Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 291

Mehdi Hasan, the PCC and Me

Some months ago I told the strange story of the BBC Radio programme ‘What the Papers Say’, transmitted on Sunday 29th July 2012.  The account is to be found here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/07/what-the-papers-didnt-say-and-what-they-did.html

 

Alas, the programme cannot, as far as I know, still be heard on the BBC website. I felt ( and feel) that it was most interesting that such a person as Mehdi Hasan had a position as a BBC presenter on Radio 4, whereas I had actually been told by a senior BBC executive, to my face and without any elaboration,  that I would never be permitted to present a programme on that station.

As a result, I wrote the following article in the Mail on Sunday:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/08/am-i-an-animal-a-cow-or-just-another-victim-of-bbc-bias.html

 

This was published on 4th August. Mr Hasan (who by this time wasn’t speaking to me any more, and hasn’t since)  responded through an article in the ‘Huffington Post’ , which is discussed in detail here 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/08/quote-unquote-getting-it-straight-with-the-huffington-post-and-mehdi-hasan.html

 

I made it clear that I was unhappy at the presentation of my alleged words as a direct quotation in this article.  

 

This issue has now been resolved by the Press Complaints Commission. Why were they involved?  I tried quite hard to get Mr Hasan and the Huffington Post to reply to my question about whether they had a shorthand note, or a recording of the words they had attributed to me in quotation marks.

 

I am very old-fashioned about journalism, having been trained in the lost days when even provincial evening newspapers had serious libraries of their own, and when News Editors would ask, with narrowed eyes ‘Have you got a proper note of that?’ if a reporter produced a quotation which fitted particularly neatly into his story. It wasn’t, exactly, that they didn’t trust their reporters. They just knew that one day they might have to stand up in court and defend the story, or at least be able to defend it against the cold, beady gaze of the paper’s own lawyers. So the News Editor required a full and legible note, in the Pitman’s Shorthand we all had to learn (minimum speed 120 words per minute) and which was so ordered and regular that another Pitman-trained reporter could read your note as easily as he could read his own.  You might have been as certain as you liked about the accuracy of the words, but no News Editor, Editor or lawyer would have accepted your certainty without the backing of a note or a tape (though a witness to the conversation would do in most circumstances).

 

Since then, shorthand has declined (the classical notations have I think largely been abandoned in favour of sketchier, wrigglier,  more personalised and undisciplined squiggles than my teacher, the estimable Mrs Whittaker, would have tolerated) . And many modern journalists have come to rely on tape recordings which (while cumbersome when you are searching for a crucial passage) are even more undeniable than a clear shorthand note.  But what if you have neither, nor a witness? Is it then legitimate to present what you *think* someone said as what he definitely and exactly said?

 

Anyway, I eventually decided to ask the Press Complaints Committee to take up the matter, as at least this would ensure that the ‘Huffington Post’ acknowledged my question. And after much back-and-forth, which shall remain confidential,  the quotation marks have come off the words which Mr Hasan attributed to me. And the PCC has placed the following account on its website  here

 

 http://www.pcc.org.uk/case/resolved.html?article=ODEzMw

 

 

 

As I’ve always said, I can’t definitively say that I didn’t use those exact words, nor do I specifically dispute them, nor can I deny them, because I lack a shorthand note of my own, or a recording,  and because they were said several years ago. However, the precise wording Mr Hasan uses  seems to me to be remarkably convenient to his argument, and my old News Editors, wise in the ways of the trade, would certainly have asked him if he had a note of that. Or a recording. Or a witness.  What emerges from all this is that he did not have either a note or a recording, or a witness, but was prepared, even so, to present the words as a direct quotation, enclosed in quotation marks. They’re now not enclosed in quotation marks, which I think is important.

 

Let’s call that Case One, in Mr Hasan’s Way with Words.

 

Then there’s Case Two. For this we must go back in days, weeks, months and years gone by to 27th August 2009, when Mr Hasan and I attempted an internet-based debate on BBC bias. One of Mr Hasan’s contributions to this is to be found here

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/08/mehdi-hasan-bbc-wing-bias-corporation

 

 

In this article (which is a separate question in itself, so completely does it miss the point about the BBC’s bias against moral, social and cultural conservatism) you will find the following passage ‘Then there is the claim from small-c conservatives such as Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips that they are ignored by the BBC. Is this the same Hitchens who is a frequent guest on BBC1's Question Time (according to the screen and cinema database IMDB, he has appeared on the show every year since 2000, and twice in 2007)? And the same Phillips who is a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze?’

 

Now, I have made many public complaints about my treatment by the BBC, since I was rather poorly treated on a Radio Five Live programme back in about 1995 or 1996, when I had recently returned from America,  and about which I wrote in the Guardian media section.  But I don’t personally recall having complained of being *ignored*, then or later.

 

It would have been silly, as  I was plainly not being ignored. Mr Hasan is right to say that I have made many appearances (though as a guest or panellist rather than as a presenter, a role I have been allowed precisely twice by the BBC in 17 years of broadcasting) . I have checked my own newspaper’s cuttings library, I have used Google and I have used a reputable database which scans all publications in this country and have yet to find any instance of my complaining about being ‘ignored’ by the BBC.  I think this is because I haven’t done so, though – as usual, I am open to correction. It wouldn’t, I think, be the first word which occurred to anyone encapsulating my attitude towards the Corporation.

 

Yet Mr Hasan makes it . And lo, he immediately has evidence to hand that this claim by me that I have been ignored is not justified.  The fact that I don’t appear to have made such a claim slips past unnoticed by most readers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Went Wrong With Nursing?

My beloved Aunt Ena was a nurse almost all her life. She was tiny, fierce, immensely generous with her small possessions, secretly charitable,  happily self-sacrificial with no thought of reward, funny, full of poetry (she could quote at will from the English poets), profoundly and seriously Christian (her Bible, which I inherited, was soft from frequent and careful reading) selfless almost beyond belief (especially since she possessed the Hitchens temper, which in moments of stress is as hard to control as Chernobyl). She learned her calling in the great old London hospitals, under terrifying matrons who had probably met Florence Nightingale and in whose sight no speck of dirt, no badly-made bed, no bedsores and no sloppiness could survive. She learned even more in the Queen Alexandra’s military nursing service, as she followed close behind the Allied Armies as they fought their way into Germany after D-Day. As time has gone by, and I have learned more about what is important and what is not,  I have come to think that she was the greatest human being I have ever met or am likely to meet, though of course almost nobody (apart from her friends and relations) has ever heard of her , or ever will

 

She became, in the end, a Sister Tutor, passing on her knowledge , wisdom and experience to hundreds of others.  Soon after she retired, she became seriously ill and, I am sorry to say, was taken to hospital, where she died. I was present at the moment of her death, and one day I might be able to bring myself to write about that extraordinary and moving occasion, though it would need the pen of Charles Dickens (whose books she loved, and who had been born in her battered but strangely loveable home town, Portsmouth)  to describe it properly. I am still not sure , even at this distance, that it is not too private.

 

She was plainly not very impressed by the standard of nursing she encountered, though too kind and self-effacing to make a fuss about it. Nor was I, though I knew so much less than she about how it should be done.

 

By that time (it was the late 1990s) many people had begun to notice that something had gone wrong, In our minds we had a picture of what a nurse should be,  much like what my aunt had been – disciplined, devoted, always there, putting the patient first at all times, but it plainly wasn’t quite like that.

 

In a very interesting letter published in ‘the Times’ (of London) on Saturday, Dr Brian Posnee refers to Project 2000’, the scheme to turn nursing into a ‘graduate’ profession which was cooked up by Mrs Thatcher’s Health Secretary, the long-forgotten John Moore, in 1988.  ‘The consequences were so predictable that it was difficult to believe that this plan was a serious proposal’, Dr Posnee wrote.

 

‘The excellent, caring nurses, many not academic, were marginalised’ he added. ‘The driving force behind this concept was a desire for status, which permeates much of modern society’.

 

Well, I agree that the idea was obviously flawed, and I seem to remember getting some smug spokesperson on to my Talk Radio programme, who loftily and dismissively pooh-poohed any idea that it would lead to lower levels of care.  I thought to myself then ( much as I thought when the drink licensing laws were destroyed a few years before) that I was powerless to prevent something which was obviously wrong. It was the old Curse of Cassandra, being right but not being believed, which is actually a reflection on humanity’s general unwillingness to listen to timely warnings. It seems that most of us have to wait until the Greeks are inside the walls of Troy, before we realise that we have been betrayed. It’s yet another argument against that daft experimental system of government, universal suffrage democracy (results of the experiment have been in for years, and conclusions available – i.e. it leads inexorably to war, national bankruptcy and social breakdown – but there seem to be no plans anywhere to act on this information).

 

Actually Project 2000 only put the lid on something that had already begun long before, though I suspect it put off a lot of the kind of women (and yes, they mostly were women), who didn’t fancy themselves as students of thought, but who knew more about duty, kindness and human beings than a thousand ‘graduates’. Modern ‘equality-at-all-costs-and-in-all-things’ militant feminism had for years viewed nursing as a demeaning occupation for women. The old starched uniforms were derided as making their wearers look ‘like waitresses’ or ‘like serving maids’ (a mistake most people were unlikely to make, it seems to me). I think what the feminists really didn’t like about those uniforms was the strong suggestion of owing something to a religious order, which of course they did.

 

The interesting thing about Ann Clywd’s terrible experience, which brought this subject into public consciousness for a short while, is that there is nothing at all new about it . Remembering my frustrating exchanges with official spokespersons years ago, I plunged into the archives and found that there had been a major row about this very subject in 1998, sparked off a by a pamphlet called  ‘Come Back, Miss Nightingale’ written by a nurse, Janet Warren, and a doctor ( a GP) Myles Harris. It traced the decline to , yes, the 1960s, when the profession began to be ‘stridently combative, right-based and feminist…in an expanding consumer economy focused on youth and the contraceptive pill, traditional nursing would seem out of date and irrelevant…Having to dress yourself up as a Victorian serving maid, cloister yourself in a nurses’ home for three years and take orders from ruthless old maids in the form of the traditional ward sister was unlikely to attract recruits of the Beatle generation’

 

My own memories of hospital, of the old Cronshaw Ward of the then Radcliffe Infirmary in  Oxford after I smashed my ankle in a motorcycle crash in 1969, are of pretty dedicated nursing, though it is astonishing to recall patients smoking in the ward.  Can this have happened? I think so.

 

Warren and Harris identified the key moment as 1993, when new arrangements for nurse recruiting took full effect – with the introduction of university diplomas that no longer provided immediate attachments to hospitals.

 

‘Young women who want to nurse want to join a profession , to share its ideals, to be loyal to it. Twenty years ago, student nurses could do just that. Today they are faced with spending 18 months of their three-year training on the campuses of often very minor universities. Many feel at sea with subjects such as sociology and psychology’

 

They concluded ‘Nursing’s collapse is a cultural and spiritual one, a failure of the notion of charity and compassion, not the result of failed pay bargaining rounds’.

 

I suspect that much of fury directed against Margaret Thatcher is a rage against this sort of loss, which became more and more obvious during her period in government, but which was not necessarily caused by her policies or acts. Pre-1980 Britain was much less affluent than it became, but also much gentler and kinder. The economic storm came at about the same time the big social, educational and cultural changes of the 1960s began to make themselves felt. I don’t think the Thatcher government cared much about all this, or understood it, and I have many criticisms of it. But the thing people really didn’t like about the 1980s was the ‘cultural and spiritual ‘ change that came then with such force.  And that had its origins in the 1940s, 1950s and above all the 1960s, with the launch of the permissive society

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flags, Drugs and Same-Sex Marriage

The Irish problem is one of those, like the Middle East, or rape, or immigration, where any unconventional expression of opinion is dangerous. You will immediately be accused of saying or thinking things that you have not said or thought. Here I seem to have been accused of endorsing ‘Loyalist’ terror and violence, or in some way of lacking sufficient sympathy with the cause of Irish nationalism.

 

Well, I loathe the ‘Loyalist’ murder gangs just as much as I loathe the ‘Republican’ ones, and have always said so. I was particularly rude about Marjorie Mowlam’s disgraceful meeting with the leaders of these squalid organisations. And I see a lot of merit in, and largely sympathise with,  Irish patriotism.

 

When introduced to a collection of ‘Loyalist’ chieftains in Washington DC , I refused to shake their hands ( as I had refused to shake those of the ‘Republican’ apologists).  I last week specifically condemned the violent scenes outside Belfast City Hall. I doubt whether any of those responsible had read or heard my opinions. I doubt that many of them can even read.  I grow tired of the (frankly stupid, and utterly illogical) assumption that one cannot be against the IRA without being in favour of the ‘Loyalist’ terrorists. Many Irish nationalists loathe and fear the IRA, and have been disenfranchised by the Belfast Agreement, which has rewarded and enhanced the violent Republicans, and marginalised the constitutional nationalists. It’s had a similar but exactly parallel effect on Unionists, destroying the UUP and creating  strange process where the Unionist Movement finds a new part every few years, as the existing one turns into a collaborator with Sinn Fein.  There’s no escape from this process, as, to be in power-sharing is necessarily to co-operate in the slow doom of the Unionist cause. Once Britain washed its hands of that cause in 1998, it was only a matter of time.

 

I have a lot of sympathy with Irish Nationalism. I am deeply sorry that it took the violence of 1916 and afterwards to persuade the British governing classes to come up with some sort of Home Rule. It is plain that the unification of the two Parliaments ad never truly worked, and that Ireland, by character and above all by religion, was not the same as the rest of these islands. I also think that the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising was a dreadful tragedy and an appalling mistake, and was one of the many baleful consequences of Britain’s entry into the First World War. Some say that the war avoided a violent confrontation earlier than 1916. I don’t necessarily dispute that, but I think the intervention of the German Empire in our quarrel made it much, much worse, and a sort of fury that we had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the Easter Rising of 1916 lay behind the needlessly brutal putting down of an event that was not – until after those cruel counter-measures  – widely supported by ordinary Irishmen and Irishwomen.

 

That episode lies as an uncrossable divide between sensible, civilised, gentle Irish people (the sort who would be broadly conservative in sentiment were they on this side of the Irish sea) and Britain, though I think the recent visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Dublin may have undone some of that very deep damage. I do very much hope so.

 

 I am equally sorry that it took threats of violence to persuade many Irish Nationalists that the Protestants, Ulster-Scots or whatever you want to call them, wanted to remain British. Just as my sympathy for Irish nationalism arises directly out of my own English and British love of country, surely any thoughtful Irish nationalist can see that the Ulster Protestants are a people and need a place in which they can live? Ethnic cleansing and its inevitable horrors were discussed here recently (the post called ‘Orderly and Humane’, about the mass –expulsions of Germans after 1945) . They’re not to be contemplated by any civilised person.

 

As discussed here earlier, my solution to this would never have been a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant People’, which wasn’t economically or politically sustainable, and was bound to include severe discrimination against the Roman Catholic minority there, but the full integration of part of the North of Ireland into Great Britain.  I still think that the experience of direct rule confirms that this arrangement was workable.

 

I am told that the endorsement of the Belfast Agreement in Northern Ireland was ‘democratic’ ( as if that necessarily commends itself to me, a sceptic when it comes to the virtues of universal suffrage democracy) .

Well, yes, it was. But I think the referendum was manipulated and improperly influenced, not least by the leaders of all major British political parties, not to mention the President of the United States (claiming to be an Irish Protestant) ,  campaigning for it in person, with plenty of sickly mentions of his daughter,  plus plenty of broadcasting bias.  I might add the hastily-arranged concert by ‘U2’ at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, (2,000 free tickets to this were handed out to school sixth-formers). Why was it hastily arranged? Could it have had something to do with a poll in Belfast newspapers which had just shown that Protestants in the 18 to 30 age group were opposed to the agreement by a margin of 40% to 25%, with many undecided?

 

The Agreement itself, by the way, though distributed in the Six Counties in a soppy cover showing a young family outlined against the sunset on a windy beach, a lovely piece of intangible persuasion almost worthy of the BBC, was never signed by its principal beneficiaries. Thus dozens of media reports of it having been ‘signed’ by all involved were untrue. I discovered this  by the simple procedure of ringing up the Northern Ireland Office and asking. My fellow-reporters didn’t. Yet they breezily and repeatedly said it had been signed.  Even today I can win bets by asking people who signed it.  This typifies the gullible coverage of the matter in the British press. I asked, because I had good reason to suspect that this would be so, knowing some Irish history. (By the way,  having read the text again, I think the agreement highly ambiguous on whether a vote is needed in the Irish Republic to confirm a vote in the Six Counties for a united Ireland. You could easily read the Irish vote of May 1998 as implicitly endorsing unity. In any case, it’s unlikely to the point of absurdity that voters in the Republic would vote against union with the North. I am happy to discuss these details if anyone wants to).

 

I would also draw readers’ attention to Anthony Blair’s famous ‘five-point hand-written pledge’ of 20th May 1998, plainly designed to influence a vote that had begun to look doubtful.  I have it here in front of me, as I always thought it would be one to keep. Two of these pledges, which I reproduce without comment,  were ‘Those who use or threaten violence excluded from government’ and ‘prisoners kept in jail unless violence is given up for good’.  

 

I am taken to task for my attack on Bill Clinton’s cynicism, by ‘Bob, Son of Bob’ . he seems to be saying ‘Tough,, that’s democracy’. Well, it may well be so, and in that case it merely adds to my dislike if universal suffrage democracy, a system of manipulation and bribery which is fast bringing the Free World to its knees.

 

But in general, he misses the point. First, it’s my view that any country which intervenes in our internal affairs should be opposed. Any country which does not maintain its sovereignty against threats will soon cease to be a country. No nation which intervenes in this way can possibly be a ‘friend’, though it might on some future occasion be an *ally* of convenience, or have been one in the past. Allies are seldom friends, and often enemies. It was up to su to determine the outcome of the IRA’s long campaign of criminal violence.

 

Second, he misses the point, which si the utter cynicism of the engagement.  Clinton had no concern for Ireland. He discovered the issue in search of votes and money in 1992.  It was purely cynical. He wasn’t a Roman Catholic. He was in favour of abortion. He knew his party had lost many Roman Catholic working class votes through its support of abortion. He had no intention of changing his view on that. So he decided to win some of them back, in several key electoral college states, by courting the ghastly sentimental, ignorant Irish feeling which, alas,  flourishes among perfectly kind, pleasant people in the USA. He also sought money for his very expensive style of campaigning (see below). By 1994, after his bad failure in the mid-terms, his Irish-American money backers   saw their chance to make him care. They came to him and said it was time he delivered.  This coincided with John Hume’s campaign for ‘The Irish Dimension’, and an Irish intellectual fashion for Sinn Feinery (see if you can find Edna O’Brien’s astonishing article about Gerry Adams, penned for the ‘New York Times’ during this era. It’s a treat.

 

Clinton, staring the possibility of defeat in the 1996 election in the face, acceded. The price was a visa for Gerry Adams. The whole process is brilliantly described in a book by my good friend Conor O’Clery , ‘The Greening of the White House’, which ranks alongside ‘Pressure Group Politics’ by H.H.Wilson (a study of the lobby for commercial TV in Britain) as a textbook of how politics actually work.

 

Mr ‘BSOB’ argues ; ‘Peter Hitchens could have gone for a much simpler explanation for USA support of the GFA - that politicians who need votes in the USA were listening to a vocal group within their own electorate that is certainly no ally of Britain – the Irish-Americans’

 

Well, yes, I could have. But it would have been so simple, that it would have been wrong, and far less interesting than the more complex truth. Irish America has always had a big vote.   JFK benefited greatly from it (but never backed the IRA) Ronald Reagan was undoubtedly influenced by it, but never backed the IRA. It probably saved Eamon de Valera’s life at one point. But never before the Clinton Presidency did it compel the White House to back the IRA against the British government.

 

 

Then he misses another point. He says ‘the bit about Serbia implies that Americans are scornful of us in the way that, say, the French are, and he draws this conclusion because he finds a policy in which Britain and the USA are not united. But as British MPs are themselves not united on this issue, we cannot expect USA to be united with us – should they unite with the pro or anti GFA British MPs?’

 

No, I simply point out that this very senior official (closely linked in fact to Teddy Kennedy, though not herself Irish) had the view that she had. It is quite different from the French view, which is an intimate rivalry going back for centuries (see that fine book ‘That Sweet Enemy’ by Mr and Mrs Tombs, he English, she French) . It is based on the view (shared by my late brother in his post-2001 years) that the USA is a post-revolutionary Utopia and the rest of the planet a fit place for it to impose its will by force, for the good of the inhabitants. At the time of the conversation there was no ‘GFA’ for anyone to be in favour of . the ‘GFA’ came five years later, after Britain had been compelled first to treat with, then to give in to the IRA – a process much aided by absurd propaganda attempts to claim that the IRA has disarmed, for which thre has never been any independent evidence.

 

He asks :’ Does Peter Hitchens argue that alliances can only exist in cases where both parties in the alliance agree fully on all issues?’. No, he doesn’t.  Where has he ever said any such thing? But I am not sure in what we are allied with the USA, and against what common enemy? The USA not only actively favours our absorption into the EU, the single greatest threat to our existence as a nation. It has compelled us to capitulate to a criminal terrorist gang. In what way is it helping us? We have sent troops to fight and die, quite against our national interest, in Iraq and Afghanistan , to aid American ends and make the Iraq operation(in particular ) look less like the unilateral irruption it was.  Now we are being dragooned into boosting Saudi Arabia’s interests in the Middle East. This is not just one way. It is absurd.

 

Finally, he says :’ America is one of the few countries where anyone from England can emigrate to and both a) already know the language and culture b) not feel a hostility directed towards him for being English.’

 

Well, up to appoint. In increasingly large and important areas of the USA the dominant language is Spanish. This is becoming more common, not less, and will continue to do so.  And if Mr ‘BSOB’ has never experienced American hostility to the British, then I am glad. I have, and friends of mine have, and I would add that Hollywood (especially in such films as ‘The Patriot’, but also in many others where English actors end up playing supercilious, cold villains) often reinforces the lingering resentment of Britain to be found in a certain type of American.  

 

Many,  it is true (perhaps even most), barely know who or where we are and make no connection between the phrase ‘English language’ and ‘England.

 

The Home Affairs Committee Report on drugs is remarkably dull, and seems to have been something of a damp squid, barely mentioned by many newspapers this morning.  It is interesting that the committee chose to visit Portugal, which, as I have mentioned here before, is not perhaps the poster-boy for decriminalisation that the Cato Institute, itself far from neutral,  has claimed (there are varying accounts of this episode, and I would say the jury was still out).

 

But they did not visit Sweden, one of the few advanced countries which has not followed the fashion for going soft on cannabis, or Greece (which one correspondent tells me has been conducting a fairly stringent campaign to clamp down on drugs. I am looking into this) .

 

They have entirely accepted several ideas which seem to me to be still in dispute – they believe that attempts to interdict demand by punishing possession are doomed, they are sure that ‘harm reduction’ works, and if they are even aware that cannabis might have some mental health dangers, I could find no sign of it in the electronic report I have been sent.  

 

The government which has quietly decriminalised drug possession anyway, without frightening the voters by actually admitting to this policy, can use the report as a chance to triangulate itself against the wild men, and look responsible. I doubt whether the call for a Royal Commission (takes minutes, lasts years) will be heeded.

 

I decided some months ago to withdraw from the battle, or whatever it is , over Homosexual Marriage. It is a trap for conservatives, entirely aimed at winding them up and tempting them into arguments where they can be falsely portrayed as cruel bigots. It is a total diversion from the real battle, over the future of marriage as such.

 

But I would make this point. Those in the Tory Party who regard themselves as social and moral conservatives have often reposed some sort of faith in Al (‘Boris’) Johnson and in Michael Gove as hopes for the future. Well, both of these gentlemen have come out strongly in favour of same-sex marriage. This is no surprise to me. There is no hope in the Tory Party. Please believe me.

 

 

Lowering our flag is a shameful surrender to Ulster’s gangsters

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

In a large part of this country, it is against the law  to fly the Union Flag from government buildings for 348 days of the year. This has been so since the year 2000. As a special treat, it can be flown for the other 17 days. The rest of the time the flagpole stays bare.

The place where this law operates is Northern Ireland.  I wonder how much longer  we shall be able to fly our national flag in the rest of the United Kingdom, or even how much longerthat flag will exist at all.

I think this is a shocking fact. I am one of the few British journalists who bothered to read the so-called ‘Good Friday’ Agreement under which this country capitulated to the gangsters of the Provisional IRA, under American pressure.

I know that we released hundreds of grisly criminals, destroyed our security apparatus and withdrew the Army in return for various unsigned and unenforceable promises from Sinn Fein and the IRA.

But even I did not know that this was one of its effects. Our national flag, you see, might offend someone. That is also the excuse for its recent removal from Belfast City Hall, which has led to so much bitterness and turmoil in that city.

But the reality is this. You haul down your flag when you surrender. And it was a surrender.  I was amused to see that Mrs Hillary Clinton, that nasty hard Leftist now aiming for the White House, had her  vote-winning visit to Northern  Ireland spoiled by the flag riots on Friday.

How can you have riots and peace? The great pretence, that giving in to organised crime brings peace, was for once exposed. Northern Ireland’s poor and weak have never been so subject to intimidation and gangsterism, and I wonder if I will live to see the (sadly inevitable) day when Irish troops are putting down Orange riots on the Protestant Shankill Road, probably caused by illegal displays of the old Union Flag. Peace, indeed.

The squalid history of this event is a warning we refuse to heed and which is barely known here.

I saw it happen, in Washington DC, astonished by the brusque and scornful treatment of my country by a nation I had foolishly seen as an ally.

I remember one very senior White House official letting  slip to me that she thought of Britain as a sort of Serbia, just another place to intervene in, as Syria is now. I have laughed at the phrase ‘Special Relationship’ ever since.

I followed Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams round the USA, as this coffin-faced apologist for violence and terror was feted and adulated by Americans who would have shrunk from him had he spoken for any other cause but the Irish one.

I annoyed him so much with my inconvenient questions  that he publicly said I should  be ‘decommissioned’ and –  on the one occasion we were ever alone together –  showed me his less diplomatic, less humorous side.

What was this about? Mrs Clinton’s husband Bill needed working-class Roman Catholic votes to win the White House, votes his party had lost by backing abortion.

So he discovered the Irish cause, about which he knew  little and (I suspect) cared less. He also took a lot of Irish-American campaign money. In 1993, Irish America, which these days means some very big business, tired of waiting for results and demanded action.

And so he acted, and so we were forced to make a shameful peace with the IRA, and haul down our flag over part of our own territory.

By the time the whole thing’s finished, St Patrick’s Cross will have to come out of that flag, and the harp will depart from the Royal Standard.

I think that when countries suffer defeats, they should admit to them and grieve over them, not pretend they have won. That way lie more defeats and more humiliations.

Kate’s right to ditch the pro-drug propaganda

I am glad Kate Winslet has pulled out of the latest propaganda campaign against  anti-drug laws, a documentary by Sir Richard Branson’s son, Sam, called Breaking The Taboo.

Far too many celebrities and politicians have been beguiled by the case for surrender. Sir Richard himself (who was barely coherent in a drugs debate I had with him on Channel 4 News last Thursday)  is one of them.

Whose interests do they serve? I can only assume that they  simply don’t understand what they are doing, or the dangers they are playing with.

A request to any prominent person asked to back this campaign: arrange a visit to the locked wards of Britain’s mental hospitals, and ask the relatives of their occupants what they think caused the problem.

Tax with an extra shot of hypocrisy

Why are we such cringing serfs about tax? Our money belongs to us. It isn’t pocket money from the State, but our own.

If they want it, they should prove they know what to do with it.

What evidence is there that the Government, that incompetent waster, would spend money better than Starbucks? Who do you think would pay in the end, if Starbucks paid more tax  – why, the customers.

Even Leftist politicians are careful not to pay too much tax when (for instance) they inherit property. Leftie BBC journalists are fond of (legal) arrangements to keep their tax low.

Why should coffee shops be expected to behave differently?

So who’s euphoric about Egypt now?

It is strange how muted is the TV coverage of the descent of Egypt into Islamist despotism,  and the brutal behaviour of the new regime to protesters. Compare this with the euphoric, uncritical coverage of the original Cairo ‘Spring’.

As this doomed, overrated event repeatedly proves the pessimists right, can we learn nothing? No. The world’s media are still promoting an intervention in Syria, where we will replace bad with worse, at a cost of many lives.

Plugging this petition is proof of BBC bias

Last weekend, almost every BBC radio bulletin I listened to, over several days, mentioned a petition calling for full implementation of the Leveson Report into the press, and said that the number of signatures was rising.

Unless they can show that they have ever  done this with any other comparable petition,  I believe this is objective evidence of BBC bias on a matter of public controversy. Will the BBC  Trust act?

Hitchens vs Branson and a few other odds and ends

You can watch me discussing drug laws with Sir Richard Branson on Thursday night’s Channel Four News here

http://www.channel4.com/news/catch-up/display/playlistref/061212

 

I’m not sure how long this will survive on the web. The item begins at about six minutes in, with a  report from Seattle by Matt Frei. The discussion starts at about 8 minutes 40 seconds.

 

I was struck, watching the Branson visage on an enormous screen, by how many of his mannerisms resembled those of Anthony Blair

 

There is supposed to be an audio version now available of my Bristol debate with Howard Marks, but when i follow the link I can’t get it to work. 

 

Here’s a ‘review’ of my book on drugs by someone called David Bowden, who is apparently a TV columnist.  he sweetly asserts that I provoke ‘surprisingly little bile’. He should look at Twitter during and after C4 news on Thursday evening, if he really thinks that. This strange statement is part of an article which barely addresses the book’s arguments, caricatures them where it does, but spends a lot of time analysing my many undoubted human faults.  

 

http://www.spiked-online.com/site/reviewofbooks_preview/13151/

 

Today’s ‘Daily Politics’, on BBC2, on which I also appeared, doesn’t seem to be available yet on the BBC iplayer.

 We discussed, amongst other things, Northern Ireland and nursing.

The Howard Marks versus Peter Hitchens Debate - Audio

Here is a link to the recent debate I had with Howard Marks at the Bristol Festival of Ideas . It seems to be clear and of quality.

 

http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-worlds-most-prolific-drug-dealer-and-a-right-wing-columnist-debate-the-war-on-drugs

For the next Six days Only - A Link to the Daily Politics, Northern Ireland, Economics, Nursing etc

For the next six days only, here is Friday’s edition of the daily Politics, in which I took part. Among subjects under discussion, taxation, Northern Ireland, the Clintons, economics, and the crisis in modern nursing.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01pbn2g/Daily_Politics_07_12_2012/

A small response to people who (while ,as it happens, disagreeing with what I say) suggest that I am 'rude' or 'aggressive' on air. I have many times explained that the guest on a live broadcast must seize his opportunity while he has it, as he never knows when the presenter will shut down the discussion or give the last word to someone else. This may appear rude to the viewer or listener who doesn't understand how broadcasting works - just as a prisoner can be made to look as if he is resisting custody when he isn't, by guards who know the technique. This is why the complex subject of BBC bias is so important. If you don't understand how it's done, you'll never notice most of it.

 

I'd also say that I was, in my view, no ruder to Sir Richard Branson than Jeremy Paxman has been to many of his guests on 'Newsnight', and (a sensitive subject this, but what the heck) no ruder than my brother often was in his TV appearances or debates, a rudeness much admired by many of his fan club, who are also extremely rude to and about me.

 

I don't however think that Sir Richard, who seems to have a sort of canonised status because of his support for relaxing drug laws, has been given aggressive treatment by any TV or radio interviewer. Funnily enough, such interviewers only seem to play 'devil's advocate' (the usual explanation for aggressive questioning implying strong disagreement with the subject) in one direction.

 

Can anyone, for instance, imagine any mainstream TV or radio presenter giving a hard time, on air, to Clive Stafford-Smith, that notable opponent of the death penalty? I once asked a former BBC director general this question, in a private conversation, and he had to admit I had a point. It is unimaginable. And because it is unimaginable, it is absurd to claim that BBC is impartial.

 

Personally, I'm quite willing to be roughed up on air, though I don't claim to enjoy it - it's entertaining for the listener or viewer, and often more instructive than uninterrupted prosing. Note that in this particular programme (especially in the segment on Northern Ireland where what I say is most unconventional and controversial) I am ceaselessly interrupted both by Andrew Neil and Ms Sieghart. You have to learn to cope with that.  All I ask is that everyone gets the same treatment, and nobody is ever given a soft ride by a presenter who is in fact a sympathiser while being officially neutral.  This was the basis of the successful programme that Derek Draper and I co-presented on what was then Talk Radio in the late 1990s. We called it 'Grilled on Both Sides', which I think sums up its purpose and nature rather well. I miss it to this day.

 

 

 

 

What if the Crisis Goes on Forever? And that Irish Question. What was it Again?

Forcing myself to pay attention to George Osborne’s latest budget  (‘the economy is heeling over’) I was then shocked into open-mouthed silence by the appearance on Radio Four’s ‘Today’ programme of Godfrey Bloom MEP, speaking out on the economy for Dad’s Army, otherwise known as UKIP. Alas for Mr Bloom, all most people hear when his name is mentioned is the phrase ‘behind the fridge’, the place where, in his view, women don’t clean enough.

 

This illustrates one of the problems of Dad’s Army, that it really lacks any polished and persuasive performers who can put forward a conservative case without tumbling straight into the enemy’s mantraps, where they lie howling that it’s all very unfair.

 

Perhaps this is because Mr Bloom is a mighty intellect, poor at communication but great at thinking. Or perhaps not.

 

He used his brief slot on the nation’s premier radio current affairs show to call repeatedly for cuts in public spending, as if he had been wound up and programmed by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and had only just been allowed out and set in motion.

 

As somebody (Who was it? Not Immanuel Kant or Blaise Pascal, anyway) recently said, UKIP is really just the Thatcherite Tory Party in exile.  It is very light on social , moral and cultural conservatism, and seems to me to be neo-liberal in foreign and economic policy. Continued membership of NATO, for instance, is endorsement of neo-liberalism abroad. Various ideas borrowed from newspaper columnists have then been stuck on to the manifesto, in no particular order. If you mix together the concepts ‘Jeremy Clarkson’ and ‘Think Tank’ (themselves mutually hostile) you will get the picture.  

 

Also I really cannot see how spending cuts by themselves are a coherent policy in modern Britain. You have to reduce the demand for spending first, and that is a social and cultural matter, which may cost quiet a lot of money.  The entire economy (as economists such as David Blanchflower seem to me to imply) is now so dependent on public spending for survival that large spending cuts, though undoubtedly desirable in principle, will simply kill the patient.  He is too ill for any such treatment. You might as well bleed someone who’s suffering from blood loss.

 

The levels of spending in this country are the consequence of 50 years of leftist social policy. The family, the church, independent charity and self-reliance have been undermined to the point that they barely exist as forces, while the state, and its quasi-independent agencies, have grown enormously.  Manufacturing industry as an employer has shrivelled.  The unproductive public sector wobbles on top of the productive economy. Our ability to export has likewise atrophied.

 

How on earth an immediate radical spending cut will do good under such circumstances, I honestly don’t know. The government’s tax receipts would plunge, as large numbers of public employees stopped paying income tax because they were unemployed. And its liabilities would increase, as they had to be paid various doles and allowances instead. Result: More borrowing, plus less economic activity, as you would have taken so much purchasing power out of the economy. Aldi and Lidl might benefit. I don’t think anyone else would. We did, sort of, go through this before in the Thatcher-Howe era. But the enormous receipts from North Sea Oil (now over) served as great national cushion.

 

If this is wrong, I’d be interested to know why. Serious conservatives, with a practical intent, must recognise that the country can only be weaned slowly off the disastrous welfare dependency it now faces, and cannot instantly recover from the deindustrialisation inflicted on it by market liberals who wrongly insisted that manufacturing didn’t matter.  The reconstruction of the family, of proper education able to produce employable people, plus a long campaign to persuade people that debt is bad for them, might take 20 or 30 years to have much of an effect.

 

A large cultural and moral revolution, in short, is called for. And that won’t happen until there are what Tony Benn calls teachers, and signposts in national politics (he always says that there are two kinds of politicians, signposts and weathervanes, and I agree with him). Such people need to confront, honestly, the huge size of the problems we face, and recognise our permanently diminished status as a country.  They need to be bolstered by serious journalism, which is likewise prepared to kook our crisis in the face, admit that we have been mistaken, and by an academy which is equally thoughtful.

 

Such conditions seem to me to be very unlikely, and absolutely impossible while British political discourse is still dominated by two mobs, one of which says ‘thatcher was wrong!’;, and the other of which shouts back ‘Maggie was right!’.

 

Hence the need for a political and cultural counter-revolution, for which the undoubted collapse of the Tory Party is an essential precondition. The idea that we can, in the course of a single election, restore Britain to its former state is laughable. It will be a long, long march.

 

And during that Long, Long March, we will have to recognise that the current economic crisis is not really a temporary period through which we can pass before the tills start ringing again. It is a process by which we get used to our reduced status, itself largely the result of our long period of unrealistic, utopian folly.

 

Much more likely, we will carry on as we are, and be overtaken, in the end, by a great wave of inflation and devaluation which will sweep away almost all we have come to rely on, and leave us savagely reduced, but at least in touch with reality.

 

As to the Irish Question, it’s that old issue of how title to territory is established, again (see my recent article on Gaza and Israel). There’s no absolute objective standard (for otherwise any Irish nationalist would have to call for the restoration of the USA to the Native Americans, for example). Thus, though any patriotic person must recognise the force, justice and power of Irish patriotism, sensible and humane compromise seems wise to me.  It’s certainly better that , where two ethnic or cultural groups strive for supremacy on a piece of territory,   neither one rules over the other.  It’s also always better if violence is not rewarded, as it very much has been since 1998.

 

Irish friends of mine will privately confess that Eamon de Valera’s Free State and Republic was not generous to its Protestant minority, and that the 1937 Irish Constitution, in particular, was a sectarian document.

 

IN my turn, I certainly accept that the six-county state of Northern Ireland treated its Roman Catholic minority very unfairly. But then, as I have many times said (though nobody among my Irish nationalist critics ever remembers it ) , I think the Stormont Parliament and government were a mistake from the start. After 1922, Northern Ireland should have been fully integrated into Great Britain. The ‘Irish Dimension’ so dangerously revived by John Hume should have been closed for good. The Northern Irish Protestants should have been given the following bargain – that they should  indeed remain British, but that being British would mean that they accepted the rules of the mainland.

 

With the possibility of Dublin rule reliably excluded, they should have joined British national politics, forgetting the divisions of religion, and accepting the equality between Protestant and Roman Catholic subjects of the Crown. It is one of the striking things about Northern Ireland that the British political parties have never seriously recruited or operated there. I know there has been a cosmetic introduction of the Tory party in recent years, but it is a half-hearted and belated thing. In the Blair years it was easier to join the Labour Party in Manhattan than it was to do so in Belfast.

 

And all the petty and stupid discriminations, in employment, housing and voting, should have been got rid of. I would except the school system, as I think people are entitled to hand on their religion and culture all the more when these things are no longer keys to dominance, or badges of oppression and rebellion. And I’m a great admirer of Northern Ireland’s selective secondary schools.

 

As it happened, the period of direct rule achieved many of those things, and certainly made great progress towards them. But it was intended, by the British government, as a preliminary status to the current slow-motion handover to Dublin, not as an end in itself. So nobody will speak for it now, or draw lessons from it.

 

It is interesting that a country which was prepared to send a Task Force thousands of miles  to keep 1,800 Falklanders British (because they desired to be), abandoned efforts to keep hold of part of its own immediate national territory (despite the strong desire of many of its inhabitants to remain British), and abandoned any serious effort to integrate and befriend the dissenting minority. There was never any reason why Crown and Shamrock, or Crown and Harp,  should not be part of the same cap badge, and the same coat of arms. There are plenty of loyal British Roman Catholics. Such a missed opportunity to create what might have been an example to the world of what British tolerance could achieve. 

A Moth-eaten rag on a Worm-eaten Pole? or Something Important?

As a child I used to love collecting things, mostly coins, but also sets. Along with pennies from almost every year since 1860, some polished to smoothness, others still clearly legible (‘Victoria, Deo Gratia, Reg. Omn. Brit., Ind. Imp. Fid. Def.’ , I seem to recall they said, and I knew what it meant) , I possessed silver threepenny bits, many farthings and a few enormous coppers from the days of George III, plus some French Third Republic coppers and various  coinages from the Channel Islands, where a penny mysteriously became ‘Eight Doubles’ pronounced Doobles.   I am convinced that I had an Edward VIII threepence (not silver but that yellowy cupro-nickel) but I may now be imagining it.  I certainly don’t have it now, and am not even sure that any coins were struck with his name and superscription upon them. That brief King had left very few solid traces, though his monogram, unusually,  was to be found over the Post Office at Havant and on a pillar box in Dunfermline, two places where I lived during my childhood. It also used to be visible over the Post Office at Wallingford, near Oxford, but I am not sure if it still survives there.

 

I also had a fine assembly of those enjoyable little volumes called ‘Observer’s Books’ as far as I know, nothing to do with the great liberal newspaper that once bore that name ( I believe another, rather different publication carries it now). They had a particularly enjoyable smell, thanks to the shiny paper they used for the illustrated pages, which for years I associated with Christmas. I am sure if I smelt it again now I should know it instantly.

 

I have lost most of them (only the astonishing one dealing with British railway locomotives seems to have survived the years – how shocking it is to see all these steam-powered monsters described as if they are normal and everyday, rather than semi-mythical museum pieces).

 

And one of the missing is ‘The Observer’s Book of Flags’. It would be wholly obsolete now, thanks to the incessant creation of new nations in the past half-century, and the habit of many old nations of acquiring new flags.

 

What sticks in my memory (apart from a helpful little essay on such terms as ‘hoist’ and  ‘fly’ and on that useful invention, the Inglefield Clip)  is a brief verse that was, I think, on the title page, about a moth-eaten rag on a worm-eaten pole. Unable to remember all of it, I found it on the Internet, attributed to Sir Edward Hamley, on seeing some old colours of the 43rd Monmouth Light Infantry, laid up in Monmouth Church:

 

‘A moth-eaten flag on a worm-eaten pole, it does not look likely to stir a man’s soul.
Tis the deeds that were done ‘neath the moth-eaten rag, when the pole was a staff and the rag was a flag’.

 

Well, exactly. And some thought of this kind does come to mind when I see those ancient battle-flags, now so old they are practically transparent, hanging in the silence of an old parish church.

 

No such silence was to be found this week outside Belfast’s majestic Victorian (designed) and Edwardian (built) City Hall which, as it happens, I visited only a few weeks ago while on a visit to that interesting and enjoyable city. Instead a  very angry and rather nasty mob burst into the courtyard and clashed with police.

 

I wish they hadn’t. No cause is helped by angry mobs. But it does show how much emotion a flag can stir. It’s not just a piece of cloth.

 

What had the City Council done? It had voted quite decisively to end the practice, continuous since 1906, of flying the Union Flag each day from above its neo-classical portico. Instead, it will now be flown on just 17 days of the year, paradoxically including St Patrick’s Day. The official excuse is of course that such matters are sensitive in that part of the world, and that one must try to be inoffensive and inclusive. It’s an interesting place whose national flag is deemed to offensive to fly from official buildings for most of the year. But then, Northern Ireland *is* an interesting place.

 

Actually, I can easily see the logic of this. That is because , since 1998, I have recognised the unlovely, enormous but largely ignored fact that Northern Ireland is on its way out of the United Kingdom, and into the Irish Republic. No sense getting angry now about a defeat which has already happened, and which the people fo northern Ireland were bamboozled into endorsing in a referendum which, like all such votes, was easily rigged to produce the result the establishment wanted ( and would have been held again if it hadn’t).

 

Only another referendum , which can be called at any time, stands in the way of this change. The people of the province are all aware of this, as are most citizens of the Irish Republic ( or ‘Ireland’ as it prefers to be known) even if almost nobody in mainland Britain knows or cares. That’s their mistake, as we shall see. It’s important.

 

Northern Ireland’s  police force, as we discussed here the other day, has on its cap badges a sort of dolly mixture of symbols, none of them supreme, symbolising the fact that nobody is really in charge, or has a monopoly of power or force.  Even the crown in the badge is not the actual Crown of St Edward, which is the symbol of law,  majesty and state power in England and its former dominions (look at the police badges in Canada, Australia and New Zealand)  .

 

By the way,   observant people will have noticed that a similar but different problem in Scotland has been resolved for now by using the Crown of Scotland, instead of the Crown of St Edward. I believe this appears on Scottish police badges, the newer Scottish pillar boxes (Some Scots objected to Queen Elizabeth the Second’s E II R monogram on these, because she is not the second Queen Elizabeth of Scotland, but the first)  and (sometimes, or in the past) on Scottish ambulances, which bear the logo of the Scottish NHS (of what ‘nation’ is the Scottish NHS the National Health Service?). Also, Scotland has its own flag, the Saltire or St Andrew’s Cross, which can be flown alongside the Union Flag, and in a sort of competition with it. It is also part of the Union Flag itself, and represented in it. Northern Ireland’s flag or common symbol is the old red hand of Ulster, which is nowadays very much associated with Unionism.

 

Ireland is also represented in the Union Flag, which contains St Patrick’s Cross, But the flag of Ireland, these days, is the secular tricolour, which was (I believe) designed in France on the pattern of its French revolutionary equivalent, and didn’t become popular until it was raised over the Dublin Post Office at the Easter Rising of 1916.

 

All this change threatens another awkward problem for the British politicians who have been dismantling the country behind our backs over the last 20 years or so.  If Northern Ireland leaves the Union (more likely, in my view, than  the much-discussed Scottish departure) , then the Royal Arms and Royal Standard will have to abandon the Harp, which forms such an important part of them. And the Union Flag will have to be stripped of St Patrick’s Cross, making it quite different. People won’t like it when it happens, I suspect.

 

But such things do happen. They may well be on their way.

 

The row over Belfast City Hall, which was flying our nation’s flag when I last saw it a few weeks ago, has drawn attention to the fact that Northern Ireland Government buildings long ago (in fact soon after the surrender to the IRA concluded at Easter 1998) abandoned daily displays of the Union Flag. Belfast City Hall, being in the centre of the Province’s biggest city, may have offered misleading reassurance to Unionists that things hadn’t changed all that much. The Stormont government buildings are some miles way, in a suburban setting which most visitors to Belfast will never see, and which few residents will visit either.

 

You may ask what will fly instead. As far as I can discover, nothing will. On the 348 or so days of the year not set aside for nostalgic displays of the Union Flag, the flagstaff will be bare, as it is at Stormont.

 

Northern Ireland, you see, is not and never can be a nation in itself. And because we never fully made it part of Britain back in 1922, we postponed till the 21st century the problems that we have coming.

 

Perhaps they could fly a large question mark in future. The flag that would, alas, most accurately assert the true state of sovereignty over Belfast and the six counties of Northern Ireland would be the EU standard, with its 12 mysterious yellow stars representing who knows what?

 

I suspect that Brussels’s blue and yellow banner will be the flag and badge of the ‘peacekeepers’  or perhaps gendarmes who, 30 years from now, will be dealing with protestors on the Shankill Road in Belfast, who refuse to accept Dublin rule and have (once again) been infringing the law by displaying the banned Union Flag, long ago forgotten and abandoned by the truncated, multicultural English Republic across the sea.

 

For the defeat of Unionism throughout the British isles will turn out to be the heralds of the end of the country we grew up in in all its territory.  Northern Ireland’s Unionists are like pit canaries, the first to smell defeat.

 

I’ll be told (I often am) that the Roman Catholics of Northern Ireland currently have no desire to unify with the South. That may well be so.  Who’d have thought that the Unionists would ever lose their majority on Belfast City Council? But they did.  Lots of things can change, including the state of the UK economy and of the Irish and EU economies, and I’m still expecting a 32-county Ireland in my lifetime. 2016, centenary of the Easter Rising, may now be too soon because of the Eurozone collapse. But 1922, centenary of the Free State, looks a possibility.

 

There may be tumult and shouting from time to time, but the Abolition of Britain has already happened, long ago. We’re now in the interval between the fact, and everyone realising that it is a fact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Truth Shall Make You ... Very Cross

 I am grateful to those who responded with interest , or otherwise welcomed my review of ‘Orderly and Humane’, a book which I do very much hope will be widely read and discussed. I am even grateful to those who wrote to point out the typographical errors in the posting . I would just ask them, rather than to make this a genuine expression of disapproval, to tell me what the errors are so that I can put them right. I have no sub-editors here to rescue me from my own bad typing. I learned from the age of eight to type badly and fast with four fingers, which is how most journalists type,  and computers, for reasons I have never fully understood, make me even more error-prone than I was in the days of ribbons and paper.  actually it is, alas, impossible to correct your own work properly, even after five readings I will still fail to spot glaring errors, as the writer sees what he hopes and expects to see, a microcosm of the problem of knowledge, belief and understanding which we would do well to heed. We need other people to help us get things right.

 

I am also grateful to one stern critic,   ‘Frankz’ , who writes :’I generally respect your opinion but what can be said here? I must admit you wore me down about half way through. In a war that cost 56 million lives by some estimates the list of atrocities is endless. How easy to make a catalogue of them and thereby conjure a historical road block. Another war to end all wars even as the seeds of the next one are sown by those who fervently spread this illusion and think they can give it substance by the force of their character and the humanity of their concern. There is so much here that is lacking. Those that fought did not die in vain unlike the millions rounded up like cattle and exterminated like vermin in the camps. To those that toss and turn at night over the bombs dropped on the cultured and impeccably European inhabitants of Dresden, I say first consider the bombs not dropped on Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka. I feel that almost all of your points could be easily refuted or shown to be narrow in focus but to what end? It would change nothing. I will only point out that that England did not go to war to defend Poland as you very well know. England went to War to preserve her own Identity. If she had compromised it the liberty you defend would be a worthless sot granted to a vanquished and ethnically cleansed people.’

 

I am always a little discouraged when people appear to sigh, as if their opinion was obviously right (‘what can be said here?’) . It betokens an unwillingness to alter a long-held view. First, the atrocities I listed followed the war and did not take place during the war. Secondly, they were planned and approved at the highest level.

 

I made no comment about whether people died ‘in vain’ , not myself being qualified to judge the circumstances in which a death is ‘in vain’, but suspecting they are known elsewhere, by authorities more knowledgeable, and more highly-placed, than us.

 

But I am not sure what he means by ‘To those that toss and turn at night over the bombs dropped on the cultured and impeccably European inhabitants of Dresden, I say first consider the bombs not dropped on Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka’. Perhaps he could elaborate?

 

If he means what he thinks I mean, it is indeed an interesting indictment of the allied war effort, widely believed by those educated since the 1970s to have been principally a rescue operation to save persecuted Jews, that the allies made no effort of any kind to help Europe’s Jews or hinder the industrial murder of them .  Professor Douglas provides a partial explanation of this. The Polish wartime leader Wladyslaw Sikorski told Anthony Eden (p.24) that it would be ‘quite impossible… for Poland to continue to maintain 3.5 million Jews after the war. Room must be found for them elsewhere’ (any serious historian knows that pre-war Poland, our future gallant ally,  was a hive of rather vicious Judophobia, though it’s not done in fashionable circles to stress it these days). I might add his mention of remarks by the then British ambassador to Warsaw, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, ‘The slaughter of Jews in this country has made the towns a good deal cleaner, and has certainly decreased the number of middle-men’ (p.182, taken from British Foreign Office files, exact reference in the book). Professor Douglas says that anti-semitism in Poland remained ‘ at ‘pathologically high levels’ even after the slaughter of most of the country’s Jews. 

 

But it seems unlikely to me that a failure to act to save the Jews in any way excuses the slaughter of German civilians.  The logic of that simply escapes me.

 

He then adds :’ . I will only point out that that England did not go to war to defend Poland as you very well know. England went to War to preserve her own Identity. If she had compromised it the liberty you defend would be a worthless sot granted to a vanquished and ethnically cleansed people.’

 

Well, if her aim was to preserve her identity, then she made a pretty poor job of it. Any normal person transported from the Britain of 1939 to the culture and civilisation occupying the same space today would find it so transformed as to be baffling and frightening. Much of that transformation , the Americanisation, the destruction of historical landmarks, the changes in manners and diet, the debasement of  language, morals, manners and of educational standards,  the assault on privacy, the overcrowding, noise , state interference, crime and disorder, are directly traceable to our incompetent participation in the war, which we entered at the worst possible moment and then promptly  lost, only to be subsumed in the strategic schemes of the USA and the USSR, neither of which had any interest in preserving us as a major independent power(the sine qua non of keeping one’s identity).

 

So if that was our aim it was a very poorly pursued aim, which we failed to achieve,  and the timing of our entry, wholly dictated by the ludicrous and empty guarantee to Poland, was the principal reason for our failure.

 

Now , a few words about ‘Bert’, our most pretentiously-named contributor, who once again speaks out from his solipsistic mountain top. And what a  delight it is to see what he says (in this case to Paul Noonan) :’ I don’t know why you’re babbling on about ‘huge campaigns’ in the fire brigades (I’ve never heard of them).’

 

Now, poor old Bert misses quite a lot of developments. He’d also never heard, for instance of the EU Landfill Directive. And when it was explained to him that it had a profound effect on rubbish collection in this country (is indeed the principal reason for the spread of fortnightly collections) he was unable to acknowledge this and has yet, to my knowledge, to admit that he was mistaken and inadequately informed on this subject.

 

Bert is never wrong, for if it looks as if he might be , he changes the subject . Recently he accused me of denying freedom to non-believers by recommending the teaching of Christianity, as truth, to children. When I pointed out that I advocated the continuance of the existing freedom for parents to opt out of such teaching, he said that didn’t count because parents were apathetic. Then he changed the subject, to say that it would be all right to teach them *about* Christianity (i.e. as an anthropological peculiarity of others, rather than as a faith they might be reasonably expected to embrace and follow in their own lives), but it would be an assault on their freedom to teach it to them as if it were the national religion, and foundation of the civilisation in which they lived.

 

Well, that’s just slippery.  How can a national religion survive if the schools don’t endorse it? It’s not as if any mechanism exists to force those taught it in this way to accept that it *is* true. They can disbelieve it when they’re taught it, or renounce it later, as many do. Indeed, they then know what it is they disbelieve, and can criticise it more effectively.

 

But if they’re never taught it as truth, at an age when they are interested in such questions ( and the young are more interested in the great questions than anyone else, except perhaps the dying) the they will be denied the chance to decide to believe it at all. And this will gradually cease to be a Christian country.

 

So what ‘Bert’ is actually saying is that we should follow a policy which will provide the ‘freedom’ to believe in nothing, or to have no belief, but not offer the freedom to believe. Meanwhile the state schools teach( as truth) the ideas of sexual permissiveness and egalitarianism, in PSHE classes and ‘Bert’ has not, to my knowledge offered any objection to this, or described it as an abridgement of freedom that it is so. If he does so now, he will at least have achieved a sort of consistency. But his real purpose, the deliberate secularisation of a formerly Christian country, cannot be cloaked as a struggle for ‘freedom’.

 

As to the campaign top recruit women into the Fire Service, I refer him to an article (reproduced below) which I wrote for the Mail on Sunday of 7th April 2002, which describes the official measures. I suspect ‘Bert’ of not himself being in the Fire Brigade, which would explain his unawareness of this campaign:

 

Were the Government to announce that within seven years 15 per cent of nannies would have to be male, everyone would think they had gone mad. Yet an equally absurd plan - to feminise the fire brigades of Britain - is quietly under way, and many in the fire service fear it will one day lead to needless deaths. They believe it has already done severe damage to discipline and morale. However, a creepy censorship prevents them from speaking their minds. With employers and union united in the anti-sexist cause, honest doubt is being stifled by a totalitarian refusal to admit there might be a problem.

 

Fighting fires is as masculine as nannying is feminine. This is not just because it has always been done by men, but because physical strength is at the very heart of it. Firefighters do many things but the job we really pay them for is the one that nobody else can do: bringing human beings out of burning buildings or cars before they die. Some women have proved they can do the job: a small group who have earned the respect of their fellows by working hard and well. They have also survived the bullying, insults and 'practical jokes' which tight-knit groups often inflict on newcomers.

 

However, their hard-won position will actually be undermined by the Government's 15 per cent quota, because all firewomen are now bound to be suspected of having slipped through the selection process because of their sex.

 

Even when the tyranny of political correctness grips almost every field of life, most sensible societies recognise there are limits. But the ultra-feminist movement besieges the strongest outposts of a male society, precisely because such outposts remind everyone that sex discrimination is often sensible in real life.

 

Get rid of them and you are halfway to destroying the old male role of husband, father and provider, which is the real target of these extremists.

 

The current campaign became possible in 1997, when 5ft 3in Gillian Maxwell was turned down by the Northern Ireland Fire Authority because she was not tall enough. She took them to a tribunal, arguing that the existing height rule discriminated against women because it excluded 60 per cent of the female population. In these strange times, this suspect argument was enough to overturn the 1947 Fire Services Act which had set a minimum height of 5ft 6in for all UK fire brigades. Since then, many more women, and incidentally large numbers of small men, have tried to join up.

 

Fire services found it hard to defend their sensible policy of hiring big, strong men, not because the policy was wrong but because of the boorish stupidity of some firemen, who deliberately persecuted female colleagues. This obscured the intelligent arguments against having large numbers of small female firefighters. It is not much use saying you have nothing against women if you deliberately foul the ladies' loo, order female colleagues to make your tea and noisily watch pornographic videos when women are around.

 

There have been other changes, too. Discipline is now derided as 'militaristic'. The proud name of 'brigade' is being phased out and replaced by 'service'. More graduates are joining, and veterans wonder - with reason - what use a degree is in a fire. They say the new mood has led to a decline in the old team spirit, which they believe is vital in the heat, danger and potential panic of a serious fire.

 

There is also a nasty, totalitarian atmosphere in which people are afraid of speaking. All the firemen - and firewomen - who wrote or spoke to me begged me to keep their identity secret. Complaining publicly about the new policy is death to a career and can even lead to disciplinary action.

 

As ever, the TV soap operas have joined the 'progressive' cause. Though most fire stations remain all-male, London's Burning features feisty fire officer Sally Fields played by Heather Peace. Reality, however, is different. Ms Peace has admitted she could not be a firefighter in real life. 'Of course not. I'd be a gibbering wreck,' she says.

 

Just as the police have been suffocated by political correctness since the Stephen Lawrence case, fire brigades also face a relentless campaign to change their conservative, traditional culture.

 

In March 1999 the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, declared that the fire service's equality record was unacceptable and that the Government wanted a service that 'looked like Britain in all its diversity'. He then set the target of 15 per cent women in the brigade by 2009, a giant increase on the current 1.4 per cent. Six months later a Home Office report rammed home the message: the service was ' institutionally sexist'.

 

Yet there is no evidence that the fire service's male domination has cost a single life. The report admitted: 'Exceptionally high levels of satisfaction and support are reported from the public at large.' The truth is that the fire service works well and is popular and respected. Its male culture helps keep morale and efficiency high. But under this Government, politically-driven sexual equality is more important than firefighting itself.

 

Is this wise? Medical experts agree that absolute strength - the maximum amount of weight that can be lifted - is far higher for men than for women. The average woman has between 50 and 60 per cent of the upper-body strength of an average man. Training and exercise can partly overcome this, but why go to all that trouble? The fire service is such a popular job that it has dozens of strong, fit applicants for every vacancy.

 

Yet more and more women are being chosen. How is this?

 

There is no standard national test for firemen, but everywhere the entry requirements have changed in the past 15 years. Chest expansion and lung capacity tests have been dropped. A simple trial - carrying a 12-stone man for 100 yards in less than a minute - has been scrapped. Now there are fitness checks that might have been designed to gloss over the differences between men and women.

 

Everyone from the Government downwards insists there is no sex bias. Widespread claims that women are slipped through on the nod or given special advantages are flatly denied. But in the London Fire Brigade, this boast of freedom from bias turns out not to be entirely true. Women can repeat fitness tests if they fail, without having to go back to the beginning.

 

This is said to be part of a 'positive action programme'. If the Government really wants to hire an extra 6,500 firewomen in the next seven years, there is going to have to be a lot of such 'positive action'.

 

And positive for whom? I have spoken to many experienced firemen who are convinced that more women in the fire service will mean needless deaths in the future, either of members of the public or of firemen whose colleagues cannot rescue them. To be fair, I have also spoken to union officials and firewomen who say we have nothing to fear.

 

There is, sadly, only one way to find out, which is to follow the current policy and see what happens.

 

But why should a successful and effective service be revolutionised, and why should the public be guinea pigs in a social experiment driven by militant feminism? Is this extremist campaign worth a single human life? ‘

 

A footnote. A contributor asked to which system of thought Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill subscribed. Well, Attlee is on record as saying that he did not believe in a deity, though tought the Christian ethic very fine. Winston Churchill's private religious beliefs are, so far as I know, a matter of controversy among those who have studied his life and work. I'd be interested to hear from anyone with knowledge on this.