Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 296

Today, children, we're teaching underage sex and debauchery

How much easier it is to go after the corpse of a dead villain than to fight a real live one.

If we are all so disgusted by the Savile affair, which is over, why are we not much more revolted by the schools and clinics which, during next week, will be giving contraceptive jabs and implants to underage girls, so they can have underage sex?

If you want to know what a society is really like, you should not judge it by the sort of thing that becomes a scandal. You should judge it by  the sort of thing that does not become a scandal.

The almighty authorities of this country, backed by Parliament, and ultimately by the force of fines, police and prisons, are now forcing their  tawdry sexual standards on an entire generation.

These policies take us back to an age of great cruelty to women, and of dreadful sexual exploitation of the young of both sexes. They are closely linked with the growing number of young people who have no stable family, and the growing number of old people trapped in solitude.

They involve the deliberate violation of innocence, the undermining of family life, and the subversion of parental authority. Schoolgirls as young as 13 are being given contraceptive injections and implants without their parents’ knowledge, hundreds of them actually in schools, thousands more in ‘clinics’.

Aren’t  our children supposed to be safe from predators in schools? Not when the State is the predator, cynically grooming vulnerable children for illegal sex.

‘Patient confidentiality’ forbids nurses from asking parents’ leave beforehand, or from telling them afterwards. This could be happening to your daughter or granddaughter, now, and you would never know.  The age of consent for sexual intercourse is still 16.

Why are those involved not being prosecuted for incitement to break the law, or for aiding and abetting crimes?

Simple. The liberal State approves. And it will get worse. Once you abandon lifelong  marriage, as our elite long ago did, you begin the long journey back to the debauchery of Babylon.

And in the end nothing is wrong any more. It is only ‘inappropriate’, a shifting boundary that alters with fashion and our growing tolerance of what would once have shocked us.

How many years, I wonder, before child prostitution is once again openly practised in this country? Laugh if you like.

Even 20 years ago, could you have imagined the changes which have come to our society since 1991? Do you think they have stopped? The general view of our governors is that  if it is even a little bit hard to prevent any moral ill, they will give up the struggle.

In their perverted, Babylonian way, the authorities have decided that the only bad thing about sex is that it leads to babies. They don’t care about the emotional misery and betrayal of the exploited young.

So as long as they can prevent conception, or obliterate it later with ‘morning-after pills’ and mass slaughter of the unborn, then they believe they are acting responsibly.

They also make a few feeble efforts to discourage the spread of sexual diseases.

This is the morality of the brothel-keeper throughout the ages. When the Government and the law behave like this, what is the good citizen to do? Where is he or she to turn?

Thoughts on Emigration

Thoughts on Emigration

 

When I say that I would emigrate if I were not too old to do so, people often ask me where I would go.  My answer is that it is not all that important If one is in exile, one accepts that one can no longer play as full a part in life as one did at home. But on the other hand, one no longer feels the deep hurt which comes from watching one’s own beloved country, every hill, cliff, field, hedge , riverbank, wood,  spire, tower and gable,  every prayer, song and poem, every act of bravery and generosity, every martyrdom and sacrifice, all the great cloud of witnesses to greatness, kindness and goodness  that the educated patriot feels about him, being dirtied, twisted,  betrayed, despised, destroyed and mishandled by rogues or fools.

 

I am a northern person, of cold winters and misty skies, who has not the slightest desire for endless sunshine and boring blue sky. Give me a frosty morning, or a lashing storm, or a crisp, bright spring day, over anything Southern California can produce. Any country where you can’t come home to the lighted doorway of a warm kitchen on a frosty night, with your breath steaming in the cold, is not for me.

 

I’ve in the past considered making a serious effort to learn either French or German, languages for which I have a reasonable basis.   Strasbourg , or its near-twin Freiburg-im-Breisgau are among the most attractive cities on the planet. One is technically French and the other technically German, but both are really Rhenish, and set in the middle of a zone of high civilisation that should lift the spirit.   

 

Berlin is , for me, a thrilling city, set amid lakes and forests,  whose new Hauptbahnhof links it swiftly by rail to dozens of seductive destinations (Dresden in a morning, Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, Hamburg or Vienna in a day). It’s also not far from the piny, sandy shores of the mysterious Baltic  and I have not done one tenth of the exploring of Germany that I would like to do. I could never afford to live in Switzerland, perhaps the only real rival to England as an independent, law-governed free society,  though I am never happier than halfway up a mountain (I think somewhere about 5,000 feet is ideal). The part of Moscow called ZaMoskvaRechya, just south of the river near the Tretyakov gallery, is –thanks to the end of  Communism – one of the most appealing cityscapes I know, and maybe at a stretch I might be able to work my shrivelled Russian into a workable state after a couple of years.

 

I’ve a fondness for the Pacific North west of the USA, and imagine I’d feel much the same way about British Columbia round about Vancouver. I became something of a Canadian nationalist while I lived in the USA (I particularly liked seeing the Crown of St Edward on the cap badges of Canadian police officers, and John Buchan’s signs on the Ontario freeways proclaiming that it was ‘The King’s Highway’. In fact I’ve always tended to shrug off Canada’s political correctness, in reality not much worse than PC in the allegedly conservative USA. It strikes me  as a superficial thing, concealing an enjoyably free and robust way of life regulated by English law - except in beautiful Quebec, where I can gabble in atrocious French and be thanked for it.  I could even learn to love ice hockey.

 

Australia has much to be said for it, judging by Sydney, Melbourne (which has real trams) and Canberra, though it’s not the classless near-utopia that Nevil Shute portrayed, and the weather may be just a bit too warm for me . I’ve never been to New Zealand (one of my most regretted gaps in experience) and so perhaps tend to idealise it.  It’s annoying that they seem to have reduced their railways to a tourist rump, just when the rest of the world is discovering how suited they are to compact countries.  I found the Falklands quite appealing when I visited, though I wish they’d find a way of getting some trees to grow.

 

I like plenty of places, and could in theory live in them, but of course one has to work to pay one’s way. And that’s not so easy at my age. Whenever I see migrant workers scrubbing the floors or emptying the bins in London, I make myself remember that any of these people could in reality be professors of history or philosophy in their own countries, whose skills and knowledge are useless to them here. It’s an important truth to bear in mind, and even if I’m wrong it does no harm to treat them as if this might well be the case. Which of us is certain that he will never be a refugee, a slave or a prisoner before the end of his life? Not I.

 

 

The Not-so-Beastly J.B.Priestley

I have for many years been prejudiced against J.B.Priestley. I suspect it’s mainly fashion, plus some cruelly dismissive lines in a long-ago satire by that fine poet and all-round good person James Fenton ‘Oh we didn’t like being beastly, as we showed him to the door, but when he brought in J.B.Priestley, Well it was the final straw.’

 

For those interested in really obscure lost battles, this was to do with the late Richard Crossman’s disastrous editorship of the ‘New Statesman’ magazine, in those long-lost days rather a good read and much more important than it is now. Crossman was one of several  editors who, by heavy-handed direction of the New Statesman,  drove away readers and so helped to create a vacancy for a well-written and enjoyable weekly review. This vacancy was soon filled by the Spectator , itself transformed for the better in the same era by Alexander Chancellor. It is astonishing now to recall that the NS was once far ahead of the Spectator both in status and sales.

 

Of course by then (this was the 1970s) J.B.Priestley was in his eighties, having been born in 1894, and not by then at the peak of his powers or anywhere near it, though he was  (to his credit) a spirited opponent of destructive development in his native Bradford.

 

Funnily enough, I did read and admire Priestley’s travelogue ‘English Journey’, which is still I think in print and well worth finding if you wish to know how life was lived by ordinary English people in the early 1930s.

 

But I just ignored the novels. Then, the other day, needing something solid for a journey, I finally began to read the book that made Priestley rich and famous, The Good Companions. Now, there are things about I don’t like, but many of them stem from the fact that it dates from an age of comparative innocence, when some attitudes and mannerisms were permissible or even encouraged, which we would not put up with now.

 

But there were many more aspects of it which I liked a great deal, not least an obvious very strong love of England itself, and of the North of it in particular, and of the strong, hard Pennines,  and of Yorkshire, to me the most English of the counties,  and of the West Riding above all (I’m fonder of the North and East Ridings myself, but each to his own) .

 

His descriptions of landscape are majestic, and his strong feeling for, and understanding of music is particularly telling.  He is superb at describing the gloom, shabbiness and sombreness of decayed industrial towns, rotten hotels, long Sabbath train journeys, hospitals for the poor, funeral teas and flyblown cafes.  Modern readers will be struck by the sheer presence of the police, often essential to the story, at times and in places where you'd never see them now.

 

As for the story itself, I would never have thought anyone could make me interested in an assorted  troupe of entertainers  struggling from theatre to theatre. But he does. I could see very quickly why the book had been such a large and enduring success. A lot of my readers won’t like it, or will be put off by minor aspects (Do I hear the word ‘patronising’? I’m afraid I do) , which is a pity.

 

Then I decided to try another, and chose ‘Bright Day’  a much later novel. I have not yet finished it, but it is a wonderful and poignant evocation of the generous, optimistic, and (by our standards) very well-educated happiness of English middle-class provincial  life before 1914.

 

Once again he communicates a powerful feeling for, and love of music (particularly for a Schubert passage which I am now going to have to seek out and listen to) . He is also very good about at describing the strange feeling of being on the threshold of wonder which can overtake young men and women in their late teens. There’s a wonderful brief description of what Christmas means most to a child, which I suggest you find for yourselves.  The straightforward, blunt and wholly English Christian socialism of the era is also well-described and given a sympathetic hearing. Of course, Hell is waiting just over the horizon.  I think I know how it will arrive.

 

For Priestley, though I never knew this and should have done,  fought and was wounded in the First World War. He also went to Cambridge in the 1920s (and plainly loved the town itself, as ‘The Good Companions’ makes clear, and which interests me because I have always thought that Cambridge, as a place rather than as a University town, has, or perhaps had, a special quiet loveliness, most evident on summer evenings but also in the first days of autumn, quite unlike anywhere else).

 

 

Howard Marks versus Peter Hitchens in Bristol, 29th October - an independent account

Mr Aspinall has drawn my attention to his description of the debate I had with Howard Marks in Bristol on Monday 29th October.

 

You may read it here.  

http://my.telegraph.co.uk/jaydeeay/asp/28/howard-marks-vs-peter-hitchens/

 

 

 

 

Arguing about the Wicked Weed - and Another Evening with Howard Marks

I think I have almost finished my round of debates about the problem of illegal drugs.  Apart from an encounter at the University of  Exeter on 29th November, I have one other planned meeting, in London, for which a limited number of tickets (from the sale of which I do not benefit) are still available. It will be on Wednesday 14th November at a venue near Oxford Circus.  My opponent will be Tim Wilkinson, who discussed this matter with me here some time ago.  Booking details can be found at

http://surelysomemistake.blogspot.co.uk/

 

This gives me the opportunity to say a few words about Monday evening’s second debate with Howard Marks. This was different in many ways from the discussion we had in Oxford. So far, I have seen no independent account of it, and I won’t try to give a full description as it would be both patchy and hopelessly biased. I nearly didn’t get there at all, having woken on Monday morning feeling so ill that I had to force myself to set off for the station, shuffling thither like an ancient. I assumed that everyone at the Guardian had spent the weekend sticking pins into the wax doll of me that they keep in a secret attic at Guardian HQ.

 

I had recovered a bit by the time I reached Bristol, and was able to present Howard with his own inscribed copy of my book . This was superfluous, as he’d already bought his own, and here’s the thing, read it carefully and thoughtfully.

 

I know this because his opening speech was clearly a detailed riposte to what the book says, and many of his debating points arose from a careful study of my arguments.

 

It is such a pleasure, and so educational, to be doing battle against an opponent who actually bothers to find out what the other side thinks, and seeks to combat it with facts and logic. Howard has many admirers, but I wonder how many of them understand what sort of person it is they worship. He is not like them.  He has a genuinely inquiring mind, trained in the scientific method and in logic, and the more I meet him the more I think that he’s a loss to the country, which ought to have found some way of using his considerable talents.

 

He scored some good points, causing me to ponder and pause, and to refine my own arguments in future. And I like to think I scored a few too.  I may possibly have changed a few minds, though if so not many – but on the other hand, most people hate to change their minds and are very reluctant to do so, so it would have been absurd to hope that 90 minutes of civilised but tough argument would convert an entire hall.

 

What I once again stress about this is that everybody gains by civilised discourse. I’ve much hope that someone will point out my review of Jonathan Ree’s review to Mr Ree himself, as it was written much more in sorrow than in anger, and I just think he got it wrong because he assumed that he was free to say pretty much what he liked, in those pages and to that audience.

 

(And by the way a note to ‘Mikebarnes’ :  Why should I care if he finds such material unpalatable? He doesn’t have to pay to read it, he has no need to visit this site if he doesn’t want to. The implication that this is some sort of score-settling is also dull and unresponsive. The fact is that the Internet gives authors the chance, which they did not have before, to respond to their critics.  I think this is entirely healthy and plan to take full advantage of it in future. Why should critics, especially where they are factually mistaken, be free from criticism themselves?  They opine on works which have taken the author years of work. Their reviews can dismiss and perhaps destroy such a  book. There is no court of appeal against what they say.  The readers of reviews often place great confidence in the reviewers’ verdicts. Sometimes this is justified. Sometimes it is not).

 

I’m also moaned at for writing about a James Bond film, as if such things were not important. Surely, a film that will be seen by many millions of people is among the most important cultural events of our time? If it contains implicit messages about life, morality or politics they will be absorbed,  often unconsciously, by those who watch it.  I think I’d be foolish to miss the opportunity to say a few words about it. I’d also add that it’s quite possible to enjoy such a  film while being critical of it. in fact, my ability to publish my criticisms of it almost certainly made it more enjoyable.

 

A Good Read - and an Encounter with Those Wicked Russians

I’m not quite sure how this happened, but I recently managed to slip under BBC Radio 4’s powerful anti-Peter Hitchens defences. Yes, I know about ‘Any Questions’ , where I’m ‘balanced’ by three people who disagree with me and an impartial presenter who, well, doesn’t agree with me. And about the occasional discussions where I’m invited on as the lunatic dissenter, scrabbling for a few seconds of airtime.

 

But on this occasion, Radio 4 actually treated me as if I was a normal human being. They invited me to take part in an enjoyable programme called ‘A Good Read’ . This particular episode, which lasts about half an hour, can be found here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nl6hx

 

and will be available for a year from now. Regular readers here will know of my great liking for the detective stories of Josephine Tey , and above all for her masterpiece ‘The Daughter of Time’.  I’m always amazed that so many people have never heard of Josephine Tey or of this extraordinary, life-changing book. So it seemed to be a good choice for a programme where two guests, and the presenter Harriett Gilbert (herself a member of a distinguished literary family) try to persuade each other of the virtues of books they like.

 

I found myself describing ‘The Daughter of Time’ as ‘one of the most important books ever written’. The words came unbidden to my tongue, but I don’t , on reflection  retreat from them. Josephine Tey’s clarity of mind, and her loathing of fakes and of propaganda, are like pure, cold spring water in a weary land. Her story-telling ability is apparently effortless (and therefore you may be sure it was the fruit of great hard work. (As Ernest Hemingway said ‘if it reads easy, that is because it was writ hard’) . But what she loves above all is to show that things are very often not what they seem to be, that we are too easily fooled, that ready acceptance of conventional wisdom is not just dangerous, but a result of laziness, incuriosity and of a resistance to reason.

 

The other two books, well, I’ll leave you to listen, though I would say that ‘A Landing on the Sun’ was to me a very sad and distressing book, and I’d like to know a lot more about how it came to be written. In fact, I suspect that serious biography of Michael Frayn would be very well worth reading. As for ‘What’s my Motivation?’, I didn’t want or expect to enjoy it, yet I did, and I would never have opened it (the awful cover is enough to put most people off) had it not been Harriett Gilbert’s choice.

 

The whole thing was great fun to do, the reading and re-reading, the conversation itself,  in the hallowed surroundings of the real Broadcasting House, the all-too-brief meeting with John Finnemore, and the very pleasant and intelligent people who made the programme. Where else in the world can you get a half-hour programme about books, in which serious things can be said,  broadcast  on a strong national waveband, uninterrupted by advertisements or appeals for money.

 

Next I draw your attention to an interview of me by the Voice of Russia, the Russian state’s English language station (I suppose it used to be ‘Radio Moscow’) . As it’s a Russian state organ, I hesitated about doing it, but I can say here that I was offered no payment,  and sought no payment, that it did not concern Russian matters and was conducted in a wholly professional fashion without any sign of editorial interference, and is available here

 

http://ruvr.co.uk/listen_audio/93085029.html

 

The paradox is that an interview of me, of this kind and on this subject, is pretty much unimaginable on any BBC station. Mr Ecott was  not, I think,  sycophantic or easy, but he gave me time to elaborate my answers and did not assume from the start that my views were eccentric or suspect. And he never began a question with ‘Are you seriously saying….?’

 

The Mystery of Breast Cancer

It is distressing to read that many women have been more or less railroaded into surgery and other radical treatments for breast cancer. These are, all too frequently, surgery and treatments which may well not have been necessary.

These operations and therapies (like many of the remedies for cancer) are often vary taxing, painful and disfiguring. Even when fully justified and successful, they leave inward marks and mental bruises which may never go away. No doubt a case can be made for the screening policy, and for erring on the side of safety.

I do not know what I would do in these circumstances. The pressure is great, and the worry that the wrong decision might be literally fatal must be hard to bear. Some members of the medical profession can be quite cold and ruthless when their wills are thwarted, as they have an almost totalitarian belief in the goodness of their actions. Again, this is understandable. But can it be right?

Men can only look on and wonder, and there is a sort of assumption that this is a problem they really ought to shut up about. But I have another worry, and I don’t think I am disqualified from it by my sex. What are the reasons for what seems to be an epidemic of breast cancer? Was there always so much of it? If not, why is there so much now? Shouldn’t we be more interested in preventing it, than in engaging in heroic, but often painfully radical, efforts to deal with it once it has developed?

In the case of several other cancers, it is increasingly recognised that there are lifestyle reasons for their greater prevalence. Yes, you can contract lung cancer if you never smoke, but you are far more likely to do so if you have. Is it beyond possibility that the near-epidemic of breast cancer (and who does not know someone who has fallen victim to this disease) might also have some lifestyle connections? And is it possible that modern medicine does not want to explore them very much, as the implications would challenge one of the most powerful (and intolerant, and angry and repressive) dogmas of our age?

 

I am not here making any simple, crude connection between breast cancer and any one of a number of things that have become much more common in the past 40 years. I would simply point out that the female breast is part of the reproductive organs, and is linked to them in many ways. In an age where the following practices have recently become much more common, would it be unreasonable to wonder if there might not be a connection? Oughtn’t there to be rather more research into this than there seems to have been? And why hasn’t there been such research?

1.Pregnancy is increasingly delayed into later life. 2.The western world has experienced near-universal use of contraceptive pills, pills which cause the reproductive system to function abnormally 3. The prevalence of abortion as a back-up form of contraception, and in many cases of multiple abortions, is a new development 4. The inability of many women to breastfeed their babies for any great length of time, because of the urgent need to return to paid work is anotehr stark difference from the past.

These things all have another thing in common. They are more or less essential to the sexual revolution, by which women have been shifted, in their millions, from their former role as nurturers of children, into their new role as wageslaves, as active in the labour market as men, if not more so.

 

You might add to the above list the general health problems caused by bad diets and obesity, and by lack of exercise in the lives of millions of people, and you might be on to something. But these, too, are essential elements of the sort of society we have been persuaded to believe we want, and which it is risky to question. 

 

Normally, we would be more interested in prevention than in cure, as we are in the cases of heart disease, skin cancer and lung cancer. But in this case, we seem for some reason to concentrate on screening and cure, rather than on probing too deeply into how the disease might be prevented.

The Reviewer Reviewed. A Response to Jonathan Ree

Now that the Guardian has actually printed its wildly hostile ‘review’ of my book , I think I’ll give it the treatment the Guardian gives me. Well, not quite. But this will be a sort of essay in how I would behave if I were them.

 

First, let us review the reviewer, before we get on to the review. Who is he? Is he interesting? Yes, he is.  He is apparently a ‘freelance philosopher’. Some say (and I would not necessarily view this as a compliment) that he is ‘The Simon Schama of Philosophy’. There are not many freelance philosophers in the Yellow Pages, but you never know when you’ll want your dialectical materialism synthesised , or your epistemology unblocked.

 

This is Jonathan Ree (which I believe is pronounced ‘Ray’). Mr Ree is also apparently an expert upon proletarian philosophy.  Well, somebody had to be.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 But The Guardian writer cannot just review a book, especially a book by a bad person (that is, a person who does not accept the Guardian's world view). He or she has to bear in mind, when examining a work, that you must always psychologise your opponents, rather than accepting that they have honest differences with you. (After all, they couldn’t possibly have a legitimate case, could they? They must be unhinged if they disagree with you, mustn’t they?).

 

Perhaps the Guardian reviewer (or interviewer) might point out that various shadows have fallen across the subject's life and may have influenced his attitude.

 

Let's try this on Jonathan Ree.  The first , and perhaps most poignant piece of information I can find about him, is that when he was six (or perhaps it was another Jonathan Ree, but how many can there be?) he experienced a sad loss.

 

Here is his account of it : ‘I had a little black kitten called Thisbe. One day she went berserk, wailing and screeching and rushing around the room, climbing the curtains and banging her head against the floor. The vet said it was schizophrenia, a severe and hopeless case; and that was the end of Thisbe.

 

‘Looking back, I think the vet was wrong. Madness is for people, not animals. The ability to go insane is one of our distinctive characteristics, alongside rationality, avarice and a sense of impending death. And schizophrenia is madness in its most human form: it occurs only in adults, and it usually involves hearing voices that bring news of impending calamity. It hardly makes sense to ascribe it to a creature without language or selfconsciousness, least of all a silly kitten, barely two months old.’

 

He went on (in a review of a Sebastian Faulks Novel published in 2005) ‘Everyone will have encountered schizophrenia at some time, and even the sanest of us have probably had a few schizophrenic moments, when an imaginary lover whispers our name, a slumbering child shouts for help, or a long-lost parent tells us to get a grip. But it is a frightening topic…’

 

Well, he may speak for himself on that. I’m sorry about Thisbe.  And I now feel he may have taken it badly when I wondered if he had savaged my book because I had at some stage run over his cat on my bicycle. This was a joke, made before I knew about Thisbe,  but actually, I’m sympathetic. I was very distressed at about the same age when my pet canary was diagnosed with throat cancer. He never sang, you see. ‘Sing?’ demanded the vet after a brief examination. ‘The poor bird can hardly breathe!’ . And away he went to wherever vets put cancerous canaries. I had another pet setback at a slightly older age, when one of my guinea-pigs fell into his water-bowl on a very cold January day and froze to death. I was inconsolable for at least a day. I don’t think any of our vets would have diagnosed ‘schizophrenia’ in a pet, I must say.  But I digress.

 

Mr Ree, as far as I can discover, is the son of Harry Ree, who was Professor of Education at the University of York when I was there. Professor Ree was a towering figure, a glamorous hero of the Special Operations Executive doing dramatic things with the French Resistance, including arranging to blow up an entire car factory. According to Wikipedia (the professor died before the age of the Internet was in full swing) ‘The Germans tried to capture Rée, who escaped a Feldgendarmerie group after being shot four times and, according to his own account, had to swim across a river and crawl through a forest. He managed to reach Switzerland and still keep some contact with his organization.’

 

Later, Harry Ree became a headmaster. Later still he bravely abandoned his professor’s chair (having become an keen campaigner for comprehensive schools) and went back to ordinary classroom teaching.

 

If I were the Guardian writing about me, I should here say, quite gratuitously and without any evidence at all,  that Jonathan Ree must struggle in the shadow of such a distinguished and exceptional man. As I am not, I won’t. But you do see what I mean, don’t you?

 

Now to the ‘review’ itself. I reproduce it here with my comments inserted in the text, marked **. It is unlike the poor effort by Nicholas Lezard in the Observer (I hope he realises how much I have to struggle against my computer’s desire to call him ‘Nicholas Lizard’), in which Mr Lezard made several galumphing errors which suggested (I put this politely) an imperfect reading of the text. Mr Ree does seem to have read it, though in a bloodshot, enraged way which may have got in the way of his understanding.

 

He begins : ‘For most of human history, mind-altering substances have been regarded as a source of innocent pleasure, or perhaps something better than pleasure: religious rapture, aesthetic insight, or rushes of courage or love. But they can do obvious harm as well: occasional adventures may make you clumsy, reckless, deluded or obtuse, and if they coalesce into steady habits you could end up as an outcast or a helpless invalid.’

 

***Always mistrust the passive. Its use generally means something is not quite being said.  Regarded by whom? Well, by some people, not named. Other people have had different views.  But he is perfectly right to mention the harms of drugs, though in my view wrong to say that these harms only follow if the drug becomes a steady habit.

 

Next Mr Ree states ‘As long as such effects were confined to upper-class adults like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey or Florence Nightingale, they could be treated as individual misfortunes; but when they were observed among the productive classes and their children, moral indifference was hard to sustain. The gin craze in 18th-century London provoked a handful of panicky government reactions, and a century later the British state embarked on systematic regulation of the opiates contained in popular patent medicines. But specific legislation against so-called narcotic drugs did not start till the first world war, when the government – worried about public order, national security and military discipline – imposed restrictions on pub opening hours, and made unauthorised possession of cocaine and opium a criminal offence.’

 

**I don’t myself think that the drugs he mentioned ever began to reach the levels of mass abuse which were attained by gin in the Hogarthian era. But I’m willing to listen to arguments about that.  I’ve seen no figures. What is certain is that a drug which is a ‘harmless’ pleasure for a few rich people, whose families can afford to look after the wreckage, doesn’t require legislative intervention. But once it comes into mass use, it is quite reasonable to use the law to discourage it. Mr Ree makes the comparison between the opium laws and the 1915 pub licensing laws. Presumably he accepts my point, that the use of such drugs was so restricted that it was practicable to outlaw them entirely, whereas alcohol was so widely available that an outright ban would have failed. Thus the former legality of opium is not comparable with the legality of alcohol.

Again, I’m with him so far.

 

But then he does a bit of a soft-shoe shuffle, saying: ‘ Cannabis was added to the list of forbidden substances shortly afterwards, but it always carried an aura that set it apart.’

***What does he mean, ‘carried an aura’? This is not a statement that can be proved or gainsaid. Nor does he explain why it was added (because the government of Egypt, where it was widely used, viewed it as a scourge that should not be visited on anyone else).

 

He then states (using the passive again) ‘It was held to be relatively harmless – more like alcohol and tobacco than opium or cocaine’

 

Held by whom? And on what basis? The main active ingredients of cannabis were not discovered until the 1960s. its use in advanced societies was so restricted that few conclusions could be drawn there about its effects.

 

Mr Ree adds ‘ – and in any case, it was associated with bohemian intellectuals in studios and jazz clubs rather than scowling proletarians in dens of vice and iniquity.’

 

**This is not quite true.  The Wootton report, written when such racialist statements were still permissible,  refers to ‘coloured seamen and entertainers in London docks and clubs’ as the main customers for cannabis in post-1945 Britain.

 

Mr Ree continues : ‘ If there were steep increases in cannabis consumption after the second world war, they were concentrated among the kind of people who were considered too genteel to be of any interest to the police.’

 

**Not sure about this. Wootton again:’ By 1950 illicit traffic in cannabis had been observed in other parts of the country where there was a coloured population. In 1950, however, police raids on certain jazz clubs produced clear evidence that cannabis was being used by the indigenous population; by 1954 the tendency for the proportion of white to coloured offenders to increase was well marked, and in 1964 white persons constituted the majority of cannabis offenders for the first time.’

 

As for ‘steep increases’ there was no steepness in the immediate post-war period. It was in the sixties that pop music began to market the drug, and things changed. Until then, the drug was available, but demand was limited because nobody much wanted it.  In 1945, convictions in the United Kingdom for cannabis possession stood at four per annum. By 1950, this had risen to 79; by 1955, to 115; by 1960, 235 and by 1965, to 626. Until 1965, it was a minor affair. It was only in 1966, by which time the sexual, cultural and rock music revolution was getting under way, and the permissive society well-launched, that the speed of increase becomes noticeable (1,119 convictions in 1966, 2,393 in 1967, and up and up at accelerating rates ever since).

 

But now Mr Ree abandons any more truck with sober, factual discussion.

 

He continues: ‘What happened next is the subject of the latest polemic by the conservative columnist Peter Hitchens. The story he tells, though it has some difficulty emerging from his tangled exposition, is meant to shock and appal.’

 

**Is it? In what way?

 

Mr Ree goes on ‘In the beginning there were the Beatles, scattering sinister references to drugs in their sweet-sounding songs. Then there were the celebrity drug-busts: Donovan and his naked girlfriend in 1966, followed by Mick Jagger and his rolling friends. To Hitchens's consternation, these criminals managed to escape the obloquy they deserved. In the first place, there were gaggles of teenage fans "voiding their bladders", as he puts it, in uncontrollable excitement. Then there was the louche coterie of lascivious libertarians who placed an advertisement in the Times in 1967, calling for complete decriminalisation of cannabis. And finally there was utter calamity in the form of the cultural revolution of 1968.’

 

**This is just silly. The word ‘sinister’ occurs once in my book, in a quotation from a speech by Lord Hailsham. The word ‘consternation’,  designed to suggest a Mary –Whitehouse-like indignation, is simply a false description of my view of these court cases. I describe them, and explain their effects.  The expression ‘louche coterie of lascivious libertarians’ is certainly not mine, nor does it express or summarise my view of the signatories of the Times advertisement. Nor do I think the cultural revolution was restricted to the year 1968, nor do I use words even remotely resembling ‘utter calamity’ to describe it. Why should I? I regard it as a reversible mistake. I have seen real calamities, in Somalia and Russia, and I know the difference. As for the bladder-voiding, it’s a fact, and an interesting one, about the strange female hysteria which attended the Beatles’ early performances. So is the observation that the screams were loudest when the Fab Four sang falsetto. You tell me what that’s all about. But it is interesting, that’s all.

 

He is trying to portray my book as an emotional jeremiad, when in fact it is a reasonably detached ( and in my view, and that of another I could name, though she probably wouldn’t thank me for doing so, slightly humorous) account of events.  The Donovan arrest is very funny, and I would have thought anyone reading my account of it would realise that it was, and that I think it was.

 

Why does he do this? Well, why do you think?

 

Next he says ‘Hitchens is not the kind of conservative who rhapsodises about the persistence of tradition in British life. As far as he is concerned, the institutions that once made Britain great – from parliament to the ancient seats of learning, from monarchy and the common law to the Church of England – have all been hollowed out and subverted by cynical soixante-huitards.’

 

**So what? This is an arguable position, which many undisputed facts support. Is the monarchy a force for conservatism any more? Or the C of E? Or the civil service? Or the judiciary? If you really think so, provide evidence.

 

The deliberate caricature continues thus ‘He traces the damage to what he calls the "central committee of the British cultural revolution", most of whose members, he claims, were signatories of the petition in the Times: David Hockney, Graham Greene, Jonathan Aitken, Alasdair MacIntyre, Kenneth Tynan, Francis Crick and David Dimbleby, among others. If these names strike you as rather safe, that only demonstrates the triumph of their silky stratagems. With the help of other university-educated subversives – from Tony Crosland, Harold Wilson and Roy Jenkins on the left to Reginald Maudling, William Rees-Mogg and Michael Portillo on the right – they worked tirelessly to turn Britain into a country with no moral aspirations apart from sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. They recruited a number of luckless ladies as well, notably Diana Runciman ("divorced"), Barbara Wootton ("battleaxe") and Joan Bakewell ("adulteress").’

 

Well, that’s building quite a lot on a throwaway phrase. Having listed the more prominent signatories of the advertisement, I simply wrote of ‘Michael X’ : ‘But he is the exception in a group which might well be said to be the Central Committee of the British Cultural Revolution.’ I don’t ‘trace the damage’ to anyone. As I’ll say to anyone who asks, and have said for years, the Cultural Revolution was a negative event, caused by the post-1914 collapse of Protestant Christianity. Individuals played their part in it, but they were taking an opportunity that had been offered. The signatories to the Times advertisement ( as I explain very clearly with much referenced material from Steve Abrams) were collected by a very subtle and well-organised lobby, the organisation ‘Soma’ . Some might call this a ‘conspiracy’. I don’t. the word does more harm than good. Let’s just say a group of people with a common aim worked behind the scenes to persuade media and politicians to embrace that aim. But people like Mr Ree will still attempt to characterise such descriptions in mocking terms, as if the idea that organised lobbies exist, work and succeed was somehow a childish fantasy – when in fact it is one of the central realities of public life.

 

Barbara Wootton was a battleaxe ( as was Margaret Thatcher, as I’m sure Mr Ree would agree). To those of us who still regard divorce as an important tragedy in a human life, and who see attitudes towards it as significant definers of cultural and marital views, Ruth Runciman’s marital history is relevant to my general description of someone without a conservative fibre in her body. ‘Adulteress’ is indeed a shocking word.  This is because adultery is a shocking act, of enormous power and with a great potential to damage and destroy. Once again, it is relevant to the understanding of the then Mrs Bakewell’s attitudes towards moral, social and cultural change, and to that of the BBC, which employed her so prominently.  

 

The jeering tone continues : ‘If you want their monument, you need only open your eyes to observe a Britain where parents are no longer allowed to be parents, where teachers will not teach, and where the police are more interested in political correctness than the prosecution of crime. Divorce, you will find, has become "easier than ending a car-leasing agreement", and restrictions on the sale and use of alcohol have been abolished. In due course, you will become aware of the most terrible scandal of all: that the law against cannabis and other stupefying narcotics is now "so feebly enforced that it might as well not exist".’

 

**Well? Which of these statements is untrue? Mr Ree ( see below) seems to think that they are axiomatically false. Yet he never explains why or how.   But the use of the word ‘scandal’ again suggests a different and more carried-away tone from the one I employ. The principal use of the word ‘scandal’ in the book is as follows :’ Britain’s nonsensical, ineffectual and illogical drug law – has for long been a scandal in its own right. Its contradictions and ambiguities are – as this author agrees – absurd. But they are not absurd for the reasons advanced by those who now argue for yet more relaxation.’ What I am actually saying in this passage is that I agree with the decriminalisation campaigners to the extent that the law as it stands is absurd. But to accept that would be to accept what the reviewer is determined to put out of his readers’ minds – that this book is in fact a level-headed and factual examination of the problem.

 

Mr Ree again: ‘If you still have difficulty recognising Hitchens's version of contemporary Britain, that only confirms the power of the Big Lie. Ever since 1968, our unelected rulers have given an impression of fighting a war against drugs, while surreptitiously dismantling our last defences against them. Without anyone realising what they were up to, they have wiped out the old ethic of hard work and honest trade, and turned us into a nation of pot-smokers.’

 

**By this time, I get the impression he had flung the book to one side, so anxious was he to condemn it.  What, I ask again, does he dispute about my version of contemporary Britain? Is divorce not very easy? Do parents or teachers have any authority? Are they not at risk of prosecution if they attempt to exercise or impose  it?  Does he not read the papers, and their accounts of teachers having their careers destroyed by pupil allegations, or of parents prosecuted for daring to smack? Has he read the Children Act of 1989? Has he not noticed the decline in literacy and numeracy caused partly by the inability of teachers to teach?

Are the police not infused with political correctness and do they not pursue it with great zeal, while neglecting crime and disorder? Have the legal restrictions on alcohol sales not been relaxed to the point where they barely exist? Is the law against cannabis possession enforced with vigour? Mr Ree doesn’t care. If I say something is the case, then Mr Ree is bound to disbelieve it. I think there may be a word for this, but I can’t remember it.

 

And who are these ‘unelected rulers’? I cannot find the word ‘unelected’ anywhere in my book. I have no great enthusiasm for elected rulers, as it happens, but where does he get these phrases from?

 

Mr Ree returns to the attack :’ Hitchens is a virtuoso of the magniloquent non-sequitur. He devotes many pages to denouncing research into the risks associated with different drugs ("meaningless", he calls it), and spends just as many stringing together anecdotes to suggest that cannabis is the most harmful drug of all.’

 

**Hold on. What I actually wrote was ; ‘These classifications, as discussed elsewhere, are scientifically meaningless and have no real objective foundation. They appear to have been invented in  1971, purely so as to distinguish cannabis from heroin and LSD.’

 

And (elsewhere) to the ‘scientifically meaningless distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ drugs enshrined in the 1971 Act’.

 

 I had the impression that the decriminalisation lobby were just as sniffy as I am about the ABC classification system. But of course they are allowed to be. They are not me.

 

I don’t think I dismiss any research as ‘meaningless’. All research has some meaning, even if it is not the meaning its backers and publicists want to convey.  I cannot imagine any research which could quantify in a numerical or alphabetical order the risks of different illegal drugs. Is the danger of going irreversibly mad not rather grave? 

 

Back to Mr Ree: ‘ He (that’s me) notes that American attempts to prohibit alcohol in the 1920s were a self-defeating disaster, but goes on to call for exactly the same no-tolerance approach to cannabis in Britain now.’

 

 

 

**Well no, I exactly don’t.  Here is (exactly) what I wrote : ‘In fact this episode [US Alcohol Prohibition] is highly specific, is very different from the maintenance of existing laws against drugs used by a minority, and has few general lessons for us. The measure was adopted in a unique society at a time of great social and moral ferment, caused by World War One. It was soon afterwards followed by the greatest economic collapse of modern history. Support and opposition to it were linked to religious factions, classes and ethnic groups. Beer-drinking German-Americans and wine-drinking Italian-Americans, particularly, saw themselves as being picked on by puritanical Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

 

‘It took place in a country with vast unpoliced internal spaces and with two long and unenforceable borders with neighbours who permitted the sale of alcohol. And it never sought to ban the possession or  consumption of alcoholic drinks, only their sale, manufacture and transport. This central weakness was undoubtedly the result of a moral uncertainty on the part of the drafters. They willed the end, but not the means. The absence of a law against possession of alcohol was a clear sign to all Americans that legislators did not really believe in the law they put forward, or think that alcohol was invariably evil.’

 

Mr Ree must have noticed that I am keen on the restoration of proper penalties for *possession* of cannabis, that in fact is my main proposal. I say repeatedly that the law’s failure to pursue possession is its principal weakness. I point out in the passage above that it was also one of the main weaknesses of the US alcohol prohibition laws (though in that case I also name other weaknesses and flaws which simply do not apply to cannabis in this country).

 

How,  in the light of this,  can he possibly offer the following assertion:’ He [me] notes that American attempts to prohibit alcohol in the 1920s were a self-defeating disaster, but goes on to call for exactly the same no-tolerance approach to cannabis in Britain now.’

 

This assertion is simply not true. It cannot survive a proper reading of the text. Did he read it? If so, how did he manage to write the words above? This grave and concrete error sits in the middle of an abusive caricature of my book, the nature of which can only ultimately be argued about on subjective grounds. But this is a subjective error of great importance. It is flatly, wholly, demonstrably wrong.  I would say that a caricature which has such an error smack in the middle of it ought to be suspect in general, especially if the author is a philosopher more familiar than most with the proper, just and truthful use of language. 

 

Mr Ree continues ‘And when he offers a bemused account of the government's success in reducing the use of tobacco in Britain, he manages to overlook the obvious inference: that if cannabis is as dangerous as he supposes, then it ought to be explicitly decriminalised and subjected to the same controls as tobacco.’

 

**This is a man helpless in the grip of dogma. In what way is this the ‘obvious’ inference? (only in the solipsistic way , in that it is ‘obvious’ to Mr Ree, who already thought that anyway, thus confirming my view of the British academic classes and their surrender to the drugs lobby). Had tobacco been illegal in the first place, and never legalised before its mass consumption began, it would of course be far less widely used than it is now, and much easier to combat.

 

Similarly, were cannabis on legal sale in supermarkets and newsagents, it would be far more widely used than it is now and much harder to combat. The fact of illegality is hugely important. Further, a product in large scale use, once legalised, is extremely difficult to recriminalize. Obviously, if you have the weapon of the law, and you know something is dangerous, you retain the weapon.  Mr Ree is so completely in thrall to the decriminalisation dogma that he seriously proposes that we disarm in the face of cannabis (even though we know it to be dangerous) , as a preliminary to rearming, with feebler weapons, afterwards.

 

Tobacco is not more easily restricted because it is legal. It is regrettably necessary for us to use weaker restrictions on it because we do not have the option of illegality.  Illegality, with tobacco use at its current levels, is politically impossible, and unenforceable. But had it been illegal, at the time we discovered its dangers, it could not (for a start) have been sold in supermarkets or newsagents, or advertised.  Nor (as a direct and indirect result of its illegality) would it be anything like so widely used as it now is. And, by the way, what is ‘bemused’  about my account of the government’s campaign against tobacco? The word is just chucked in as abuse.

 

Mr Ree again: ‘I have never been very impressed by the idea that human nature changed in 1968. And Hitchens's unhinged affirmation that, since that date, young people have considered themselves entitled to everything they want without any effort or study is not going to make me change my mind. In a period of glorious achievement in classical music and theatre, I find it hard to believe "high culture, effort, self-discipline and patience" have lost out entirely to "young men and women who brawl and spew in the midnight streets of our great cities".’

 

*** I make no claims about human nature having changed. What changed after(not necessarily in ) 1968, were the rules and the conviction with which they were enforced. And to the extent to which laws and punishments deter people, and the extent to which discipline and authority direct them, people behaved more selfishly, and they saw little reason to defer their gratification in return for future rewards.   If Mr Ree disputes that ( it seems to me to be self-evident and uncontentious  - demonstrable on the  midnight streets and in the academy and in the world of work ), I would like to know why. Nor, I think, do I say that the virtues have ‘lost out entirely’. They still survive in some isolated and protected places. But they have suffered a serious reverse.  If he believes that Britain is still in the grip of deferred gratification and moral self-restraint, let him explain how and where. Calling me ‘unhinged’, when what he means is ‘I disagree with Mr Hitchens but feel no need to say so because I among friends’, is not the act of a philosopher.

 

There were 'glorious achievements' in theatre, music, art , sculpture and architecture when the mass of the people of Europe lived in pre-literate squalor. These things may happen in spite of general conditions, where a powerful elite(or state) is able to support high culture with patronage. But such things say little about the general level of education or of artistic or musical ability or appreciation. If they did, then - if our education system is a as goosd as the left pretend it is - we should surely be far surpassing Bach, the great cathedrals, Shakespeare Michaelangelo and Rembrandt. We aren't.

 

But Mr Ree by now has the light of battle in his eyes. He thunders :’ I am surprised, however, to find that someone who claims to respect culture and discipline chooses to mock Reginald Maudling as a "Hegel enthusiast", as if habitual Hegel-reading were a wretched self-indulgence rather than an arduous long-term cultural investment. And I am astonished that he can base an entire book on a few cuttings from the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail and the News of the World.

 

**In what way do I ’mock’ Reggie Maudling's Hegel enthusiasm? I merely mention it.  Here is what I wrote about  Mr Maudling and Hegel : ‘Jim Callaghan’s Bill (perhaps to Callaghan’s relief) was eventually piloted through Parliament by the mildly corrupt, genial, whisky-loving liberal Tory, Reginald Maudling – a libertarian Oxford graduate and Hegel enthusiast who had more in common with Richard Crossman than he did with James Callaghan.’

 

I can’t see where I ‘mock’ Mr Maudling for being a Hegel enthusiast. I should have thought ‘mildly corrupt’ was the unpleasant bit of the description. I just mentioned his Hegel enthusiasm, as a fact which might surprise some people,  because I thought it showed that he was the kind of person who could easily have been at home among the Croslandites and Jenkinsites of the Labour Party. Maybe Mr Ree is a fierce anti-Hegelian and thinks that the very connection is mockery. Otherwise, , coming from a man who has determinedly mocked, derided and distorted my book, it’s a bit, oh what’s the word for it?

 

It is simply not true that ‘ I have ‘base[d] an entire book on a few cuttings from the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail and the News of the World.’ Anyone who actually reads it will have to recognise that.

 

So, assuming that he has read it,  why does Mr Ree say that it is? Once again, is this the action of a philosopher?

 

Now at last we come to Mr Ree’s peroration, the culmination and epitome of his ‘review’ :‘But it occurs to me that I may always have been wrong about 1968. Perhaps it really did change the world – not by turning us all into junkies, but by unleashing the virulent strain of hysterical moralising that Hitchens appears to be suffering from. Like many other members of his generation – fogeys of the left as well as the right – he seems to be addicted to a form of self-righteousness so intense that it amounts to moral racism. His own instincts strike him as so self-evident that anyone who does not share them has to be dismissed with total contempt. If we are indeed surrounded by cultural ruin, then Hitchens is a fine specimen of it: one of those manic preachers who have been shouting so long that they can no longer hear any voice apart from their own.’

 

***Can we have an example of this ‘self-righteousness’?  Or an example of the ‘hysterical moralising’?  Or of the ‘total contempt’? I don’t know which passages he is referring to. I think, for instance, that I am quite generous to several opponents in the book. Take Baroness Wootton, chief actor in the weakening of the cannabis laws, of whom I wrote : ‘Lady Wootton was a concentrated whirlwind of determined, confident radicalism in a dumpy body surmounted by a grandmotherly, white-haired head. It is impossible not to admire her energy and sheer force. The views she held as a lonely pioneer are now the tedious conventional wisdom of the modern age. But when she espoused them, it took courage to do so.’

 

Say what you like about this passage, but it does not evince ‘total contempt’ , by any stretch of the English language. Or how about this description of Steve Abrams, the begetter of the original campaign to relax the cannabis laws: ‘...Steve Abrams, who necessarily stalks through these pages as a hugely significant actor, wrongly unrecognised by history. Mr Abrams has written an engagingly frank and revealing memoir of his involvement with the campaign to decriminalise cannabis’.

 

As for ‘moral racism’, it just seems to me to be a pompous and, er, self-righteous way of saying ‘I do not like this person’. It is on the level of the accusation that I ride my bicycle in a ‘smug and racist’ way, discussed here a couple of weeks ago. It’s abuse again, born out of a fear or dislike of actually engaging with conservatives, and a strong sense of moral and intellectual superiority , for which I can, alas, see no justification in this review. I’m still sympathetic about the kitten, though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sky Does Not Fall

What a strange thing the James Bond industry is.  I was thought to be a bit young to see the early films, and there are still plenty I have never watched at all. But from time to time I’m tempted by the publicity, and go along. I usually enjoy myself in a fairly futile way , but only by viewing the whole thing as an elaborate joke.

 

By contrast, Ian Fleming’s original books, which in most cases have nothing to do with the films at all, are quite clever period thrillers, with an undercurrent of real nastiness, set about half a century ago and absolutely ready to be filmed in their proper time, costume, language etc  (if anyone can be bothered to do that properly, and if copyright allows) .  When they first came out, they were considered a bit risque, and I clearly remember one of my mother’s friends,  a respectable middle-class person,  rapidly hiding a hardback first edition of ‘Goldfinger’ which we had found her reading in her suburban garden one long-ago summer afternoon.

 

 I’m told that the recent film of ‘Casino Royale’; made a sort of attempt to do this, though the violence in that particular book was so appalling that I preferred not to go and see it, so I don’t know. I can’t imagine that it transported Daniel Craig back to the 1950s, or did it?

 

The trouble is that the films are now a sort of cult within a cult. They refer to themselves and mock themselves. And of course they are immediately commercially successful. I saw the film in a full cinema on Sunday afternoon, having bought the tickets the day before. People were being turned away at the door. The most striking thing about the occasion was that the film began before it began, with advertisements for products that had been placed in the film. This was more like movie-placement in the advertisements, than like product placement in the film.

 

From then on it’s more or less inexplicable. (Plot spoiler warning. If you really care about the plot, don’t read on. Personally, I can’t see how anyone could care) .

 

Bond dies. He is killed, shot by a fellow-agent before falling an incredible distance into deep water.

 

Then, just as MI6 runs into trouble at home, thanks to the publishing of secret files that Bond failed to save from an unknown enemy, despite a car/motorbike chase and a struggle on the roof of a speeding train, we find him alive again hanging out in a beach bums’ bar somewhere in Asia, living on who knows what and drinking a lot.

 

So he then comes back, wheezing and unfit, and is sent in pursuit of the man he was trying to kill when the film began (I think).

 

Somehow or other this leads him to a glamorous woman in a gambling club (so glamorous she is actually smoking) and then to the villain.

 

Now, the villain is brilliantly-portrayed, and quite witty. But as it is obvious that he has had the glamorous woman horribly beaten up, and as he then casually shoots her dead for no reason at all, the joke seems to me to wear out at that point.

 

This is one of the problems with the Bond films. Because their tongues are always in their cheeks, we find ourselves laughing off genuinely horrible events.

 

We are also , I think, expected to warm to Judi Dench, here using her great talents to play the head of MI6 and shown telling a bunch of politicians that there really is still a threat big enough to justify her huge and rather ridiculous organisation ( which can’t even keep its on secret files secret, in the film).

 

But in the end, what is the threat? It is just a resentful former agent, sacrificed by Ms Dench in a  long-ago deal with the Chinese, who has nursed his private bitterness ever since.

 

He needs to be very bitter, because all the really big bogeymen that used to scare us in the days of the original Bond have vanished, or proved to be insubstantial. Hence the need for this ridiculous, spectacular, expensive vendetta, and for a hilariously pointless battle in the Scottish Highlands.

 

I love Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and almost know the crucial bit (leading to ‘…To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’ ) by heart, though I stumble over one or two bits. I often feel the words ‘And though we are not that which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are’, stealing into my mind.  It’s lovely to hear them spoken by a great actress to a big audience, as Judi Dench does while trying to justify her budget. 

 

But there’s also rather a sad undercurrent. Would you believe it, Bond spirits ‘M’ out of London in the old Aston Martin (with ejector seats and machine guns) which Sean Connery was driving about in, almost 50 years ago. And as the ancient vehicle is revealed, the old Bond theme tune swells into the soundtrack. We are being asked to be nostalgic for the old Bond, British and proud of it. I was reminded, alas, of that terrible film ‘Barry Mackenzie Holds His own’ (I think that’s what it was called and I can, more or less, explain why on earth I went to see it) in which ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is played to give a nostalgic, patriotic gloss to a load of old rubbish. There are other problems, not least the strange references to Bond’s parents, and the brief glimpses we have of their graves, during the Scottish battle scenes. If he had such parents, could he possibly be the age he is now? Or is Bond now a sort of Doctor Who, reincarnated every few years to remain always the same age?

 

Far better(for once) to go Back to the Fifties

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enter a church and you should hear echoes of eternity - not the Sugababes

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column:

I think the Church of  England has just committed suicide. Its decision  to allow grotesque, overblown weddings in its churches is an act so desperate and hopeless that  I fear there is no return.
Beneath the ancient arches  of our parish churches we  shall soon be enduring the music of the Sugababes and watching trained owls deliver matching rings to overdressed couples sitting on fake thrones, as photographers lean in as close as they can, to film the crucial moment.
With the support of the strangely overrated John  Sentamu, Archbishop of York,  parsons are to be instructed  to swallow their doubts and  permit any kind of rubbishy vulgarity.
The excuse is that, in some way, this treatment will persuade the men and women involved to forsake the cocktail bar and the tanning parlour, and become regular churchgoers.
Everyone but a bishop can see quite clearly that it will do no such thing. The victims of these nasty, extravagant ceremonies will never enter a church again.
Just as Groucho Marx wouldn’t belong to a club that would have him as a member, people will have no respect for a church that is obviously so desperate to welcome them that it will take money in return for ditching its principles.
The whole point of churches is to disturb our day-to-day lives with the haunting rhythms and poetry of eternity. If we go into them and find that they are just like the nearest shopping mall, only with nicer architecture, then we will turn away disappointed.
I don’t know if anything could have saved Christianity in  England from becoming a despised minority religion. But I am quite sure that these pathetic attempts to appease the spirit of the modern age have made things much, much worse.
Even 50 years ago, the Christian religion still had the  attention and loyalty of many serious people. Now, even those of us who still stick to it  find it hard to defend our  supposed leaders.
I suppose it will continue to survive in a few odd corners, its ceremonies performed for foreign tourists in the more  picturesque cathedrals.
But for the rest, many centuries of faith, hope and charity are ending not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with ‘Here Come The Girls’.

Spiritual symbol... or centre of a new world power?

How little we know about the Islamic world, even though a large and growing number of British subjects are Muslims. I am strangely haunted by recent pictures of Mecca.
They show a monstrous clock tower dominating all around, surmounted by a huge crescent. To me, it looks more like the burgeoning capital of a new global power than the austere spiritual goal of millions of devout pilgrims.
What a pity that I cannot go there to  see for myself. I’ve found my way into North Korea, into Soviet nuclear facilities and the remotest corners of China. I’ve even slipped into Iranian Shia shrines, and been much impressed with the devotion of the worshippers.
Yet for reasons I’ve never fully understood, Islam’s holiest place is closed  to Christians. How are we going to understand each other properly if such  barriers continue to stand?

Our pointless cult of human sacrifice

Have you noticed how keen we are getting on human sacrifice? I don’t (quite yet) mean the actual slaughter of people to soothe the rage of angry pre-Christian gods.
But I do mean the furious denunciations of individuals, whether it be Andrew Mitchell or Jimmy Savile, usually done to quell the wrath of the mob.
In many cases, the mob is furious because it hates in other people the things it dislikes in itself. How many of Mr Mitchell’s attackers have never sworn when they shouldn’t have, and have never lost their tempers?
How many of Savile’s noisiest critics are secret viewers of pornography?
It’s not that I want to defend Mr Mitchell for being rude,  let alone defend the Savile creature for his gross appetites. It’s just that I don’t think frenzies do any good.
When all this is over, the Government will be the same (as it always is after some Minister or other has been driven from office).
And the BBC will be the same too, still judge and jury in its own cause and scornful of conservative opinions  and morals held by millions of its licence-payers.
For a lot of people, the last Election was, at heart, a chance to pillory and destroy Gordon Brown (or the person they imagined him to be).
My belief is that they  were mainly furious with themselves for having been so completely fooled by  Mr Brown’s smooth sidekick, Anthony Blair.
But as they ejected the scowling Labour leader from Downing Street, they replaced him with a man whose politics are pretty much exactly the same. Another human sacrifice.
A grown-up country is interested in policies, not in punishing individuals. But we are not grown-ups any more, just children rushing this way and that as the TV tells us.

Had they lived to be really old, would Stalin and Hitler have ended up as pottering old geezers in straw hats, peering out at us from behind grizzled beards? And would we have softened towards them as a result?  Well, I cannot soften to the old killer and torturer Fidel Castro, despite recent pictures of him doddering around Havana, looking as if he has escaped from a pensioners’ outing. I still see blood, and hear screams.

This government, like the last, is very good at figures. Crime figures are down. Unemployment figures are down. Inflation figures are down. Funny, isn’t it, that in our actual, real lives, crime and disorder get worse, prices rocket upwards and factories are closing. How can that be?

When I read in August that the talented Hollywood film director Tony Scott had killed himself without any apparent good reason, I was fairly sure that pretty soon  we would find that the poor man had been taking ‘antidepressants’.
Well, a preliminary autopsy has found ‘therapeutic’ levels of an ‘antidepressant’ in his system. I take no pleasure in being right, but as the scale of this scandal has become clear to me, I have learned to look out for the words ‘antidepressant’ or ‘being treated for depression’ in almost any case of suicide and violent, bizarre behaviour. And I generally find it.
The science behind these pills is extremely dubious. Their risks are only just beginning to emerge. It is time for an inquiry.

It is now 25 days since  I asked Edward Miliband’s office if he had received private tuition while at his comprehensive school.  Why am I still waiting for an answer?

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