Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 290
December 17, 2012
Syria - Some Badly Needed Balance
Amid the wasteland of rubbish and propaganda published and broadcast about Syria, a few bright lights shine. One of them is this article by Patrick Cockburn in Sunday’s ‘Independent on Sunday’ Newspaper. It just goes to show the difference it makes when a proper, experienced and knowledgeable correspondent is on the spot.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/syria-the-descent-into-holy-war-8420309.html
For the next few days you can also hear Patrick interviewed on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme, at about 7.09 am, here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/listen_again/default.stm
The BBC deserve some credit for this, even though they have for far too long been treating the Syrian rebels as being in some way the ‘good’ side. Perhaps they are beginning to understand that it is not, after all, so simple.
The One You've been Waiting for - Peter Hitchens vs Sir Simon Jenkins, coming soon
This is the one you’ve been waiting for. I am hoping to debate with Sir Simon Jenkins, principal target of my book on drugs ‘the War We Never Fought’, at the Oxford Literary Festival in Mid-March. I’m sure the Festival will announce full details later, but I will mention the exact time, date and place as soon as they are confirmed.
What if the Question Time Audience is Repesentative After All?
What if the BBC’s Question Time audiences are in fact truly representative of public opinion? It’s a favourite belief of beleaguered conservatives that the studio crowd assembled for this programme is in some way selected to reflect the BBC’s own view of the world.
But I am not sure that it is wise to cling to this belief. For at least 20 years now, the British public have been subject to a stream of propaganda and re-education all the more effective for being subtle. The borders are not closed. It’s not illegal to listen to foreign radio stations. Conservative newspapers, magazines and books continue to be published. There are independent schools. People such as me appear on the panels of discussion shows, though under interesting conditions.
Frankly, if the old Communist regimes of Eastern Europe had had the sense to allow such safety valves, they might still be in power. As long as the young were imbued with the regime’s world view, as long as mainstream TV seldom if ever departed from the agenda of equality, diversity, globalism, climate change, as long as comedy, drama and soap operas were all under the control of pro-regime ideologues, not to mention the book review pages and the bookshops, supporters of the old regime could continue to live in a world of their own, while the government got on with its purposes.
British conservatism – I use the word widely – has really been talking to itself for the past quarter-century. Since the collapse of the Thatcher project, which was never that good in the first place, it has been an exile community, a bit like the Jacobites after 1745.
It has enjoyed itself complaining about Labour government, but never really understood what Labour was doing or why. And it has, in its heart, repeatedly accepted Labour’s legitimacy and right to rule.
The final hours of the last majority Tory government ever, in 1997, were not a moment of grief and fear, but a gentlemanly departure, leaving the garden tidy as they went off to relax at the cricket. I never met a senior Tory in that era who genuinely felt robbed or sorry.
Yet the Blairites came charging into the seats of power, bursting with plans to transform the country irrevocably (Andrew Neather’s amazing outburst about immigration lifted the veil on a tiny corner of this immense project). The neutral civil service, already tottering, was simply destroyed. The Prime Minister’s Press Secretary, armed by Orders in Council with unprecedented and unconstitutional powers, because the head commissar of an irresistible, centralised executive. The independence of the House of Lords was smashed. Northern Ireland was sold to the terrorist gangsters. Even the monarchy was co-opted and made subject to Alastair Campbell, after the death of Princess Diana. Huge, irreversible steps were taken to merge our sovereignty with that of the EU, many of them involving the independence of the armed forces. And so it went on.
And the Tories sat about, making daisy chains, until the day they believed inevitable, when some pendulum or other would swing them back into office. They never fought against the Blairite ideology. Most of them quietly accepted it.
Those were the worst years in which to be an ex-Marxist, seeing a government with at least four 1960s revolutionaries in it in senior positions (none of them, like me, open about their pasts or anxious to discuss them, let alone willing to renounce or condemn their past views) , and listening to deluded old Tories saying ‘That Tony Blair, best Tory Prime Minister we ever had, haw haw’.
They seemed to think that because he hadn’t nationalised the ice cream industry, or raised the basic rate of income tax, he wasn’t the head of a radical government. Didn’t they understand that the Left these days cares about culture, sexual politics, open borders, the constitution and the ceding of sovereignty to supranational bodies, plus of course the expansion of a vast client state of welfare recipients and public service workers? No, they didn’t.
During that period, the Blairites sought to get the message across to the Tories – you can’t come back into office until you have surrendered to our policies. This was made plain by Mr Blair himself, at an amazing meeting in Kettering, towards the end of the 2001 ‘election’(in truth there was never any contest, so completely had Tory Britain conceded the right to rule).
He said ‘"At this election we ask the British people to speak out and say the public services are Britain's priority, to say clearly and unequivocally that no party should ever again attempt to lead this country by proposing to cut Britain's schools, Britain's hospitals and Britain's public services. Never again a return to the agenda of the 80s."
I was there when he said it, and I managed to ask him (it was a sparsely-attended occasion and the election was really all over) if he wasn’t presuming a bit, telling the Tories what they should think. He looked a bit vague and Bransonish, and avoided the point. By that stage he and I were both going through the motions.
But while all; this was going on, the schools (backed by the BBC) were teaching everyone our new multiculti history, and our new climate-change dominated geography, and our new post- Christian sexual morality. And it worked!
A Survation poll in the Mail on Sunday showed that support for same-ex marriage among the under-35s is 73 per cent. 50 per cent of Tory voters b back it too. It’s only among the pre-revolutionary population, the over-55s, that there is a majority against it, and it is not a very big majority.
I suspect most middle-aged people don’t really have strong feelings about the issue one way or the other. Christian sexual morality more or less collapsed when divorce-on-demand became legal in the late 1960s.
They’ve just realised that the majority is now in favour, and it’s simpler and more convenient to join in.
I’m not advancing an argument here, just stating a fact. I don’t use the phrase ’silent majority’ (I may have done long ago, but I can’t recall when) because I have long suspected that there isn’t one. The fact is that propaganda works, and people like being in the majority.
The question of what is right or wrong, on the other hand, cannot be answered by opinion polls, and never will be.
December 16, 2012
A Rough Guide to 2112 - the Abolition of Britain complete
This article on the census was also published in the Mail on Sunday of 16th December.
The future will be another country. They will do things differently there. The Census is not just a description of the state of things on a day in 2011, it is a prophetic document telling us where we are going, whether we like it or not. I don’t.
For the last 60 years or so, we have lived in a nation that was more or less familiar to anyone who had grown up in the pre-war Britain of 1939. Even the devastation of conflict had not transformed it out of recognition.
People behaved, thought, worked, laughed and enjoyed themselves much as they had done for decades. They lived in the same sorts of families in the same kind of houses. Their children went to the same kinds of schools.
And they had grown up in a land which was still identifiably the same as their grandparents had known. And so it went back for centuries. As recently as 1949, the prices of most goods were roughly the same, and expressed in the same money, as the prices of 1649.
A short-distance time-traveller between 1912 and 2012 might be perplexed and astonished, but he would not be lost.
That period is now coming to an end. I suspect that anyone in Britain, travelling between 2012 and 2112 would be unable to believe that he was in the same place.
What is the most significant single fact in the Census? I do not think there is one. Several are shocking or disturbing, if you are not fond of change, and delightful if you are. But there are some, which taken together, prophesy a transformation to come.
Look at these – manufacturing is now only the fourth biggest employer, after supplying and selling goods and services, health and social work and education. So, in the nation that was once the ‘Workshop of the World’, we now have more teachers than industrial workers.
London is rapidly becoming a separate nation, as different from England as Scotland or Wales are, with indigenous British people now in a minority, in some areas a very small minority indeed, and incidentally with extremes of wealth and poverty not known since Edwardian times.
Then of course there are the decline in Christianity, down by four million, from 72% to 59% ; the growth in indifference to religion, with non-believers almost doubling to 14.1 million; and also of Islam, rising so fast that one British resident in 20 is now a Muslim. The Muslim population is young, and keen on large families, while the Christian population tends to be older and less likely to have children. This is very much a work in progress, far from complete. A lot of nominal Christians are no longer bothering to pretend to a faith they have never cared much about.
Do not be surprised if, in 10 years, the gap between the number of professing Christians and the number of Muslims has grown much smaller.
The secularists, who have so enthusiastically sought to drive Christianity out of British life, may realise with a gulp of apprehension that they have only created a vacancy for Islam – a faith which is not at all troubled by Richard Dawkins.
Perhaps most significant of all is the accelerating disappearance of marriage as the normal state of life for grown-up people. For the first time, fewer than half of adults are married. This means many things – a greater number of fatherless households, a greater number of cohabiting couples, the rapid disappearance of what was once a strong social force.
Since the stable married family is a fortress of private life and individuality, its retreat will mean the opposite of that - more state interference and surveillance, more conformism – and more conformists - and mass culture.
Its main effect will be on the children. Many of them will grow up outside what used to be normal, a lifelong two-parent home. They will, as a result, be different sorts of people. Already, half of Britain’s 15-year-olds do not live with their ‘birth parents’. 300,000 sets of parents split each year.
I cannot believe this is not part of the reason for the so-called ‘riots’ of 2011, in which young men brought up without male authority ran wild. These were equal-opportunity events, and their causes were home-grown, not imported. This will get much, much worse.
Again, conservatives will find this worrying and ill-omened. Liberal ‘progressives’, who have never had much time for the married family, seeing it as a sort of prison, will view it as a liberation. Edmund Leach, giving his influential Reith lectures in 1967, put it this way ‘Far from being the basis of the good society, the family with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents’.
It is striking that just as homosexuals seem to be most enthusiastic about getting married, heterosexuals are tiring of the whole thing.
But now compare the giant political fuss over same-sex marriage with the numbers of people affected. See just what a tiny proportion of the country is involved. While the decline of conventional marriage involves many millions, there are 105,000 people in civil partnerships, one fifth of one per cent of the population, one person in 500. And that is seven years after they first became available.
I have deliberately left migration to the end. The figures are astonishing, with one in ten people in England and Wales now born abroad, and the rate of increase over the past few years equally astounding – half of these new citizens have arrived here since 2001.
And, in a figure which has not attracted the attention it should have got, nearly three million people live in households where no adults speak English as their first language.
The main significance of this is the speed of it. Even now, official immigration still stands at 180,000 a year. Probably these totals are an underestimate, as illegal migrants tend not to fill in forms.
But the really important fact is that this revolution is the result of a deliberate, planned attempt to change this country forever, and we have the evidence of this.
On 23rd October 2009, a former New Labour official called Andrew Neather, wrote an article in the London ‘Evening Standard’ which was that very rare thing – a genuine revelation of a political secret.
The crucial passage described ‘a major shift from the policy of previous governments’.
It disclosed that a ‘big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy … there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.
‘…earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended — even if this wasn't its main purpose — to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.
‘Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing…there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour's core white working-class vote.’
‘Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom. But ministers wouldn't talk about it.’
Why not? Because Labour voters wouldn’t have liked it.
‘.. while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.’
On Friday the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was still trying to appeal to working class voters whose views his metropolitan fat cat party secretly despises.
While praising immigration to his London audience, he pretended to be concerned about it by admitting there is ‘anxiety’ about the pace of change. He promised (absurdly, since the EU has controlled our frontiers for many years) that ‘Britain must always control its borders’.
But he then swiftly dismissed the idea – which would be the only hope of future harmony - that migrants should assimilate, saying this was ‘wrong for our country’.
He proclaimed ‘One Nation doesn’t mean one identity.
People can be proudly, patriotically British without abandoning their cultural roots’.
Is this true? In the days when the USA still sought to assimilate its migrants, it certainly didn’t think so. It insisted that they became Americans in every way, and as soon as they could. Half the point of American state schools was the creation of new young Americans.
Since that policy was abandoned 30 years ago, the USA has in reality ceased to be one country, with large areas speaking Spanish and retaining the customs and cultures of their homes, hostile or chilly to their American fellow-citizens, who return the favour.
Any observant person in Britain can see the same process in such cities as Bradford, where multiculturalism has created two solitudes with their backs turned on each other.
Bit by bit, the people of this country are ceasing to have key things in common. They don’t share a religion, or a culture, or a history. Many don’t even share a language. They don’t eat the same food, or watch the same TV stations or have a common sense of humour. They sometimes even disagree about whether to drive on the left
They come from completely different legal and political traditions. In a strange paradox, many of the new Britons are more socially and morally conservative than their indigenous British neighbours, though their presence here is a sort of revolution in flesh and blood.
Many of the new migrants also have a completely different work-ethic, not having grown up in our entitlement-based welfare state – which is why one of their main unspoken functions in Labour’s plan has been to keep wages down by providing a huge pool of cheap and willing unskilled labour.
Without mass immigration, the minimum wage would long ago have had to rise sharply, creating the crisis that all economists predicted when it was introduced.
As it is, we are fast becoming a low-wage unskilled economy, with overcrowded cities, multi-occupied housing and hopelessly strained medical services, transport and schools. There is also a widening gap between the rich, who can afford servants again for the first time since the era of Downton Abbey, and the poor, who have to be those servants .
The only way we will be able to sustain this is by becoming steadily cheaper, devaluing our currency through inflation and incidentally destroying the savings and pensions of the thrifty. That will also kill off the welfare state, whose provisions and payouts will gradually shrink to the point whre they are valueless.
We are also becoming a more violent, noisy and unrestrained culture, more drunk, more drugged, more indebted, more rootless and less particular.
Our language is increasingly internationalised and full of Americanisms (Mr Miliband thinks railway stations are called ‘train stations’), our landmarks, particularly the customary weights and measures with which millions grew up, are being extirpated in schools and on the media.
There is no sign that any of these developments are stopping, or even slowing. Far from it. They are accelerating. They were meant to. The secret thinkers at the core of the Blair government wanted to begin the world over again, at home and abroad, though they never dared to tell us how. As their mighty, unstoppable project unfolds, Britain as we knew it will disappear, as they hoped it would. At least we know who to blame.
December 15, 2012
Nearly at the Ten Million Mark
This weblog is approaching a rather exciting moment (for me at least). The ticker recording the number of page views is getting pleasantly close to 10,000,000 and will, I suspect, arrive there in the next few days. We passed a total of 100,000 comments some time ago, and I have now posted 1,270 times in the six years since it began.
Despite any quarrels or other problems we may have had, I’m very grateful to all the readers who come here , to read, to argue, to question, to endorse or to disagree. I very much enjoy the contact, and I feel I’m beginning to get to know my audience. This is very important as I long ago found that I simply couldn’t keep up properly with all my e-mail and snail mail correspondence, and sometimes felt that (say) a lengthy reply to a reader might have been of some use to several others, who I hadn’t had time to write to.
My greatest aim is to make sure that as many readers of my column as possible also come here, to follow through and to explore subjects more deeply than can be done in a weekly column. I’m equally glad of those , especially from far away, who are not readers of the Mail on Sunday but are interested in what I have to say. I’ve noticed some people, remarking on the difference between the columns I write for the paper, and the postings I put up here. But wouldn’t it be odd if they were written in the same register and style? Likewise, I’ll speak quite differently to a big audience in and adversarial debate than I will to a small group of people who have come to discuss a subject in which they’re intensely interested .
In any case, I will announce it when we pass the ten million mark.
To Tweet or not to Tweet, and some thoughts on the Tragedy of Sandy Hook
What with hurrying backwards and forwards to Bristol for ‘Question Time’, and one or two other matters besides, this has been a rather frantic few days and I haven’t posted as much as I should have liked. But one of the results of being on ‘Question Time’ was a great landslide of abuse on Twitter (yes, I know there were one or two favourable comments, glinting amid the slurry, but it’s impossible to pretend that they were numerous).
And I thought, as I sometimes do, that it might after all be worthwhile establishing a presence on Twitter. Some of you will know (I make no great secret of it) that I have a shadowy, marginal existence on Twitter under the name of Micah Clarke. I won’t go into the tedious reasons why I don’t use my own name, except to say that they are tedious, and much like the reasons for posting as ‘Clockback’ ( as in ‘turning the clock back’, a joke as it happens) on Wikipedia and in one or two other places.
Occasionally, where I detect signs of a reasoning mind, I will respond, as Micah Clarke (user name ClarkeMicah), to particular tweets. I will always identify myself as Peter Hitchens, though people are oddly reluctant to believe me when I do so, which is one of the reasons why I am writing this posting. Yes, the person posting as Micah Clarke on Twitter, and saying he is Peter Hitchens, is this Peter Hitchens.
As to whether I engage more generally in Twitter itself, my inclinations for the moment are not to do so, because of the largely moronic, mob-rage atmosphere that I find whenever I say anything in a public place, or on TV or radio, which runs against fashion or conventional wisdom. The tiny word-limit only encourages crudity and coarseness (which the site itself seems to do nothing to discourage) .
By the way, a small point here about the latest appalling school massacre. Once again, I looked for evidence that the shooter might have been taking some sort of medication which might be acting on his brain, and once again, I found it.
The Washington Post, a major liberal newspaper which can generally be relied upon to be scrupulous in its facts, reports as follows about the Sandy Hook mass killer, Adam Lanza, as saying Lanza was ‘A really rambunctious kid, as one former neighbor in Newtown, Conn., recalled him, adding that he was on medication.’
The Post report continues :’ His parents, Nancy and Peter Lanza, separated about a decade ago, and his mother, a kindergarten teacher at Sandy Hook, remained in the family’s home with her sons, Adam and Ryan Lanza, according to Ryan Kraft, 25, who was a neighbor.
‘The separation hit the children hard, Kraft recalled.
‘When Nancy Lanza would go out to dinner with friends, she sometimes relied on Kraft to watch Adam Lanza, who was too boisterous for Ryan Lanza to manage. “He would have tantrums,” Kraft said. “They were much more than the average kid [had].” Yet he was not prone to violence, Kraft said.
‘“The kids seemed really depressed” by the breakup, Kraft said of the Lanza brothers.’
‘Slate’ Magazine repeats some of the Washington Post account but gives it some extra context : ‘One thing everyone seems to be able to agree on is that Lanza likely had some sort of mental disability or developmental disorder. One law enforcement official tells the Associated Press Adam Lanza might have suffered from a personality disorder and the New York Times reports that several who knew Lanza in high school had been told he had Asperger’s syndrome, a high functioning form of autism.
‘It certainly seems he had several tell-tale signs of the disorder, often making those around him nervous because he was painfully shy and seemed to struggle to be social and form connections with people. It was evident Lanza “had a condition,” a neighbor tells the New York Post. “You definitely notice it,” he added. Lanza was “kind of, like, needy. I wouldn’t say antisocial, but struggling to be social.” One “family insider” tells the New York Daily News Lanza “was a deeply disturbed kid,” who “had major issues” and “was subject to outbursts.” A 25-year-old neighbor who sometimes watched Adam Lanza when his mother would go out with friends said he was on medication, reports the Washington Post.’
I hope that reporters on the spot pursue this angle actively, rather than yet another futile wail in favour of ‘gun control’ . People said to be suffering from Asperger’s syndrome are frequently dosed with medications, including SSRI antidepressants.
Guns, as I have repeatedly said, have been freely available in the USA for centuries. Shootings followed by suicides, of this sort, were rare in that country until the era of modern medication for mental illness, and there is a strong correlation (yes, I know, correlation is not causation) between such shootings and the use of these medications. Until the media take more interest in this correlation, we won’t get the proper inquiry into it that we so badly need. Why anyone should be against such an inquiry, I cannot imagine.
So you want to legalise cannabis? You must be as dumb as Nick Clegg
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday Column
Perhaps 15 years from now they will be selling Cannabis Cookies in the supermarkets, and the drug itself will be available at your local corner shop. You can guess which famous brand names will be on the packets. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Let us hope that, at least, the State will by then have built enough mental hospitals to house the poor victims of this squalid drug, the young people who will take cannabis and lose their reason.
But the desire of a few rich cynics for a legal market for marijuana is the real reason for the endless dishonest propaganda on the drugs issue which has fooled so many gullible and ignorant politicians and journalists.
In this unpleasant future, greedy businessmen will make enormous fortunes from the misery of others, and the avaricious State will find a new source of tax revenue, to pay the interest on the vast debts it can never meet.
As in all important debates, it is crucial to distinguish between the actively evil and the lazily stupid. It is kinder to assume that the Deputy Prime Minister is one of the dumb ones.
Fondly imagining that he was being bold and original, Nicholas Clegg said on Friday that there was a ‘war on drugs’ in this country. Then he called for a Royal Commission on the subject.
Now, there would be nothing wrong with a proper Royal Commission on drugs, which genuinely reflected the full range of opinion and wasn’t packed by the immensely powerful pro-drug lobby.
But this is a country where senior politicians (I know who they are, but cannot name them) have snorted cocaine in their adult lives, where the political, media and academic establishment is crammed full of former or present dope-smokers, and where the police themselves are broken defeatists in the face of drugs.
Such a Commission would undoubtedly be stuffed with the apostles of dope, as every single body has been that has considered the subject since Baroness Wootton’s original committee in 1968-69.
Haven’t heard of it? No surprise there. Nor have most of the people who write, broadcast and speak about drugs. But it was the key moment at which the alleged ‘war on drugs’ in this country was abandoned.
Lady Wootton, a mighty Left-wing battleaxe, defeated that wily old beast Jim Callaghan in a terrific Whitehall struggle.
Heavily influenced by a brilliant lobbying campaign, featuring all four Beatles, Lady Wootton’s cabal urged two crucial things.
One, that cannabis should be given a special status, as less serious than other drugs. And two, that the offence of possessing drugs should be seen as less serious than selling them.
She also arranged to ensure that the law was constantly under review, so that it was steadily weakened, in a salami-slicing process that few would notice. Ever since then, governments have been pretending to be tough while actually being weak and defeatist.
A Bill was quickly put through Parliament to do these things. It was officially supported by both Labour and Tory parties and heavily backed by a strong soft-on-drugs lobby among Home Office civil servants (led by a man called Henry ‘Bing’ Spear).
Soon after it was passed, Lord Hailsham, then Tory Lord Chancellor, told the magistrates of England and Wales to stop sending anyone to prison for possessing cannabis. They obeyed.
By 1977, Lady Wootton was able to write a gloating letter to The Times mocking one of its commentators for foolishly claiming that the then Government was taking a tough line on cannabis.
But, having died in 1988, she did not live to see an editorial in that supposedly conservative newspaper, in July 1992, calling for cannabis decriminalisation and saying, accurately, that ‘the law banning cannabis sale and use is all but unenforced’.
Nor did she live to see John O’Connor, a former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad, write in February 1994 that ‘cannabis has been a decriminalised drug for some time now’.
Well, if the police and The Times could see this so long ago, do you think it has got any less decriminalised since then?
But Barbara Wootton would have rejoiced at the efforts of Lady Runciman and the Metropolitan Police, who in 2001 helped to create the ‘Cannabis Warning’, a sort of official shrug that is now the preferred police response if they catch someone with this drug. There is no punishment and no record. This retreat was never even approved by Parliament, but it has stripped the spine and bones out of what was left of the law.
Mr Clegg does not seem to know any of this. Nor does Will Self, the pretentious former illegal drug abuser who, on the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday night, noisily barracked me on this subject. They claim, absurdly, that our problems come from a non-existent ‘prohibition’ that vanished 40 years ago.
All these people calling for a ‘debate’ don’t really want any such thing. They want to hurry us into legalisation – though they will not call it that, hiding behind such words as ‘regulation’ or ridiculous, unscientific claims that cannabis can be smoked for medical purposes.
Once they have won, it will be incredibly hard to go back. By the time people grasp that legal cannabis has made this a Third World country, stupefied and acquiescent, it will be too late.
It’s not too late now. But it very nearly is.
The turban is a badge of courage we’re right to salute
When I heard of plans for a Sikh soldier to be the first Guardsman to wear a turban, I thought it was another exercise in political correctness. But when I looked into the matter, I decided that I had been quite wrong, and changed my mind.
Sikhs have repeatedly fought for this country – wearing turbans while they did so. In both world wars they refused to use steel helmets in battle, because the turban is such an important part of their beliefs, and sustains their indomitable bravery.
Rightly valuing their courage, the highest of all the virtues because none of the others is possible without it, the Army has made a special effort to recruit British Sikhs.
I find myself unexpectedly moved by the sight of Jatinderpal Singh Bhullar guarding Her Majesty in his turban. Those horrible modern rifles still look silly with a ceremonial uniform, though.
Any day now, the Peter Hitchens Blog will welcome its ten millionth visit. It could be you.
Since I began it, almost six years ago, it has built up a lively readership of several thousand people each day.
It features a number of articles by me each week, on politics, foreign affairs, religion and anything that takes my fancy, as well as book and film reviews and debates with contributors.
December 13, 2012
An Interview with PH
Some readers might like to see this rather professional interview with me in the ‘Warwick Boar’, the student newspaper of that university.
It is here
http://theboar.org/books/2012/dec/10/interview-peter-hitchens/
Great Expectations Disappointed Again
I think ‘Great Expectations’ must be one of the best stories ever written. If it were tacked on to the Bible as an extra book, it wouldn’t be out of place, as it is so full of real life and its hard truths, betrayal, shame, revenge and punishment, as well as pride and vanity, and their terrible consequences. It’s also written in a particularly lovely style of English, carved out of slate and sandstone rather than marble, sparkling with humour for those who learn to hear the voice of Dickens in its cadences.
I find, more and more, that I wish I had heard that actual voice in life. I’ve just read the book for the third time and found I could not stop, nearly missing my station on the homeward journey, and staying awake deep into the night rather than interrupt the flow of it, though I know the story more or less by heart.
I think I can now say for certain (as I haven’t felt able to do before, when urging Dickens on the surprising number of people in my generation who have never actually read him) that it is even better than ‘David Copperfield’ though there are passages and moments in ‘Copperfield’ that rise even higher, and the reader always knows that this was Dickens’s own autobiography, close enough. He called ‘Copperfield’ his ‘favourite child’. In much of Dickens there is a feeling very like the one you can obtain on a darkish winter’s afternoon in the older parts of any English city or, better still, near the sea. I can only describe it as a feeling of anticipation, of something vast and inevitable approaching, which you cannot avoid. I think it is at its strongest in the description of the great storm in ‘Copperfield’, but is present throughout both books. There is a terrifying passage in ‘Little Dorrit’ (one of the Dickens books I have not yet been able to finish), a passage I have been unable to find since I first read it, in which one character warns another that there are people approaching him far off now but inevitably growing closer, whom he must meet and cannot avoid. It does not sound as if that meeting, when it comes, will be good or desirable.
It has a touch of the haunting, disturbing passage at the end of the Gospel according to St John (21:18) where Christ says to Peter ‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.’
If that doesn't freeze your marrow on a careful reading, I don't know what will.
Not merely is ‘Great Expectations’ an unequalled book. David Lean’s 1946 film of it must be one of the finest adaptations of a novel ever done. So anyone who sets out to film it again has a very difficult task and I feel sorry for them. I recently write scathingly about an unfortunate TV version of the story, in which a young blacksmith from the Kent marshes was ludicrously played by an actor with the features of a male model, and Joe Gargery was a sort of sulking Chartist. The only good thing about it, I now think, was that it reintroduced the very nasty character of Dolge Orlick, who doesn’t feature in Lean’s film, so we have no real explanation for the illness and death of Mrs Joe.
Now, alas, I have to report disappointment at a new full-length film, now on general release. It has one or two things. For a while I thought that Robbie Coltrane, because of his gigantic frame and gargoyle-like face, might have been a good choice to play Jaggers, the dark centre of the film who knows all secrets and, in a fashion, knows the way in and out of Hell itself. But in the end he cannot begin to compare to Francis L. Sullivan’s version, in which even the word ‘Pip’ was freighted with a ton of meaning, and in which the moment when Jaggers makes it clear to Pip that he must not be told that his convict benefactor Abel Magwitch has illegally returned from Australia is played for all its menacing worth so that the room seems to darken as he speaks.
In the new version, to give you an example of the way in which the makers have run about all over the place, Jaggers openly admits ( as no lawyer of that time - or in most cases this age - would ever do) that he knows that Magwitch is illegally in the country. Part of the fear of the moment is that Pip understands that he is utterly on his own, that the man who has until now been his protector against the chaos of London must now stand aside.
There are other things. Though the portrayal of 1830s London (I have always assumed that the book is set at the end of George IV’s reign, or perhaps William IV’s, as a King is still apparently on the throne) is superb, in all its squalor and Hogarthian mess and chaos. But Jaggers’s office is nowhere near sinister enough, and the house chosen to represent Satis House is all wrong, in architecture and period, and a surprising amount of sunshine gets round the curtains into Miss Havisham’s supposedly Stygian apartments . Helen Bonham Carter’s strange bulging eyes and rather chubby features also do not convince as the gaunt, whispering Miss Havisham, who is never seen to eat. Also, I do not think it is really necessary to dwell so much upon her barbecued features after she sets her wedding dress alight.
And, just as in the TV version, the makers have chosen to make a big thing out of the rich young gentlemen’s dining club, the Finches of the Grove. I think this wastes a lot of time. It is pleasant, though, to find that Biddy has been given a large role, she having been virtually written out of the TV version.
As I think must always be the case, it has been impossible to find anyone to play the sainted Joe Gargery as he should be, perhaps the single sweetest character in Dickens, yet sweet with immense humour, patience, strength and yet fundamental seriousness. If you read the book, it is impossible not to hear and see Bernard Miles’s rendering of Jo, both as Pip’s ally against his ferocious sister, and – triumphantly – as the blacksmith crammed into an appalling suit, embarrassing the snobified Pip on a visit to Town, as near as anyone has got to portraying the double ghastliness of embarrassment caused by class and demonstrative parental love. For Joe, though not Pip’s actual father, is in every way a father to him. The passage in which Pip describes his own shameful behaviour towards those who had been good to him, generally done to please worthless people to whom he owes nothing remains one of the most moving things in the English language. Lean’s film conveyed this meaning. The new one doesn’t really.
I have a theory as to why these new adaptations fail, and always will. They shouldn’t, because the story is so powerful, the characters so strong and clear, and the plot is such a clever knot. So many moments, also , are easily filmable.
The trouble is that the bridges of custom and memory which once connected us to the England in which the story is set have been broken down, or have fallen.
People just are not like that any more. I suspect the effect of TV, by making us all seek to conform with the image of life and beauty portrayed on the screen, has destroyed much of our individuality, just as it has atrophied our imaginations. A lawyer such as Jaggers would not now dare to have such strong mannerisms and would go to the gym ceaselessly to try to get rid f his chins. Joe Gargery would long ago have lost his innocence, become far more knowing and would not be able to as he does in the book – to make a fool of himself by being good .
Something very subtle has also happened to our voices and our faces. In 1946, we all had great grandfathers who had lived in villages and spoke the accent of the place. We all had great grandfathers who had been hungry, who had been cold, who hated and feared debt as a fiendish enemy, who had been chastised by parents or teachers, and who had experienced at first or second hand one form of cruelty or another in an England of harsh laws, mantraps and enclosure. And we all had great grandmothers who had been regular churchgoers, who knew the Bible, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ and ‘Fox’s Book of Martyrs’. Their heads were full of songs we have forgotten ( see also the very touching singing of ‘Barbara Allen’ in the clever 1951 film of ‘A Christmas Carol’ (released as ‘Scrooge’ in Britain, and worthy of David Lean, though it adds episodes which were never in the book, but actually directed by Brian Desmond Hurst) in which Alastair Sim plays Ebenezer Scrooge).
Just as, when Robert Graves wrote ‘Wife to Mr Milton’ about the same time as David Lean made his film, the prices of goods in 1949 England were recognisably similar to the prices of the same goods 300 years before, the people of that era were still recognisably similar to their forebears, as far back as the Civil War. The modern world hadn’t quite got hold of them. They were the connected heirs to an older England, the very end of which I just saw in my childhood. The faces and voices of Bernard Miles, Alec Guinness, Finlay Curry, Martita Hunt, Jean Simmons and Valerie Hobson all understand that world. Those who come after cannot do so. Let us just be glad that Lean’s film was made when it was, and try to ensure that future children see it, so that they have some clue as to how the past really was.
December 12, 2012
So Who Won in 1998?
‘Colm C’ writes: ‘PH says: "Nor did they [Sinn Fein and the IRA] need to do anything except pretend to disarm and pretend that future terror outrages were the work of "dissidents" whom the IRA (breaking a long tradition of Irish republicanism) mysteriously never punished for their dissent". The clear implication of this statement is that the Provisional IRA did not disarm and that the so called dissident Republican movement is actually still the Provisionals in another guise (or as Mr Hitchens sometimes describes it "I can't believe it's not the IRA"). If PH has hard evidence to support this claim he should present it - otherwise it is merely an unsupported allegation. I or anyone else might just as well claim for example that UKIP is a secret Tory front group, but if I do not provide evidence to support such a claim it is worthless.’
***Well, there is ample evidence that the IRA *was* heavily armed and if we are to believe that atiger of this sort has had its teeth removed, we would surley be wise to examine the toothless gums before turning our backs on it.
Indeed there is no doubt oof any kind that the IRA was armed, and well-supplied with powerful explosives. We even know who its suppliers were. There was nothing secret about it. There are many graves containing those killed by its weapons, and the cities of Northern Ireland and Great Britain bear the multiple scars of its bombs. Whereas there is no evidence of any kind that (in the rather feeble parallel offered by Mr 'C' ) UKIP had ever been a secret Tory front group, which would be necessary to make the two accusations comparable. Were there such evidence, then one could look for counter-evidence that it had ceased to be so. In the absence of such counter-evidence that it had abandoned this purpose, then we might reasonably assume that it continued to be so.
The question is whether the IRA is now disarmed. If we are to believe that the IRA is no longer armed, when it certainly used to be heavily armed should we not have material, objective evidence for this claim, apart from the fact that somebody with an interest in this people believing that this disarament has happened, asserts without material evidence that it has happened?
Mr ‘C’ Continues :’ ‘Moreover, far be it from me to defend the Provisionals, but if they did begin punishing "dissidents" I'm sure many people, possibly including Mr Hitchens, would seize on such "punishments" as evidence that the Provisionals were still engaged in terrorism and that therefore the peace process was a sham.’
**Maybe they would, though I do not think it is so much as sham, as a surrender in which conventional wisdom pretends that the IRA did not win, when it did. In my recollection every single murder, bank robbery, thuggery and atrocity committed by Irish republicans since 1998 (not least the worst of all, at Omagh) has been greeted with a pious chorus of ‘this must not be allowed to derail the Peace Process’. Which being interpreted means ‘Republican violations of the agreement do not count, and will not invalidate the agreement’.
Short of the Provisional IRA leaving calling cards at the scenes of these events saying ‘We did this’, for details call 0800 PROVO’ the blame will never be attributed to them. Even then, I suspect the complacent chorus would insist that it was the work of ‘dissidents’ pretending to be the PIRA. Mr C’ seems never to have heard of ‘deniable operations’. Even if they did leave such cards, the ‘peace process’ (namely the slow-motion surrender’ cannot be delayed or halted, and a way would be found to discount such evidence.
Mr ‘C’ continues: ‘ Incidentally it is not true that the IRA broke a long republican tradition by failing to punish dissidents - the Provisionals split from the Official IRA in the early 1970s, and for most of the period of the troubles a mexican stand-off existed between the two groups. This was in spite of the fact that from the early 1970s onwards, the Officials were about as far removed from traditional Irish republicanism as it is possible to get. According to an authoritative book on the Official IRA, "The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and The Workers' Party", members of the Official Republican movement even received training in the use of firearms from the RUC.’
***The phrase ‘for most of the period of the trouble’ conveniently leaves out the periods when the Provisionals did have shoot-outs with the Officials, which nobody seriously disputes. I believe there were conflicts with INLA as well. But this is not the best example of what I mean. The Officials did not really stand in the way of anything the Provisionals wanted, just turned bit by bit into a peaceful organisation.
But if the views of Mr ‘C’ are correct, the failure of the Provisionals to discipline ‘dissidents’, is inexplicable and ahistorical. Surely if Provisional Sinn Fein were wholly dedicated to maintaining peace, for fear that its negotiated gains would be lost by breaches of the agreement (which would be the case if they had been the conceding, defeated partner trying to defend their position against a ruthless, triumphant and powerful foe insisting that the pact was kept to the letter, or else) they would stamp hard on the culprits of Omagh, the BBC bombing and all the other crimes, bank robberies etc which have been carried out by so-called dissidents since 1998. These are the laws of war. The defeated, or the weaker party, suffer badly if they fail to enforce their own soldiers' surrender, disarming and ceasefire.
The precedent is clear. Michael Collins’s Free State ruthlessly killed IRA diehards after the Treaty, and de Valera’s government in its turn hanged IRA men in the 1938-40 period, sometimes bringing Albert Pierrepoint over to Dublin to do the job. In both cases they feared British resumption of hostilities if these diehards were not curbed.
In fact, Britain is the conceding, frightened loser from the agreement (how anyone can claim otherwise when we consider prisoner releases, general amnesty for terrorist crimes, dismantling of the RUC and its special branch, withdrawal of British troops and installations, entry of Sinn Fein into government, provisions to transfer Northern Ireland to the Republic, irreversibly, after a referendum, plus the acceptance of ‘decommissioning’ without any material evidence thereof, and the continued freedom of Sinn Fein - alone among UK political parties - to raise funds abroad, I cannot imagine). Britain further fears to disrupt its scuttle by drawing attention to breaches of the armistice, because Britain, having been defeated, wants to disengage from Ireland as quickly as it can, preferably without the British public realising the circumstances in which this took place. These have been spun as a ‘victory’ and as ‘peace’ when they are in truth a shameful capitulation to lawless violence, worthy of a third-world political slum, but not worthy of a major military and diplomatic power.
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