s oilfields or the Balkans, or the Baltic States?   Very probably. Would the USSR have been as hopelessly unprepared for such war as it was in 1941? And then what would British and French interests have been?

 

But because people refuse to think about this era in a rational way, and because they believe so many myths, we end up with books suggesting that Enoch Powell would have been a Nazi collaborator. Oh, by the way, the Scottish nationalists also get it in the neck  from Mr Sansom for their fictional collaboration, though Irish nationalism/republicanism receives a comparatively easy ride in the book . This is despite the historical fact that Sean Russell, a former IRA leader, actually went to Berlin in 1940 to offer his services to the Third Reich, was given sabotage training by the Abwehr and put on a U-Boat (U-65, since you ask) which set off from Wilhelmshaven in August 1940,  with the intention of landing him in Galway. As it happened, he died of a burst gastric ulcer on the way. The IRA, far from being ashamed of this episode, put up a monument to him in Dublin which still stands.

How 'multiculture' fanatics took Mary Seacole hostage

Poor old Mary Seacole, a good-hearted, kindly person, has been the sad victim of fanatics. Long after she was dead, zealots used Mrs Seacole in their bitter campaign to abolish Britain and replace it with a multicultural nothingness.

Their target was Florence Nightingale, steely, Protestant, patriotic, self-disciplined and authoritarian. They wanted to expel Miss Nightingale from the national pantheon.
They chose Mary Seacole, a jolly hotelkeeper and herbal healer, as their weapon.

Mrs Seacole did not reform the hospitals first of Britain and later of most of the world. She did not re-found nursing as a profession. She was not remotely the equal of Florence Nightingale. But because she was non-white, nobody dared to resist. They were scared of being called ‘racist’. So Mrs Seacole was put in the history books, as long ago as 1992.

Then she was turned into a national heroine and went into the National Curriculum.
Personally, I doubt that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has the power to remove her from it. Opposition to his plan is already brewing.

If you think this sort of thing is just a paper battle, you are sadly wrong. In 1999, delegates at the conference of the Health Service union Unison voted overwhelmingly for a motion that deemed Florence Nightingale an ‘inappropriate role model’ for modern nursing, as her image ‘represented negative and backward-thinking elements’.

Mary Seacole was said to have ‘matched, if not exceeded’ Miss Nightingale’s achievements.
The end of old-style nursing, scorned by our new rulers as ‘backward-thinking’, has a lot to do with the hijacking of poor Mary Seacole by radicals.

This rewriting of history, to influence the present and the future, is what happens when revolutions take place. In George Orwell’s 1984, the ruling socialist party proclaims: ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’

When I was growing up, we were still taught our national history as a story and as something to be proud of. A dedicated campaign, beginning in 1960, changed all that.
Old-fashioned narrative history books were thrown away. Confusing pamphlets full of conflicting ‘sources’ appeared, designed to suggest there was no true version of events and above all that what your parents had been taught was wrong. 

I hear again and again of fragmented jumping about – children who have been taught about the Romans, the Tudors and Hitler, but with very little in between. In secondary schools, many pupils give history up at 14, though it is compulsory up to 16 in most continental nations.

This matters. A country whose young know no history (and even the Eton-educated Prime Minister seems vague about Magna Carta and seems never to have heard of the 1689 Bill of Rights) is like a person with amnesia roaming the streets, the easy target of every sort of fraud and crook, ready to swallow the stupidest propaganda. And so we are.

If you have ever wondered how it is that modern politicians  survive and prosper when they are so obviously mediocre and incompetent, now you know why. Hardly anyone realises how bad they are, because they know no better. The person who knows no history remains forever a child, unable to see when he is being fooled and robbed.
 
Talk about REALLY getting it in the neck
I find David Attenborough’s lecturing tone increasingly annoying. And the music in his new BBC Africa series is intrusive and needless.

But if you didn’t see the fight between two giraffes last week, hurry to iPlayer. It gave new meaning to the expression ‘getting it in the neck’.

Crime statistics - a job for the Fraud Squad
I long ago accepted that this country’s police are just another nationalised industry, infused with political correctness and run mainly for the benefit of the employees. So I take no sides in the current battle between Home Secretary Theresa May (a hopeless wet liberal) and the Police Federation (which grows each day more like the public sector unions of the Seventies).

But I just can’t take seriously new figures which claim to show crime has fallen while police budgets have dropped. This is not because I think the modern police prevent crime. They would if they went back to proper foot patrols, but they won’t.

As long as they sit in cars and offices, suing each other for sexual harassment, police manpower has about as much influence on crime as does the number of Morris dancers or the membership of the Mothers’ Union.

What I object to is the claim that crime has fallen. It’s our standards of justice that have fallen. This week we learned the prison population has actually dropped, thanks to soft sentencing, early releases, mass tagging, plus the granting of bail to almost anyone accused of anything less than mass murder.

As I showed a few weeks ago, the police, prosecutors and courts have ‘reduced’ crime by reclassifying thousands of major crimes as minor, and ignoring crimes that would once have landed their culprits in prison.

But it’s worse than that. Thanks to Dr Rodger Patrick, a former senior copper, now an academic, I have learned of the many methods used by police forces to reduce recorded crime. There’s a full account of this on the Peter Hitchens Blog, but in summary it goes like this.

The public are actively discouraged from reporting some crimes. Police officers get convicted criminals to own up to various past offences (perhaps not entirely truthfully) which are then classified as solved.

People are charged with crimes even though police know the charges won’t stick and will be dropped. These are also listed as ‘cleared up’. Multiple crimes in one street are recorded as one episode. Thefts are recorded as lost property.

Officers are moved away to easier tasks, where detection and clear-up are more likely.
In short, it’s like any centralised, Soviet-style system. Any politically sensitive statistic will be manipulated. Of course, all the police need to do now is to massage the figures the other way, to prove that Mrs May’s ‘cuts’ are increasing crime, or that crime has gone up under the new elected commissioners.

I wouldn’t believe that either. It’s going up because the country is run by pig-headed Left-wingers who refuse to recognise they’re wrong.
 
Hindley: The cold, scheming truth
Good to see that not everyone was fooled by Myra Hindley’s disgraceful, scheming attempt to get herself released. If she’d been truly sorry, she’d never have dared.

Prison papers record an official reporting that she was ‘cold and calculating and devoid of emotion, able to smile or cry as the need arose’.

And part of her pose was to keep up with the news by reading, yes, The Guardian.

Should We Trust Official Crime Figures?

What are we to make of the following facts ?

The week began with leaked figures apparently showing that ‘Recorded crime fell by at least 10% in 19 out of 43 force areas in England and Wales while budgets were cut by an average of just under 10%.’

 

Later came the revelation that the Prison population in England and Wales actually fell during last year – dropping by 2,869 to 83,909. Don’t get too excited The prison population is still very, very high( in 1950-51 it was 20,474, in 1960-61 it was 27,099, in 1970 it was 39,028, in 1980 it was 42,300, in 1990 it was 45,636 and in 1999 it was 64,770, passing 70,000 for the first time only in 2002).

 

But under Kenneth Clarke there is no doubt that, by some means or other, a way has been found to halt and even reverse the rise. The least likely explanation for this, especially under Mr Clarke, must be a tougher and more punitive justice system scaring wrongdoers back on to the path of righteousness.  So either crime really is falling (a comically unlikely solution to the riddle) or a way has been found of a) ignoring more crimes b) not sending people to prison for offences which would formerly have merited prison sentences and c) letting more people out of prison more quickly.

 

One hint came when, this morning (Thursday 3rd January)the ‘Sun’ newspaper revealed on page 2 (where important stories are put, which editors do not regard as exciting) that one in nine murderers is freed from prison after serving fewer than ten years of a life sentence. The figures, obtained by the genuinely conservative MP Philip Davies , showed that 275 convicted murderers were released during 2010 and 2011. Of these, 32 served fewer than ten years. Four served fewer than eight years, seven served fewer than nine. It is also the case that 35 people,  who had been convicted of homicide, killed again after being released, surely the indefensible deaths of innocents caused by deliberate state action.

 

Will those who oppose the death penalty,   because they are on principle unwilling to risk using it because there are a small number of wrongful executions, abide by the same principle, and also oppose the release of any convicted killers, lest they kill again? No, I thought not. Understandable, but in that case their objection is not a principle, it’s an excuse behind which they hide their real beliefs.

I might point out here that a huge amount of prison space is taken up by murderers serving ‘life’ sentences. Unlike many ordinary criminals, who (after 15 or so crimes) then start serving very short repeated sentences, murderers must by law be kept inside for comparatively long periods. I believe at least one prison in the South of England is largely devoted to housing such prisoners, many of whom are regarded as unlikely to reoffend.

 

 

The Ministry of Justice says that the *average* time served by convicted murders is now 16 years. I would stress here that many crimes which would once have been treated as murder are now tried as manslaughter in the courts, in order to obtain a swifter, cheaper conviction. So one could only get a true picture of the situation by close study of manslaughter cases and their outcome, which I have not done, lacking the time and the resources. I suspect such a study would show that , if cases were categorised as murder or manslaughter according to the rules of 30 or 40 years ago, the average time served for murder would be a  good deal lower than 16 years.  But it would be legally difficult to obtain, publish or comment on such information in individual cases.

 

Even so,  I think it fair to say that homicide is less sternly punished in this country than at any time in modern history. I’d also add, as I always do, that the reason why we don’t have more homicide is not that people are getting nicer or more well-behaved, but because medical skills are getting better. Many attacks involving extreme and potentially lethal violence,  which would once have inevitably resulted in homicide, no longer do so because of much-improved emergency trauma treatment. These facts are an important example of the way in which raw figures, examined without background knowledge, can give a seriously misleading impression.

 

It’s important to put in these distinctions because, as I recounted in ‘A Brief History of Crime’ , the existence of a functioning death penalty for heinous murders (which satisfied the public’s justified  thirst for justice and retribution)  enabled the relatively early release of the many more pitiable murderers who, even in the days of the gallows,  were reprieved and instead sentenced to life in prison. By the  end of the 19th century, 20 years had come to be regarded as the maximum time to be served by reprieved murders. Fifteen years was normal. By 1939, most life sentence prisoners were released after between ten and thirteen years. During the 1939-45 war this fell to between six and ten years, though afterwards it rose again to between seven and eleven years (figures mainly from the 1949 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, an excellent source). In a  few exceptional cases (‘mercy killings’ and survivors of suicide pacts, for example) those involved were released after one, two or three years. In the whole period between 1900 and 1949 only one released murderer committed another murder after being freed. 

 

 

But I digress. My main argument is that the crime figures are fiddled for political reasons, and cannot be trusted. And , thanks to the dedicated work of Dr Rodger Patrick, a former Chief Inspector in the West Midlands Police turned academic, I can tell you how it is done.  Dr Patrick got in touch with me after I wrote about the astonishing increase of ‘Out of Court Disposals’ (OCDs) of crimes – including the use of ‘cautions’ to dispose of rape cases, in return for an admission of guilt.

 

He has been researching the manipulation of crime data for many years. During this time, police performance has been politically important – so bringing into operation what (unless anyone else wants to claim ownership) I shall term Hitchens’s Law   ‘Any politically sensitive statistic will be manipulated’. This sits alongside the well-known ‘Bikini Effect’, noted by Sovietologists in the 1960s, under which  the official interest in deception is so great that ‘What the figures conceal is more interesting than what they reveal’.

 

For example, in a period when the police are trying to obtain more money and resources, and the party in power is keen to oblige, police and state might co-operate to give the impression that crime is rising. When the government of the day is anxious to show that its ‘crackdowns’ are working, then the figures will be massaged to show that crime is falling. But the police, with other objectives, may not co-operate. Cue conflicts between different sorts of statistics. Similar things are true of inflation figures, exam results, school performance. But we will stick to crime.

 

 

 

Often the attempts to manipulate statistics show up when one force or another seems to be doing particularly, exceptionally well. Detection rates, for instance, sometimes rise quite spectacularly. In the case of at least one force, large numbers of supposed detections were obtained through offences being ‘Taken Into Consideration’(TICs) *after* culprits had been convicted and sentenced. Or crimes were dealt with through ‘Penalty Notices for Disorder’ (PNDs), thus avoiding the expense of a trial, but also sparing the culprit form proper punishment .  You will have to get used to quite a lot of acronyms in this discussion, for there are more to come.

 

TICs are supposed to be offences which accused persons admit to when they plead guilty, so that they can be sentenced for them as well, and will not be prosecuted for them in future . You can easily see how a police force under pressure to show evidence of improved performance might persuade criminals to admit falsely to such offences, thus increasing their clear-up rate. There have been instances when this has been proven to happen. As for PNDs, once again it may be useful for criminals and police, in that the police can say the offence has been dealt with, while the offender avoids prosecution and a much more serious penalty.

 

Then there is what Dr Patrick refers to as ‘nodding’, when numbers of burglaries and vehicle thefts ‘detected’ through TICs suddenly rises. If malpractice is exposed, the numbers then fall.

 

Next there is what Dr Patrick calls ‘cuffing’ ( a term taken from the trade vocabulary of conjurors, who use it to describe the hiding of objects up one’s sleeve).

This, most crucially for our discussion, is used to deflate the  level of *reported crime*. You will note that it is *reported* or *recorded* crime that is said to have fallen in the figures leaked at the weekend. This is crime actually fed into the records by police forces, who have compiled the figures themselves. It is different from the levels of crime recorded by the British Crime Survey, an opinion poll of the over-16s which has considerable faults (not least that it leaves out so many young people, who are often victims of crime) . Older figures, of arrests and convictions, are simply not comparable with either of these measures, as police are often reluctant to make arrests for ‘minor’ crimes because of the appalling bureaucracy they must then suffer; because those arrested are often not charged by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), when they would have been in the days when police took such decisions arrests are; and because a lot of prosecutions fail or are dropped ; and because a growing number of offences are dealt with by OCDs ( see above) including (largely unpaid) fines, farcically feeble ‘restorative justice’  and non-punitive actions such as probation or community service orders.  

 

An attempt was made to avoid such ‘cuffing’ when in, 2002 a National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) was introduced. This was based on the idea that the victim decided whether he or she had been the object of a crime, and what that crime was.

 

But around 2004, this absolute standard was altered. Instead, the police were asked to classify notified crimes according to the ‘balance of probability’. This meant that individual forces were once again free to decide whether a crime really had taken place. Sometimes senior officers cancelled crimes that had been recorded, by ruling that ‘no crime’ had taken place. A BBC survey in 2011 found wild variations among forces in how many crimes had been ‘no crimed’ (2% in one force, 30% in another) . These decisions are recorded and so fiddling is fairly easily detected.

 

Since this method was  exposed, forces have tended to put pressure on officers not to record an event as a crime in the first place. Thus members of the public are asked to accept that that a theft is in fact no such thing, just ‘lost property’. Or a group of burglaries in one block of flats are classified as one crime.

 

One way in which these figures are influenced is in the police response to reports of (for instance) stolen mobile phones. There have been cases of youngsters (with no conceivable dishonest motive as they were not insured) threatened with prosecution for making false claims that their phones had been stolen. Could this be to help keep the figures down?

 

Some social scientists have in any case estimated that around half of all robberies and of theft from the person are never reported to the police at all, probably because the items are uninsured and the hope of detection is very small. The fact that many people do in fact have insurance on mobile phones may have increased the number of such cases, previously unrecorded, which began to be recorded.

 

In one of his papers, Dr Patrick shows how levels of certain crimes dropped abruptly when particular forces adopted new policies of challenging and discouraging the reporting of certain types of crime. This was a shift from a victim-centred approach, under which the police believe you unless there is evidence to the contrary, to a police-centred approach, under which the person who reports a crime is not believed until he can produce proof of the crime.

(I mention here a general point, that I often hear from readers, that police are uninterested in pursuing a crime unless actual CCTV evidence exists of it taking place, and a particular point, the extraordinary account of a burglary in Southampton, carried out in broad daylight carried out (with a crowbar) and recorded on a web cam, so clearly that the burglar’s face is plainly visible. Police did then act and the burglar was convicted, but he was then (ludicrously) bailed while he waited to be sentenced (presumably because of the usual ‘social inquiry reports’ which have to be compiled before anyone is sentenced these days, so that excuses can be found for their behaviour).

 

The burglar then simply failed to turn up for sentence. Despite his victim reporting sightings of him to the police, nothing was done until the victim and his friends tracked down the culprit to his pace of work.

The burglar was then sentenced to 30 months in prison (in reality, a maximum of 15 months and probably a good deal less than that), despite the fact that he was already subject to a ‘community order’ for a drugs offence. The story is amazing in several ways, and the video footage dispiriting and disgusting. But the simple inertia of the criminal justice system, when a convicted burglar is on the loose, is not accidental or untypical. There is no moral fury in the system, just a weary bureaucratic going-through-the-motions ‘oh well then, if you insist’ attitude. If the victim hadn’t captured the event on film, how much chance do you think there would have been of anything happening? The thief thought he was safe, having smashed another camera on his way in, and failed to realise there was a second one.  He was very nearly right to think he was safe. But I digress. This is a comment upon the spirit of the system, which of course affects its behaviour).

 

Dr Patrick quotes Hans de Bruijn, an expert on performance measurement, saying that any system of performance management can be threatened by the activity known as ‘gaming’ ‘generally accepted as one of the failings of the Soviet centrally planned economy’. What this means is that , seeking to meet targets, those involved will distort the figures to please their political or other masters.

 

As De Bruijn wrote: ‘ Once a system of performance measurement has been designed and introduced, the perverse effects will, in the long term, force out the beneficial effects’.

 

 

Another method mentioned by Dr Patrick is (apart from deliberate under-recording and the conversion of post-sentence admissions into TICs, dealt with above) is ‘the shifting of efforts towards easier-to-detect offences, and the systematic redeployment of specialist officers traditionally committed to combating serious and organised crime in inner city areas to affluent suburbs’. This is known as ‘skewing’.

 

One thing which Dr Patrick homes in on the use of cautions and informal warnings.  ‘This resulted in many individuals gaining a police record when the evidence was insufficient to secure a conviction at court. In some cases the suspect would be unaware they were being recorded as responsible for an offence, this included serious offences such as rape and kidnapping’.  This might mean they continue in their criminal behaviour, and do much more serious things later. They also escape justice, as their crimes are dealt with through minor fixed penalties or cautions, and cannot thereafter be brought to court.

 

We have dealt with ‘cuffing’ , ‘nodding’ ‘skewing’ and ‘gaming’. Another method available to police forces which want to give a false impression are ‘stitching’ under which offenders are charged with crimes when there is insufficient evidence. The police know perfectly well the CPS will not pursue the charge, but can still claim that the crime has been ‘solved’ in records.

 

You might think that the massaging of figures could be shown openly to clash with the British Crime Survey, which for all its faults cannot be manipulated in the same way. But Dr Patrick says the Home Office has in recent years stopped asking the specific questions in the BCS , on which such comparisons could be based.

 

 

I think those who ceaselessly maintain that the official crime figures should be believed without question have to re-examine their position in the light of Dr Patrick’s research (which I have here briefly summarised from voluminous papers).

 

 

 

The Vile Peter Hitchens Responds to his Critics

There’s an interesting contribution from David Cheshire, blushing unseen, or largely unseen, on the ‘Why and How’ thread.  My response to it (below) could be summed up in my old warning that “A Liberal will defend to the death your right to agree with her. Disagree with her, and she’ll call the police” .

 

 

Mr Cheshire was stridently rude about me on Twitter, so I contacted him on that site and suggested he added some facts and logic to his abuse, on this blog. It now turns out that he has been a contributor here before, despite believing me to be ‘vile’.

 

 

This is what he said in his most recent contribution here : ‘You were good enough to reply to my tweet saying that I seemed to disagree with you. What I actually tweeted was "Vile Peter Hitchens in his usual vile tabloid happy to exploit a tragic murder for his mean little ideological ends. Pathetic moral wimp ". This was about an article I saw blaming liberals for the very recent murder in the street of a man on his way to church. You also challenged me to argue my case on this blog. I only have one argument: that this crime was too recent and too raw for you to use it to score a political point. I was outraged at the sheer indecent inappropriateness of this, and still am. The kind of moral absolutism you preach is just as likely to increase evil deeds because the only absolute in life is life itself. Once you elevate principles above everything, appalling things become justifiable. Moral fundamentalism is as bad as any other kind and just as likely to cheapen life. It is based on fear and fear is no foundation for goodness, only compliance. I repeat however, my rudeness to you was based on the morally precipitous timing of your article, not its content which is familiar enough and does not gain credence by repetition. A happy new year to you.’

 

I have since written to Mr Cheshire asking him if he has similarly condemned the many writers and broadcast commentators who rapidly drew conclusions from the recent mass murder of children in Connecticut (generally the same conclusions,  that this was, axiomatically and unquestionably,  an argument for stricter laws against guns).    

He has yet to reply, so it is not fair to assume that he did not do so, somewhere perhaps unknown to me.

 

But if he did not condemn those commentators, it would rather weaken his case. And, as it’s still Christmas, I will devote some energy to dealing with his argument in general. This is not for his benefit, though he is of course welcome to reply at length if he wishes. Somebody who thinks I am ‘vile’ is not likely to be open to my arguments. But it might be helpful to others who were more open to logic .

 

First, there is no doubt that my ends are to persuade people that the liberal ideology of the past 50 years is damaging our society, and is mistaken on its own terms. I do this in the hope (fainter every day) of persuading the dominant people in politics, the media and the academy to change their minds, on the assumption that their motives are fundamentally good and that they will be distressed to find that their ideas have had consequences they didn’t intend.

 

I’m not sure that this is ‘ideological’. I have no ideology. Rather the contrary.  Nor can I see why it is ‘mean’. Mean to whom? In what way? Nor is the avoidable death of a human person a ‘little’ matter. The word ‘pathetic’ seems to me to be more abuse. I am not sure what a ‘moral wimp’ might be, or in what way I can be said to be one. It strikes me, though, that a wimp would probably be too tentative and diffident to attain vileness.

 

Challenged on this language, Mr Cheshire changed direction rather abruptly. He said :’ I only have one argument: that this crime was too recent and too raw for you to use it to score a political point. I was outraged at the sheer indecent inappropriateness of this, and still am.’

 

Well, as above, is this really his view and can he prove it by showing evidence of similar outrage against the legions who said that this made a case for gun control, when Sandy Hook was at least as ‘raw and recent’ as the death of Mr Greaves, if not more so? How long does Mr Cheshire think one should properly wait before commenting?  (Mr Greaves was attacked on Christmas Eve, Monday 24th December, my article was published on Sunday 30th December, nearly six days later).  Perhaps, when people say things with which Mr Cheshire agrees, they are not ‘scoring a political point’.  Perhaps they are also not subject to his strange personal statute of limitations upon comment, which I would like him to explain.  But that would simply bring the question back to him. Is his outrage really what he says it is, or does he just disagree with me about the causes of this murder?

 

 

Well, he’s welcome to do so, but he can’t turn that into a  general comment upon my assumed vileness. He still has to explain his conclusions. At least, he can't if he genuinely believes in the freedom of speech and thought. But does he?

 

My own immediate response, when I heard of Mr Greaves’s death in a  brief late-evening radio bulletin, was a distressed outrage that the holiest night of the year had been profaned in this particularly startling way.  I have always observed in the past how even the most clangourous and rackety parts of our cities assume a special calm on Christmas Eve. Yet a  church organist, on his unharmful way to that church on Christmas Eve, had apparently been beaten to death in that peaceful, sacrosanct time. The victim was plainly a peaceable and gentle person who would have done nothing to provoke such a fate.  I am fairly sure this news was broadcast by the BBC on the evening of the 28th December, four days after the event. I could not think of any comparable incident in this country in all my long life here. I was startled mainly by how low down the bulletin the news was. I thought the BBC should have been more shocked. And when I read the following day’s newspapers,  I thought that they, too, should have been more shocked. That was why I rewrote my column on Saturday morning, which I very rarely do and which causes a great deal of work for my colleagues. I thought it was a major event and deserved a proper examination.

 

I still do.

 

I think that it is significant that Mr Greaves was not safe as he walked to church.  I think that until recently he would have been safe. And I think that profound changes in our society are the only explanation for this change.

 

I know nothing of Mr Cheshire’s circumstances, but he was not, in any case, my target.My target was the class of bourgeois bohemians, in political, academic and media craeers, who dominate our policy-making.

 

These people, who are seldom poor,  tend to live in circumstances where they are safe from the sort of thing that happened to Mr Greaves. Alternatively, they have moved away from the places in which they grew up and moved to the capital. This has two effects, One, they lose touch with their roots and so do not observe the great changes which have taken place in their home towns. Two, that ambitious newcomers to London tend to move to areas where people of their own sort have established themselves, or are doing so – that is, gentrified and middle class islets in the vast patchwork wilderness of London, where life is (unusually) probably more settled and peaceful now than it was ten years ago,  thanks to the influx of the ambitious and free-spending young. Most of the metropolis, especially its more troubled parts, which they sensibly avoid,  is unknown territory to them. It will stay that way. They have no reason to venture there.  They simply don’t experience the world as provincials (or ordinary born and bred Londoners) do.

 

One other thought. Mr Cheshire argues as follows : ‘The kind of moral absolutism you preach is just as likely to increase evil deeds because the only absolute in life is life itself. Once you elevate principles above everything, appalling things become justifiable. Moral fundamentalism is as bad as any other kind and just as likely to cheapen life. It is based on fear and fear is no foundation for goodness, only compliance.’

 

I am not sure what he means, to be honest. ‘The only absolute in life is life itself’ *sounds* clever, even profound, but is it in fact so? I don’t think so. Is it even true? As for ‘elevating principles above everything’ , if Love (for instance) is the greatest of these principles, and Grace its equal, and they stand supported by Faith and Hope, how will that justify appalling things?  On the contrary, it is precisely because these principles stand above all things and all men that we can definitively say so many actions (even, nay, especially those done in the name of goodness) were absolutely wrong. And if principles are not elevated above all else, then they aren’t principles. Surely the question is not whether principles themselves may have wicked effects, but about *which* principles do so.   Egalitarianism, unconditional surrender, universal human rights, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leading role of the Party, belief in racial superiority, all various forms of human utopianism, have certainly led to appalling cruelty. 

 

As for goodness, the point about humans is they are capable of goodness and of evil, and free to do either. And fear is a very effective way of scaring people away from evil deeds. Its purpose is not to make them good (only God is good) but to discourage them from evil. Fear, in my experience, is a great gift. It has saved my life at least once, and many times prevented me from doing things I would have regretted forever. I’d be surprised if any honest person, having lived any sort of full, unsheltered life, could deny that fear had been useful to him or her.

 

I still think it is a large logical leap to proclaim that someone else is ‘vile’ just because he disagrees with you about morality and politics. But it is a problem withthe new breedof  liberal bigots, who are so sure they are superior to the rest of us, always ready to accuse others of a fault they cannot see in themselves, and who respond to dissent with rage (and would respond to it with censorship and repression, were they strong enough).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Should we believe in God? The Oxford Union Debate

Some of you may recall that last year I took part in a debate on belief in God at the Oxford Union Society, which led to a lengthy exchange between me and Professor Peter Millican.  The motion, that 'This House Believes in God’ was lost, though I have not been able to discover the exact vote. Here is the Youtube record of the occasion.

 

As far as I can recall, the speakers are in the order in which the participants actually spoke..

 

Professor John Lennox

 

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

 

Dr Michael Shermer

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pOI2YvVuuE

 

Dr Joanna Collicutt McGrath

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DENtQ6PDW3k

 

Dan Barker

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btJazTimH4M

 

Peter Hitchens

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnIH4gomOqc

 

Professor Peter Millican

 

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

 

 

Why and How Social and Moral liberals -in All Parties - Cause Crime

A little later I hope to post a review of a couple of books which have deservedly come back into print, Sarah Gainham’s superb novel about Wartime Vienna ‘Night falls on the City’ and John Buchan’s novel about fate and time ‘The Gap in the Curtain’.

 

But first I must respond to the latest wave of abuse on Twitter. This takes the form of various people jeering at the idea that liberals bear any responsibility for the killing of Alan Greaves, the much-loved church organist who died of severe head injuries on his way to Midnight Mass in a Sheffield suburb, on Christmas Eve.

 

I think it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that this crime is a consequence of social, political and moral change. I was puzzled that the incident did not attract more attention when it was first reported – a patently good person, on his way to a joyous occasion in the midst of the season of goodwill, violently struck down in the street.

 

 

I know from my own local papers, in a remarkably civilised part of the country, that many rather horrible crimes of violence never attract the attention of the national media, because such things are now alarmingly commonplace.

 

Back in September I recorded how ‘two men were jailed for attacking Kirk Smith in his home, in a petty, moronic robbery - of £20 and two phones. Abdul Adan, 21, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years (in reality he will serve half that) for stabbing Mr Smith four times, after first smashing his nose. Mr Smith's wounds were appalling. They 'bared his intestines', as the court report puts it. Adan's accomplice, Michael Edwards, 25, got three-and-a-half years, which of course he will not serve in full.’

 

We have also discussed here the fact (the above account is an example) that many people are the victims of horrible, life-changing attacks, but – because their lives are saved by heroic medical intervention – survive. So they do not, as they would have done in the past, feature in the homicide statistics. There is a great deal more violence abroad in our country than there was 20 years ago, and enormously more than there was 50 or 60 years ago.

 

One of the reasons for this is a general lessening in self-restraint. Another is the widespread use of mind-altering drugs, as well as the allied growth (for several reasons) of severe drunkenness. Another is the widespread knowledge among the morally deficient that cruel crimes are generally not followed by severe punishment. When they are prosecuted at all, and in many cases they are not, they lead at first to feeble consequences such as cautions (now, as we know, issued for an extraordinary range of crimes including rape), the farce known as ‘restorative justice’, non-custodial sentences, uncollected fines, suspended sentences and, eventually, repeated brief spells in prisons which are not, for the criminal type, punitive or harsh.

 

If these changes are not the result of liberal social, cultural and moral policies, then what has caused them? Some people will instantly say (for they know no other argument and have never heard any other explanation), that the culprit is ‘Thatcherism’.  As a non-admirer of the Iron Lady, I would agree that her time in office was certainly not a period of social conservatism. The dismantling of marriage continued (I really do recommend the chapter on this subject in my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, which I was re-reading last night. The idea that boosting the tax allowance for married couples will in any way reverse this revolution is laughable. ). The covert decriminalisation of drugs (always a bipartisan policy) continued.  The destruction of rigorous, disciplined state education continued apace. The automatic halving of prison sentences was discussed but not implemented till the arrival in office of John Major.  The dilution of discipline and rigour in schools continued. The growing coarseness of language and manners in the broadcast media continued. The destruction of the alcohol licensing laws began.

 

At best, the Thatcher period was morally neutral. At worst, it contributed sharply to that decline (I take the second view, regarding her failure in these areas as her most significant fault). But social change generally follows some years after the measures which make it possible, and it was the great raft of changes sponsored by the 1964-70 Labour government, identified by me in ‘The Abolition of Britain’ as the British Cultural Revolution,  which had really begun to take effect by the 1980s. They were above all the fruit of an alliance of social liberals from both major parties, headed by Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland, but ably supported by such Tories as Norman St John Stevas.

 

These included far easier divorce (and punitive, anti-husband settlements of custody and marital property), abortion on demand, a culture of entitlement in welfare payments, the encouragement through subsidy and cultural change of fatherless families, the abolition of grammar schools, a presumption in favour of bail, the abolition of the principle of punishment in the criminal justice system, and its replacement with the view that crime was a social disease in need of treatment, the consequent weakening of sentences, and of prison discipline, the legalisation (under cover of ’literary merit’) of pornography.

 

And they were of course accompanied by major changes in the attitudes towards certain forms of previously frowned-on behaviour by the churches, by the media and by educators. They were accompanied by the withdrawal of the police from preventive patrolling and later(under Mrs Thatcher) by the removal of police officers’ discretion to act independently, through the astonishing Police and Criminal Evidence Act and its codes of practice. Other significant changes involved the presumption that bail would be granted to accused persons, and the removal of the police force’s power to decide on prosecution, and the creation of the Crown prosecution Service, which subordinated decisions on prosecution to political and (increasingly ) financial constraints.

 

Under these conditions, is it surprising that it is now more dangerous to walk through the city streets at midnight than it used to be? And does anyone seriously deny that it is more dangerous than it was 50 years ago?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Night Falls on the City - and The Gap in the Curtain

Obituaries are often the most interesting things in the newspapers, and not only because the libel laws don’t apply to the dead. Thanks to a chance reading of her obituary 13 years ago, I came across one of the most rewarding novels I have ever read, which also happens to have one of the most evocative titles. The author was Sarah Gainham, and the book ‘Night Falls on the City’. At that time, the book was out of print and I read it, or rather devoured it, in a tatty old hardback found in the back room of a private library to which I belong. My excuse for writing this review of it is that it has recently been republished as a smart paperback (by Abacus) and is also available on Kindle.

 

First a word on the author. Sarah Gainham was not her real name. Born Rachel Stainer,  she became by marriage first Rachel Terry, then Rachel Ames. She was a much-admired foreign correspondent for the Spectator magazine (in a previous period of brilliance under Brian Inglis), dealing during the turbulent middle years of the Cold War with that fascinating but always under-reported (in Britain) subject, the German-dominated centre of Europe. She lived in Vienna, Berlin, Bonn and Trieste. One of her husbands was another even more brilliant correspondent, the great journalist Antony Terry. The other was Kenneth Ames, also a distinguished journalist.

 

I have not read any of her other books (I am told that ‘Time Right Deadly’ is the best of them, along with ‘Cold Dark Night’ (set in Berlin) and ‘the Stone Roses’ (set in Czechoslovakia)), but I haven’t yet located them and doubt if they begin to equal ‘Night Falls on the City’.

 

I’ll try not to spoil the plot for anyone here. What I can say is that central character is a distinguished and much-admired actress in Vienna, a city in which the theatre has a far higher standing than in Britain, and great actors are privileged and admired, and politically significant. She is married to a prominent socialist politician and writer, who is also a Jew.

 

The action begins in the hours before the German takeover of Austria in 1938, which is of course the Night falling on the City of the title, and rarely moves outside a small circle of people in a small area of prosperous Vienna.

 

There are a few moments of utter horror, which, on first reading, imprinted themselves on my memory so fiercely that they seemed much tamer on a second encounter.

 

There are many others, which grow stronger on reacquaintance, of the sinister invasion of happy professional lives by the need to compromise with evil, so as to survive.

 

I suspect that many of these moments are drawn from the life, taken from the confessions of actual Viennese people who made such compromises and were never able to forgive themselves. In one striking passage, she notes that for most people the first (and vital) compromise was no harder to make than the one many intelligent professionals surrender to,  when they find themselves working for stupid or crude superiors, and decide it is simpler to humour them than to oppose them.

 

There is also a very dark excursion, when the theatre company are more or less compelled to make a cultural tour of occupied Poland. This episode is so full of menace and understated horror that it (and a small, bitter sequel when bombs and ruin later come to Vienna) have remained in my mind ever since as a series of shadowy pictures, impossible to forget. I never read or hear any account of occupied Poland now, when they do not come sharply to mind. I am, once again, quite sure that they are drawn from the life. The same is true of a certain description of a round-up of Jews in a Vienna market, and its aftermath. It is all done with a sure, confident but restrained hand, which make the terror and horror of it all the more potent.

 

There is one recurrent theme of the book which I will not refer to, as it only develops some time after the beginning. I will say that it lends a feeling of ever-present fear to the whole story.

 

Also important is the telling description of what it is like to be under bombardment from the air, and what happens when bombs fall near your home; and the understanding that for most Germans, the war with the Soviet Union was the one which mattered, and which led to their defeat.  A clever division of labour between the characters underlines the political and strategic ignorance of even quite educated people. From start to finish, only a few really understand what is happening, and how serious it is.

 

Perhaps it’s because I lived in another great continental city, Moscow, in which the Theatre also had a powerful status, and in which memories of war and of serious repression were very present that I find ‘Night falls on the City’ so very fresh and absorbing. Though it was, in its time (1967), a considerable popular success in Britain and the USA, and solved its author’s financial problems for the rest of her long and not very happy life. I don’t know, but I feel confident in recommending it to anyone who prefers a big serious subject wrapped in a sparkling, alluring parcel of well-plotted, well-told and exciting fiction, as I do.

 

I was on many delayed trains during the week before Christmas, and barely noticed their lateness because I was so sunk either in ‘Night falls on the City’ or in ‘The Gap in the Curtain’ (Polygon) by John Buchan.

 

This I don’t recommend so generally. Either you like Buchan’s Edward Leithen books, or you don’t. They are a lot better written and more credible than his Richard Hannay shockers, which I have now quite grown out of (though I am still fond of The Thirty Nine Steps and Greenmantle, especially of Hannay’s malaria-stricken Christmas, lost in a Bavarian forest in a blizzard as he flees from the appalling Ulrich von Stumm, taken in by a kindly peasant family amid the storm of war).

 

Leithen is Buchan, more or less exactly, the Buchan who became an MP (for one of the much-missed university seats, abolished so foolishly and dogmatically by the Attlee government) Lord Tweedsmuir and Governor-General of Canada. The Leithen books are full of several of the things I like most about Buchan, particularly his love of the British countryside and his very fine descriptive powers when writing about it, and his belief in the strong influences of old houses on those who live in them.  There is a passage about the ‘tawny paradise’ (as Chips Channon so evocatively called it) of London life for the wealthy and influential which would be hard to better, he is also fascinating in his description of elevated political and parliamentary life in the 1920s and 1930s, as seen from the inside. It is not like that now, but I think it must have been. And there is one surprising but( as always) enjoyable excursion into Africa, and a lovely account of the great, under-rated joys which can come to those who are ready to undergo a bit of danger and physical hardship

 

In this case, after a rather difficult start, we follow the fortunes of five people who are allowed, during a 1930s country-house weekend, to glimpse a copy of The Times, exactly a year ahead. Two of them see the announcements of their own deaths. There is a certain amount of mystery and the supernatural, as there sometimes is in the work of this very practical and apparently down-to-earth man (I am thinking here of two of his  short stories, one about a man who discovers and restores an old Roman temple, the other, in a way, similar, about a city magnate who falls into the worship of the ancient goddess Ashtaroth).