Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 298

An Evening with Howard Marks

I can’t possibly give a full account of my encounter with Howard Marks in Oxford on Thursday evening, as you can't atke notes on a debate when you're taking part in it, but I thought readers might appreciate a few notes on the event.

First, I should explain how it is we came to be debating. Mr Marks and I first met on a windy evening in Blackpool more than ten years ago, when we were both speaking at a National Union of Students event, on drug laws, in the vast and rather lovely Winter Gardens.

It was quite a big meeting and we were having quite a lot of fun arguing when some commissar from the NUS marched on to the stage,  switched off my microphone and told me I had to leave. When I asked why he told me that I surely already knew. I said I had no idea. I then foghorned my protest to the hall, not needing the microphones, and rose rather angrily to go.

Howard (as I have ever since called him) behaved magnificently. He scooped up his notes, took me by the arm in a very friendly way and said ‘Well,  if he’s going, I’m going too!’

We were besieged, as we went, by a very small crowd of angry, heavily-pierced people, who shrilled various incomprehensible but plainly critical remarks at me. (It turned out later that they had been fed, and willingly believed, a rumour that I had said I was a racist and proud of it, a false claim which later led me to threaten a lawsuit against the individual responsible for spreading it,  the only time I have done this. The person very swiftly retracted and apologised).

 I was then intercepted by a (very cunning) police officer, who led me into a side room. He offered me an escort to the railway station. I was, it seemed, actually being run out of town.

Oh come on, ‘ I said ‘Don’t be silly. They’re only Trots. I used to be one. They're all mouth and no trousers.  I’m not afraid of them. I’m quite happy to walk out there and brave whatever they want to say to me.’

‘Ah’ replied the subtle officer. 'I quite see. But you may have noticed – who couldn’t - that there’s rather a lot of glass in this building, some of it quite old and valuable? ’

I admitted that this is so. The Winter Gardens are a majestic Edwardian palace of glass and wood, the glory of Blackpool, if you like. I’m rather fond of them.

‘Well, sir, you see, if there were serious damage to that glass, I’d be held responsible for failing to keep the peace, which wouldn’t be very nice, would it? You’d be doing me a great favour if you let me slip you out by a back way I know, and on to the railway station’.

When it was put like that, I’d have been a heel if I’d refused. So  just said ‘ Oh, all right then. But no need to go to the station. I’m sure I’ll be safe in Blackpool till the morning’. And so I did.

But I never forgot Howard’s chivalry, and his instinctive rally to the side of liberty, even the liberty of an opponent he didn’t know, and had no reason to like.  If ever I seek a definition of magnanimity, I recall that evening.

A little while later we found ourselves debating again, this time in Durham.  Once again, we enjoyed the encounter, without conceding anything to each other in the argument. There was a vote, and to my surprise I won it, as Howard is a hero in the student world . Something similar happened in Exeter.

So it occurred to me to seek a rematch (I think the vote last night was more or less even, to the extent these things matter. My view is that a debate without a vote is like tennis without a net) .

Howard’s argument rested heavily on the fact that the old League of Nations had been panicked into banning cannabis by the more-or-less hysterical urgings ( as he described them) of an Egyptian delegate, plus the more usual points about the bad effects of illegality on users and on the purity etc of the drug, and the point that many eminent scientists and others had used cannabis without ill-effect.  Regular readers here will be familiar with Malcolm Muggeridge’s rather more measured description, in ‘Chronicles of Wasted Time’(and quoted in two of my books, 'Abolition of Liberty' and 'The War We Never Fought'),  of the baleful effect of widespread cannabis smoking on the Egyptian people in the 1920s. There was clearly something bad going on.

My case will be familiar to regular readers here and I won’t rehearse it. I suspect Howard is broadly right that the dangers of hashish, as it then was, were in some ways misrepresented to the League. That is because in those days we knew so little about this drug, which was then almost unknown in the western world, and in fact we knew very little about any drug. Like the exaggerations of ‘Reefer Madness’ so often mocked by the pro-dope campaign, such arguments now look foolish.

But they contained, for all their crudity, an essential truth – that  the ingredients of cannabis which we have now isolated and studied, are powerful psychotropics which can have unpredictable and long-delayed effects. Just how bad those are, and what action they justify, are the real issues for our time.

Each of us teased the other a bit, but without malice.

We then had an all-too-short period of questions, again quite like the sort of subjects which come up here. I think, at the end, many there felt that they could easily have gone on for longer. But bookshop staff have homes to go to, and we couldn’t stay there all night. We meet again on Monday 29th October, in Bristol, but I’m told that’s sold out.

Perhaps we might do it again. I’ve no doubt our discussions serve the cause of truth, and the cause of free speech. And they demonstrate that opponents in this matter can behave towards each other with humour and personal generosity (unlike reviewers in ‘The Observer’) . I’m also meeting Peter Reynolds of CLEAR at Exeter University on the evening of Thursday 29th November, and Tim Wilkinson ( see www.surelysomemistake.blogspot.com) in London on 14th November.

 

Peter Lilley as promised - and a Debate in London, not involving Howard Marks

I'm afraid that my attempt to link with Peter Lilley's review hasn't worked. I'll try to reinstate it when I've overcome the difficulty. Let me simply say that , though Mr Lilley disagrees with me, he gives a fair and intelligent account of what I have written. he also described the embrace he was given by the pro-drug left when he wrote his pamphlet on the subject some years ago ( a pamphlet I criticise severely in the book).

I was particularly amused by the way he described the joy of liberals at the arrival of a lost sheep in their fold,  which must have been a horribly creepy experience after years of hostility directed against Mr Lilley for having been a ‘Thatcherite’. 

 

This link may work

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/drugs-legalisation-peter-hitchens-peter-lilley/

 

Some of you may also be interested to know that I plan to debate Tim Wilkinson (whom I debated on the subject of cannabis on this site some months ago) in person in London (on the same topic)on Wednesday 14th November. Details can be found on his blog at www.surelysomemistake.blogspot.com

 

By the way, does anyone know who Jenny Colgan is? She has apparently been expressing critical opinions about me on Twitter, and I would like to know more.

 

**Note. I now recall an encounter with this person on BBC Radio 2 some months ago.

 

Martin Narey Retreats to his Comfort Zone - and other matters

Martin Narey, offered the freedom of this site to make his case against the gallows and for compulsory DNA records,  has now apparently departed. As far as I can make out, he was surprised to find that I expected him to respond when I rebutted his points. That is what is supposed to happen in debates. But now I discover that Mr Narey has placed his arguments elsewhere on the Net ( he advertises the address on Twitter). I think this means that those who follow his links will not see all my responses to Mr Narey, or yours. Why doesn't he provide a link to this site, where his postings are also displayed? If he has done so, I haven't seen it.

 

I repeat my promise to him that he is welcome to reply here, at any time, to the arguments made against him on the death penalty and his enthusiasm for a DNA database. But if he chooses not to, then I will, as I have told him, take it as a white flag of surrender.

 

This of course is nothing like as bad as Mr Lezard’s slapdash purported review of my book in a once-great liberal newspaper. It strikes me that if he’d looked at the dustjacket (often a useful resort for reviewers in a hurry) he could at least have found out which newspaper I write for. I’m used to abusive reviews, and reviews which review me rather than the book, and reviews by people who don’t seem to have read the book with any care. But a review by someone who hasn’t read the dustjacket with any care is a new one on me.

Contrast, by the way, an informed, interesting and intelligent, but critical review of my book by Peter Lilley in the latest issue of Prospect (all the more grown-up since I give Mr Lilley a bit of a going-over in the book). If and when it is on the web, I'll link to it.

 

Oh, and here’s another example of the extreme bile that my critics feel justified in employing against me. I offer it not out of rage or pain, but out of interest. It’s a comment on the Spectator site, about an article on cannabis which I recently published in that magazine. It runs: ‘Ah, how typical of Hitchens to refer to antidepressants and tranquillisers in sneer quotes. Well, they may not work for everyone, but they do less harm than the sleeping pills his mother took to top herself in a pact with her lover.’

Of course the author of this is known to the world only as ‘Ken’, and would be ashamed to post such a thing under his own name, no doubt, but it is quite astonishing to me that anyone should think that such a message could possibly advance any cause. But in the end it is only an extreme manifestation of the same problem, which besets me on ‘What the Papers say’ a few months ago, or which besets me when silly people abuse my books. Once your position has been classified as unacceptable by mainstream opinion, decent people feel free to behave indecently towards you.

 

By contrast, I spent Tuesday evening in Cambridge in debate with a person I have criticised here, Hugo Rifkind of ‘The Times’, and, while we both gave as good as we got, we ended the evening on better terms, if anything, than when we started. It was a discussion of the future (or lack of a future) of the Tory Party, arranged by the Cambridge University Conservative Association.

 

I hope shortly to give an account of John Charmley’s book ‘Neville Chamberlain and the Lost Peace’ , which goes some way to explaining how we came to make the Polish guarantee which dragged us into ill-timed and futile (on its own terms) war over Poland in September 1939.

My Subject is War

When we mark the centenary of the start of the First World War, how will we do so? Is it just an event to be marked? Will we mourn the end of a civilisation and the beginning of an age of chaos, brutality and barbarism? Will we recall it as the beginning of a revolution – and if so was it a good revolution or a bad one?

 

 

I think we have remembered and honoured the dead and the wounded, if not enough, then enough for there to be no need for any extra remembering in 1914. The bugles should continue to call from sad shires for as long as anyone speaks English, and as long as there still are shires ( and how long will that be?). But no more loudly, and no more emphatically than before. We all know that what we are really mourning is the loss of our country as it might have been if they had all lived normal lives, and we had not squandered our substance on a battle whose purpose remains entirely unclear to most of us.

 

There is little more that can be said or done to ensure that they are not forgotten. In fact it almost begins to seem unfair that these casualties should be more thoroughly recalled and discussed than any others before or since.

 

And I for one am a bit weary of Wilfred Owen, though I warm to Siegfried Sassoon because of his explosive denunciation of the great ponderous memorials to the dead in ‘On Passing the new Menin Gate’  (‘Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime/ Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime’) . In fact the drumming insistent drilling of the war poets into the minds of the young had the opposite effect on me from the one intended. I grew so tired of being preached at by teachers and playwrights and the rest, about the horror of the war,  and told that the war was futile,  that I sought for years to find good reasons for it. I even, for a while, justified the shooting of soldiers for ‘desertion’, a badly wrong position I now deeply regret.

 

If all these people were against it, people who were against all wars except those conducted by Communists, then there must surely have been something good about it.

 

In the end, I snapped out of this mental rebound while reading a novel by A.J. Cronin ‘The Stars Look Down’. Cronin’s description of the appalling treatment of a courageous objector , and his description of an episode of shell shock, persuaded me I had been wrong. And then, as so often happens when the mind changes, I fell through floor after floor after floor until finally reaching bottom, covered in debris and shame, and more furiously opposed to the war than Joan Littlewood or the Peace Pledge Union could ever have been. This wasn’t because I was a pacifist (though I had been one in my teens, and then given it up because I wanted to support the Viet Cong) , but precisely because I’m not.

 

Yes, wars must be fought, men must fight in them and this will be horrible. But they must only be fought for a good hard purpose. And the more I looked at the First World War, the more sure I was that we would have been far better off staying out of it altogether. Germany rules France today, and indeed dominates the Continent, millions of deaths later. We didn’t prevent it.  We merely postponed it.  But in postponing it we did not lessen its impact on us. We made it greater.

 

For, while in 1914 we might, with our vast overseas investments and empire and our invincible Navy, have remained more or less aloof from the Continent, we long ago lost those things and are now vassals of Germany ourselves, though everyone is too polite to mention it, and our subject state is complicated by our almost equally servile relationship with the USA, and our increasingly embarrassing indebtedness to the Muslim Arab world.

 

Were these things necessary. Was t, as the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister said at the time, a choice of how we died? It may well have been for Austria-Hungary. But I think we might have retained far more of our independence, wealth and power had we stayed out.

 

And now, from what I admit is only a brief glance at what promises to be a fascinating book on the war – Christopher Clark’s ‘the Sleepwalkers’. I learned in minutes a hugely important thing that I had never known.  We very nearly did stay out. And I mean very nearly. One of them was that France’s ambassador to London, Paul Cambon, was close to tears of despair a few days before the outbreak of war. Why? Because he was convinced Britain would not enter that war. And his belief was not baseless. At that stage, the Liberal Cabinet had decided that our roles as guarantors of Belgium did *not* oblige us to go to war if Germany invaded. As long as the Germans kept out of the coastal regions round Antwerp, which we had every reason to expect them to do, our national interests were not affected. The events that swung the Cabinet seem to me to have been largely emotional, and to do with short-sighted internal politics, than to do with any calculation of national advantage.

 

Cambon, by the way, would remark after the war that a revolution had taken place in Britain in the years between 1914 and 1918. It simply was not the country it had been.  How right he was. Huge numbers of the best people were dead, and so were centuries of tradition, loyalty, faith and kindness.  In my view it was a revolution we could well have done without, and whose effects we still feel. I treasure the fantasy that at Christmas 1914, the truce in the trenches had spread and spread, across time and distance, until the soldiers of both armies, recognising the whole thing was futile and wrong, piled up their weapons, shook hands and walked home to their wives and children, laughing at the puce-faced ‘statesmen’ who swore and shouted at them to remain at their posts.

 

My father, whose fifth birthday fell three weeks after the outbreak of war, and whose own father was among the few of his generation to come back unscathed (he was sent, by great good fortune, to guard India), was also no pacifist. When he grew up he joined the Navy. But he was fond of quoting Robert Southey’s cunning verse ‘ The Battle of Blenheim’, in which two children , playing on the village green, find ’something large, and smooth and round’ . It is a human skull, and they ask their grandpa what it means. He says there are many such, and he finds them often

 

“…And then the old man shook his head,

And with a natural sigh,

“‘Tis some poor fellow’s skull,” said he,

“Who fell in the great victory.

 

“I find them in the garden,

For there’s many here about;

And often, when I go to plough,

The ploughshare turns them out;

For many thousand men,” said he,

“Were slain in that great victory.”

 

“Now tell us what ‘twas all about,”

Young Peterkin, he cries;

And little Wilhelmine looks up

With wonder-waiting eyes;

“Now tell us all about the war,

And what they fought each other for.”

 

“It was the English,” Kaspar cried,

“Who put the French to rout;

But what they fought each other for,

I could not well make out;

But everybody said,” quoth he,

“That ‘twas a famous victory.

 

“My father lived at Blenheim then,

Yon little stream hard by;

They burnt his dwelling to the ground,

And he was forced to fly;

So with his wife and child he fled,

Nor had he where to rest his head.

 

“With fire and sword the country round

Was wasted far and wide,

And many a childing mother then,

And new-born baby, died;

But things like that, you know, must be

At every famous victory.

 

“They say it was a shocking sight

After the field was won;

For many thousand bodies here

Lay rotting in the sun;

But things like that, you know, must be

After a famous victory.

 

“Great praise the Duke of Marlboro’ won,

And our good Prince Eugene.”

“Why, ‘twas a very wicked thing!”

Said little Wilhelmine.

“Nay, nay, my little girl,” quoth he;

“It was a famous victory.

 

“And everybody praised the Duke

Who this great fight did win.”

“But what good came of it at last?”

Quoth little Peterkin.

“Why, that I cannot tell,” said he;

“But ‘twas a famous victory.”

 

My father used to place special emphasis on the words ‘What good came of it at last?’ By then he’d seen enough of war on the Murmansk convoy run, and learned of the deaths of quite enough old friends from the cheerful, close-knit society that the pre-war Navy had been, and he’d seen his home town, Portsmouth, smashed to bits by bombing. He was by no means convinced that we had really 'won’ the Second World War, as he could see no evidence of victory in the country he returned to. But he never really got round to the final conclusion of all this. I feel that’s my job.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Independent of whom? Independent of what? Our Gullible Media fall for yet another bit of lobbying

Very briefly, how ‘independent’ is the UK Drug Policy Commission (UKDPC), and from whom is it ‘independent’? Is there anyone on this grandiosely named ‘commission’ who is sceptical of the liberalisation agenda? If so, who?

 

Yet this body, which seems to me to be no better than a common or garden pressure group,  is today treated with open-mouthed respect, as if it is some kind of Royal Commission, by several newspapers and (of course) the BBC.

 

Why?

By the way, a short note from an interview with Mr Roger Howard of the UKDPC, on Radio 4’s Today programme

(It begins at 7.51, and is about two minutes in). He said: ‘In some ways we have to acknowledge that over the years the police have gone down this pathway if we look at cannabis warnings. Y’know, there has been a  de jure ( pronounced dee jaw) and de facto decriminalisation [of cannabis]. We’re saying the law needs to catch up with that’.

 

Well, stap me vitals if that point, about the cannabis warning, isn’t exactly the one I keep trying to make.

 

 

The Usual Abuse - Number One in a Series

 Ah well. I know that a number of people will accuse me of ‘complaining’ and having a ‘thin skin’ simply for writing what follows. There is nothing that can be done about them, except to advise them not to bother, and to say once again that all I am trying to do is to set down the facts, and explain to my readers how the modern world works. I am used to it. I am not surprised by it. I am not specially wounded or bothered by it. But I continue to think that it is fundamentally wrong, even so. By describing it carefully and justly,  I hope to make it less likely in future.

 

In this case, we have yet another example of the closed minds of much of the media, and the difficulty of getting any sort of dissenting ideas even discussed, let alone accepted.

 

When I finished my new book on drugs, ‘The war We Never Fought’, I ended the preface by saying: ‘I can only hope that this book manages to open a few generous minds to the truth, while preparing myself for the usual abuse’. I was remembering in particular an intemperately hostile review of my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’ in the ‘Observer’, about 10 years ago, whose author has subsequently apologised to me.

 

Now, in today’s ‘Observer’ I find the following review here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/14/narcomania-review-war-never-fought

 

It is by Nicholas Lezard, an entertaining writer whose articles in the New Statesman I quite enjoy. I have never knowingly met him, have never reviewed any of his books (if he has written any)  nor have I run over his cat on my bicycle, or in any other way given him cause to lower me into a vat of slime. Yet his ‘review’, if it can be granted this status, is, how shall i say? Not necessarily intended to be helpful?.

 

There’s no Court of Literary Appeal to which I can go to get Mr Justice Lezard’s ruling modified or reversed. The last time a writer in that newspaper attacked me, my brief letter in response was not published the following week– a rather shocking breach of a pretty basic convention that you should at least be able to defend yourself, promptly if briefly,  in the letters column when personally assailed in the pages of the paper involved. So, while I shall write in rebuttal, I don’t expect that it will necessarily be published, and I know that if it is, it will leave much unsaid.

 

So I will explain here why this review was inadequate and unjust.

 

I will begin with the sound of the clock striking thirteen, repeatedly, usually a sign that all that has gone before must be mistrusted, and that all that comes hereafter needs to be treated pretty cautiously as well.

 

Mr Lezard first shows that he is slapdash with facts when he says that I work for the Daily Mail. This is an elementary mistake. Lots of uneducated and ignorant people make it, but he has no excuse. He has since tried to explain this by saying that my work appears on the same website as the Daily Mail’s output. I might - sort of - accept this from a half-educated student dwelling in a bedsit in Middlesbrough. But Mr Lezard is a Metropolitan journalist, who well knows the difference between the two papers, and must have noticed that his ‘Observer’ Review  appears on the ‘Guardian’ website. Does this mean his review appeared in ‘the Guardian’. No, it doesn’t.  And the frontier between the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday is far more distinct than that between the Guardian and its Sunday sister paper (Mr Lezard, for instance, writes for the ‘Observer’ and for the ’Guardian’. I have never written anything for the Daily Mail).   

 

I think he has made this error because in the earlier part of the review, as full of praise for a book he agrees with as he is full of bile for mine, he makes a crowd-pleasing and juvenile attack on the Daily Mail.

 

But then Mr Lezard’s grandfather clock strikes thirteen again. And this is rather more serious. He writes ‘By his own account [he means my own account], he [me] has not even touched a drop of alcohol since he was 15’.

 

Regular readers here will know that (to the horror of one contributor, who views this as a monstrous debauch) I was until recently consuming half a bottle of red wine a night. And I have often discussed this matter here, if anyone wanted to check. Or he could have rung me up if he wanted to check. I’m easy to find. True, in recent years I’ve found I don’t have the capacity for so much wine any more, and can barely manage a glass, perhaps two or three times a week. But ‘not even touched a drop of alcohol since he was 15’? What is the origin of this claim? And worse, what is the origin of the suggestion that I made this claim? I really must ask Mr Lezard to explain. And I will keep on asking until he does.

 

Now, there’s another thing about reviewing books. I try, as hard as I can, to read from cover to cover any book I plan to review. Sometimes this is technically difficult, as with a book of Philip Larkin’s poetry , interspersed with other writings, that I recently reviewed  for an American magazine. In the end I wrote an essay about Larkin, and praised the book for its valuable, unique resources. But if it is a book of sustained argument, biography, history or (come to that) fiction, then you have to read it properly before you review it. This is particularly important if you want to give it a pasting. Heavens, how I struggled to get through the denser Marxising of Eric Hobsbawm’s last collection. But I did, till my head hurt and my brain glazed over.

 

You will now see why this is important.

 

Ding! The clock strikes thirteen again. For Mr Lezard haughtily takes me to task for referring to ‘this clique of “modern unconventionals” (the clumsy coinage is Hitchens’s, and wears thin even sooner than you might have expected)’.

 

Well, if Mr Lezard will turn to page 70, he will find that the coinage was not in fact mine, but Richard Crossman’s, and that I had a purpose in using it, because of its application to a significant and influential section of Britain’s leftist intelligentsia, who in the 1930s had privately begun to adopt the morality for which radicals propagandised in the 1960s, and which is regrettably common today. He will find that, in a letter to Zita Baker (with whom Crossman had an adulterous affair, and who aborted his baby before the pair eventually married), Crossman described them both as ‘modern unconventionals’. Not long before this, Crossman is thought to have had an affair with the poet Stephen Spender. Adultery, abortion and homosexuality - modern and unconventional indeed, in 1938. I am sorry Mr Lezard doesn’t like the expression, but he will have to find some way of communicating his disapproval to its inventor, Richard Crossman.

 

Alas, wrongly blaming me for the phrase in a slapdash review, and then hilariously attacking me for a ‘clumsy coinage’ which is specifically not my own, will not achieve this. Mr Lezard needs to explain. I shall keep on asking him to do so, until he does.

 

Ding! Now it is thirteen o’clock yet again. He partially quotes me as saying ‘It would be wrong to attribute Crossman’s moral attitudes to the entire Labour intellectual hierarchy.’ He then (without in any way giving the context) finishes the statement with the words ‘But not wrong to attribute them to some, or most of the intellectual hierarchy’. He then denounces this as a ‘weaselly formulation’ (well he , says ‘formation’, but I am sure he meant ‘formulation’).

 

Why does he do this?

This is how the passage actually continues :  ‘But it would be fair to say that most of them would have been happy with the label ‘modern unconventionals’, and – like many of their equivalents today – would have seen nothing very wrong in a little self-stupefaction. But they would not have wanted to say so in public.’

 

This passage follows a reference to the famous episode when Crossman was among several leading Labour Party figures who, having been correctly accused of drinking heavily while at a conference in Italy, sued the Spectator magazine for libel, perjured themselves in court and won substantial damages. Crossman confirmed the truth of the allegations in his own diaries (and elsewhere, see below) . Thus those involved were drunk, sought to conceal it to avoid the wrath of voters, and then lied in court for gain.

 

As Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote in the ‘Guardian’ of 18th March 2000 ‘In 1957, an article in the Spectator skittishly suggested that three Labour politicians had been drinking a good deal at a Socialist conference in Venice. The three, Aneurin Bevan, Richard Crossman and Morgan Phillips, sued, testified on oath to their sobriety, and won large damages. Fifteen years later, Crossman boasted (in my presence) that they had indeed all been toping heavily, and that at least one of them had been blind drunk.’

 

I see nothing weaselly in drawing conclusions from that about the moral attitudes of the Labour elite. Nor, given the drinking involved, is it irrelevant to attitudes towards drugs.

 

Ding! Mr Lezard’s clock strikes thirteen again. In a crude and abusive summary of my argument, he suggests that I rely on the concept of the silent majority (‘of which he presumably includes himself, not that silence is the overwhelming impression one has one contemplating him’, oh ha ha).

 

Nowhere in the book do I use the phrase. In fact I strive as hard as I can to avoid it all times, being unconvinced that my view is held by the majority, and unconvinced that a majority validates an opinion. Nor do I think I am part of any such thing. What I do say is ‘despite decades of propaganda for decriminalisation and “harm reduction” policies, many voters refuse to accept that the legalisation of cannabis is a wise or good aim. They are supported by several international treaties, which still bind the British government to maintain laws against certain named drugs. That is why the legalisation of drugs in this country has been pursued so dishonestly, and so stealthily.’

 

Note the ‘many’. Not ‘most’. Not the ‘silent majority’. Just ’many’. Also note the point about the treaties. Does Mr Lezard doubt the truth of this?

 

Now we come to the single nastiest part of the review. It runs thus, first quoting me : ‘I think it is fair to say, in the light of these facts" (says Hitchens, although none of the reality-based statements made in the previous few pages have anything to do with what he goes on to say) "that the current campaign for legalisation, or what is euphemistically described as 'regulation', of some illegal drugs is based either on grave ignorance of the issues, or upon deliberate dishonesty."

No, it is not fair to say. As I have said, Hitchens is an honest man. But he knows nothing whereof he speaks; ‘

 

Right.

 

The passage in question appears on page 59. This is the sixth page of a chapter entitled ‘what about alcohol and tobacco, then?’, addressing an argument often put forward by defenders of drug liberalisation. Immediately before this passage I discuss the reasons for the failure of American ( and Iranian, and Soviet) alcohol prohibition, the dismantling of alcohol restrictions in this country, the former success of the temperance movement here, the 1915 licensing laws, the government’s ‘harm reduction’ approach to cannabis, the contrasting flint-like nature of the state’s campaign against cigarettes.

As for the pages before that, they deal with a rebuttal of the 'Harm Principle' argument, a diuscussion of the connection between cananbis and violence, a comparison of the present pro-cannabis campaign with the 1950s and 1960s attempts to defend cigarette smoking from evidence that it was dangerous, and a discussion of the connection between cannabis use and mental illness.

If Mr Lezard cannot see what these things have to do with the issue of legalisation  (so often advocated on the basis that ‘prohibition does not work’) then he needs to pay a bit more attention.  I think he needs to pay more attention in general.

Readers of his ‘review’ will have little idea of what the book is about or of what it contains. Can that possibly be good?

 

 

 

Savile's secret is finally out. But what about all the other lies?

What else are they keeping from you? I now discover that I am almost the only journalist who didn’t know that Jimmy Savile was a child molester.

If they all knew, why didn’t they tell you? And what, exactly, is the point of the police investigating the misdeeds of a corpse? What will they do if they find a case to answer? Refer it to the CPS? Put his cadaver on trial and send it to prison?

Well, let them explain all that. What’s much, much more important is that you now know that there is a lot going on that nobody tells you.

They don’t tell you because they’re scared that very rich men can use the libel courts to ruin those who tell the truth about them.

Remember Robert Maxwell? He’s dead, too. But do you think he has no living equivalents?

They don’t tell you because there are powerful commercial or political interests involved. Or because journalists themselves have bad consciences. Or because a lie is much more comforting and convenient than the truth.

That is why the risky drugging of healthy children, said to have the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’, continues, rather than being exposed for what it is by an angry press.

It is why the myth of ‘dyslexia’, which hides the deliberate refusal of our schools to teach reading by tried and effective methods, is still current.

It is why very senior politicians are not properly questioned or pursued about their own use of illegal drugs, not in their teens or student years, but during their adult lives.

It is why our political parties, fraudulent, bought-and-paid-for and secretly scornful of their own voters, repeatedly betraying their supporters’ dearest wishes, survive long after they should have been used for landfill.

It is why the country is carpeted with worse-than-useless windmills, and why the fanatical false religion of man-made global warming is the faith that nobody dares to question.

If Jimmy Savile’s long and uninterrupted career of despicable crime teaches us anything, it is to hold hard to that old but reliable motto ‘Never Believe Anything Until It Has Been Officially Denied’.


Cameron steals the applause of real heroes

Party conference speeches have always been unfit for human consumption. But the Prime Minister’s performance last week was specially repulsive.

It wasn’t just the repeated lie that he used Britain’s veto in Brussels. It wasn’t his attempt to appropriate the Queen. It wasn’t just the faintly distasteful way in which he referred to what really ought to be personal matters.

The bit that filled me with cold fury, and had me trying very hard not to swear at the TV screen, or to hurl objects at it, was Mr Slippery’s reference to the members of the Armed Forces who have died in Afghanistan.

It should never be forgotten that in 2009, Mr Slippery bought the support of the Murdoch press by fervently endorsing this futile deployment. By doing so, he condemned many people, far better than he, to death or to severe lifelong disability.

If he had not sold his tongue to The Sun, and if he had had the courage to do as Canada did, and put an end to the bloodshed, many of them would now be alive or whole.

So it is a shocking shame for him to have the nerve to use these honoured dead to trigger a standing ovation at a political rally for his dying, divided and discredited party.

When he departs public life in 2015, I hope he devotes quite a lot of time to atoning for this.


I don't want to fight a burglar

The new ‘tough’ Injustice Secretary, Christopher Grayling, promises us the freedom to do horrid things to burglars.

This betrays a doltish misunderstanding of the problem. I don’t know about Mr Grayling, but I’m not that confident of winning a fight with a rangy, drugged-up young thief on the landing in the middle of the night. I simply don’t want him to be there at all.

And that means a combination of swift, severe deterrent punishment in austere prisons (which the Useless Tories don’t believe in), and a police force that patrols on foot again (which they also don’t believe in). These people have nothing useful to say.



Well, I suppose we can be grateful that the EU didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Economics. And, like you, I can hardly stop laughing at the award of the Peace Prize.

But there is a sense in which the EU has brought peace. It has done so by allowing France, and more recently Britain, to pretend to be independent powers, while actually being vassals of Germany.

And it has allowed Germany to be the imperial ruler of Europe while pretending to be a Europeanised, neutered nothingness.



Prescribe this for your GP

You might not expect me and Dr Ben Goldacre to be allies. I think it fair to say that Dr Goldacre, famous for his exposures of ‘bad science’, sees himself as a man of the Left.

But Mr Goldacre’s new book, Bad Pharma, exposes the appalling abuse of our trust by the big drug companies, which suppress unwelcome results from clinical trials, and which market remedies on the basis of myths.

Try this: ‘Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients.’

It gets worse. Analysis is flawed – by design – to make the drugs look better than they are. The results tend to favour the makers. When those makers don’t like research results, they are allowed to hide them. Yes, they really are.

This is an immensely important book, with vast implications for our health – and if your GP hasn’t read it, you should insist that he or she does so, soon.



I am still waiting for Edward Miliband’s office to tell me if the Labour leader was given private tuition during his time at a comprehensive school. It’s now 11 days since I asked. Any former tutors, if they exist, are very welcome to get in touch.



The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, asks: ‘How can we justify giving flats to young people who have never worked, when working people twice their age are still living with their parents because they can’t afford their first home?’

How indeed? Yet as long as the State aggressively subsidises fatherless families, and as long as the Tory Party slanders opponents of this mad policy as ‘persecuting single mothers’, it will go on, and the results will be as bad as they have always been.

Mr Narey Should Give a Proper Response on Capital Punishment . Then we can discuss DNA

Mr Narey tells me that he didn’t think it necessary to respond to my previous posting on the death penalty - much of which was a detailed rebuttal of, and interrogation of his first article.  he says he didn't think there was 'much left' in the capital punishment debate.That’s why he’s moved straight on to DNA.

I disagree.  I think there's a lot left. I am happy to discuss compulsory DNA registration, and do so below. But first I will re-post here the central part of my riposte to him, urging him to reply to what I said. I am, frankly, amazed that he doesn't think there's anything to deal with here. If he concedes my points, then well and good. Otherwise, I'd like to continue the argument. If he won't,  I'll assume he's waving a white flag of surrender.

‘What one needs to establish are common measures of the sort of crimes that a death penalty might be expected to deter. I would define these as murders, or acts of extreme violence, undertaken by calculating people either in pursuit of another crime, or to silence witnesses, or to intimidate opponents. These might feature in the crime figures as murders, manslaughters, attempted murders or serious wounding. I’d add those done under the influence of drink or drugs, because I think a fear of the gallows might deter people from deliberately destroying their own inhibitions by voluntarily-ingested chemicals. Nicholas Ingram, the British-born murderer whose execution I witnessed, was said to have been under the influence of drink and/or drugs at the time he committed his crime. The law quite rightly did not see that as an excuse. If it did, the consequences would be large – and in my view bad.
 
In the same spirit, I would add the habitual carrying of lethal weapons, be they guns or knives, by criminals as a crime that could be deterred by an effective death penalty. Other sorts of murderous violence are probably so irrational that deterrence wouldn’t influence them.
 
So my first direct question to Mr Narey is ‘Does he accept the above description of crimes which might reasonably be deterred, if a death penalty deterred?’ If not, what would he add or subtract? Mr Narey says :’Punishment offers very little by the way of deterrence. I made no apology for treating those we incarcerate with decency and dignity. It’s about imposing our values, not succumbing to the values of those who harm and steal from others.’
 
*** PH : I reply: ‘ In what way is treating prisoners austerely , compelling them to work hard, and making their conditions so disagreeable that they will not wish to return to prison ‘succumbing to the values of those who harm and steal from others’?
Mr Narey then says : ‘But there would have been an interesting moral challenge to my determination to make prisons more decent places if the various experiments in the last thirty years with austere and physically demanding regimes had deterred offending. But they didn’t.’’

**PH ‘I am most interested in this statement. What were these experiments? Preferably without referring us to inaccessible journals written in Martian, can he tell us where and when they took place and for how long, what the controls were against which they were tested, and what happened? ‘
 
One can, by contrast examine the state of crime in this country when the prisons of England were in general places of austerity, discipline and hard work. Crime was much lower (see my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’) and so was the prison population.
 
Mr Narey says : ‘Offenders, overwhelmingly, don’t believe they will get caught. That is what we need to change. It can be done. The simplest example of that is the way that the habit of drinking and driving, something which countless law abiding individuals indulged in, was changed by the spectre of the breathalyser. It was never the case that there was a significant chance of being stopped on the way home from the pub. But individuals believed there was and this particular type of criminality diminished remarkably.’
 
**PH: ‘ My recollection of the introduction of the breathalyser is that the police made very great use of it at the start, and that many people were indeed caught, most people knew someone who had been, and that the belief in the likelihood of being caught was justified. What's more the penalties wer eimpsoed strictly. Comapre and contrast the feeble enforcement of the law agaisnt using a handheld phone while driving.

Further, is it the case that thieves don’t think they will get *caught*? Or is it the case that they know that even if they are caught, nothing much will happen to them? Mr Narey knows full well that very few people in this country go to prison until they have committed at least a dozen offences, many of which will have been dealt with by ‘cautions’ or various other empty gestures. The fundamental falsehood advanced by the modern Criminal Justice industry is the claim that people become habitual criminals while in prison. No, they become habitual criminals long before they arrive there.
 
He also knows, unless he’s very unobservant, that the Police and the CPS can’t be bothered with spending manpower on offences which are not prosecuted, or which, when prosecuted, result in trivial sentences. The general abandonment of, and devaluation of punishment which accompanied abolition of the death penalty has been followed by a large increase in crime, and a large decrease in penalties. Yet the prisons are bursting.
 
This can only be explained by an increase in the numbers of people ready to risk crimes. This can partly be explained by a failure of deterrence, partly by the general moral decay we are suffering(though that could itself be partly the result of the failure of deterrence) . Mr Narey’s DNA proposals are an interesting confirmation of my view that a society that refuses to punish wrongdoing, and excuses it as a social disease, will become a tyranny of surveillance, in which we are all presumed to be potential criminals and must be subject to intense state supervision for our own good.
 
 In the end, Mr Narey’s argument could also be a case for each of us having a barcode permanently tattooed on our foreheads, so as to make identification easier. In a free society, you may keep the law, and you will never hear from the state at all, which is your servant and your ally in the maintenance of peace and order. Break it, and you are punished hard.
 
In Mr Narey’s society, crime is a disease which anyone may catch at any time from economic conditions, bad housing, child abuse, ‘addiction’ (or whatever other excuse is currently fashionable). Therefore it is wise to assume that all are potential offenders, and to have our fillings, lymph glands, blood groups, DNA, hair follicles and eye colour on file in case they offend.

Well, here I must be subjective. If this idea doesn’t make your blood boil, then in my view there is just something fundamentally wrong with you, and you have no respect or gratitude for our ancestors who squeezed Magna Carta out of King John, forced the abolition of Star Chamber and High Commission, opposed Ship Money, achieved the Petition of Right, established Habeas Corpus, safeguarded jury trial and the presumption of innocence, ended the oppressive use of criminal libel and – perhaps above all – defeated James II’s attempts to make us into a continental despotism and secured the 1689 Bill of Rights. These are the things that make us Englishmen, and which distinguish the English system of liberty from the rest of the world.’
 

 

As for compulsory DNA registration,  It is a high price, in return for not all that much. Mr Narey’s emotive cases are of course examples, above all,  of the failure of the justice system to deter wickedness of the sort he describes. DNA evidence did not prevent these killings.

It is a problem of criminal justice professionals that they see the penal system as an end in itself. But the first purpose of a police and penal system is not to punish. Punishment rarely does any good to the criminal, and does not bring back what the victim, or the victim’s family, have lost. It is there to deter potential criminals from committing crimes.

Fundamentally, like its cousin the Identity Card,  DNA registration changes the nature of the relation between the state and the subject in a way deeply hostile to liberty. It abolishes the presumption of innocence, and demolishes the idea that we are all free men and women under the law, who can and must be assumed to be behaving lawfully unless an accusation can be proved against us before jury of our peers.  With these ideas gone, the overbearing, bullying behaviour common to police forces, and authority in general,  in the unfree world will become universal in this country.

Its miraculous efficacity  is over-rated, it being less accurate and reliable  than sometimes claimed, easily contaminated by professional criminals or incompetent police officers,  and – as one contributor rightly pointed out – it is no great threat to the wicked when it is combined with the other thing Mr Narey supports - a feeble penal system which prosecutes a small minority of crimes and is unwilling to visit serious punishments on those it convicts. It can and (to my knowledge) does promote a certain laziness in the police, who will pursue individuals whose DNA appears to turn up at crime scenes, in defiance of other evidence or of strong circumstantial reasons why the person involved could not possibly be the culprit ( see an instance in my Channel Four film on this subject).

 

 

What's Socialist about State Ownership? Beats Me

Is State Ownership Socialist? Why? What is the logic that leads people to believe this?

One of the things I have striven hard to do is to destroy the lazy view that the left is in some way wedded to state ownership, while it is in some way conservative to want the winds of the free market to whistle and howl, unobstructed, across the landscape.

The left’s real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social. They lead to a powerful state. This not because they actively set out to achieve one. many leftists fondly imagine they are rebels against authority, and liberators of mankind.  It is because the left’s ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers. Without these things, society becomes anarchic, chaotic, lustful and violent – unless it is very heavily policed and supervised.

Left-wingers are also convinced of their own goodness and rightness, and so do not object to acquiring the strong centralised powers, and the freedom to pry into the lives of others, which such an arrangement gives them.  Far from it.

I sought for years for a clear statement of the ideas which motivate the modern left, especially the 1960s New Left, which marched alongside sex, drugs and rock and roll, and which later came to embrace the various sexual revolutions of our time, and what is called political correctness.

But I came to the conclusion, in the end, that it was a negative force, not a positive one. It was based above all on the angry rejection of the ideas of Protestant Christianity. This is what distinguished it from the modest and often Christian-based reform movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, on whose shoulders the modern left perches and squawks. It arose not out of any great desire, but out of the slow but relentless decline, now a collapse, of Christianity as a moral and intellectual power in Britain.

The shape of atheism in each modern society is a mirror of the religion which has previously dominated that society. There is, I think, such a  thing as a Protestant atheist, as distinct from a Roman Catholic or an Orthodox atheist. There are even Anglican atheists (such as my late brother Christopher, Professor Richard Dawkins and the author, Philip Pullman).

Much of their thinking is simply oppositional.  The nation state is opposed because it was a conservative force. The monoculture is opposed because it, too, was religious and conservative. (This leads, paradoxically, to th ecouragement or at least the appeasement of Islam).  Rigorous, authoritative education is opposed, at the moment,  because it is (or was) the education of the conservative enemy. That is why Oxford and Cambridge Universities are doomed to be comprehensivised, and so ruined,  even though they are valuable national assets. Likewise the grammar schools had to be smashed, because they reinforced the middle class, and encouraged individual liberation from poverty. The left wanted to liberate people, but only if they could be told exactly how they would be liberated, and by whom, and in what way - and if they could be persuaded to think they owed their liberation to the left. Grammar schools were the opposite of that. Why, their products might thtink they had freed themselves.

If the British revolution ever ends,  it will probably become quite stern about school discipline, and very strong on a sort of crude ‘law and order’  with heavy-handed policing, ASBOs, parents made responsible for the misdeeds of their children (while simultaneously having been rendered powerless to discipline them) . Something of this kind, a sort of social counter-revolution, did take place in Stalin’s USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Even the policy on abortion was reversed (to the shock of foreign radicals, who had admired the slaughter of innocents from afar, and longed to emulate it here) , because Stalin foresaw an urgent need for cannon-fodder in the near future. The social radicals who had been powerful immediately after the revolution were pushed to one side, and in fact never fully recovered their position, as the USSR became the chief nation of a warlike and authoritarian empire, whose reactionary, chauvinistic nationalism –in the end – outdid that of 19th century Prussia.

Nationalisation of industry has never had much to do with radical leftism. Whyever should it? (something similar could be said of the all-encompassing welfare state, pioneered by Otto von Bismarck in Imperial Germany, to try to checkmate Social Democracy, and also by enlightened business men such as the Rowntrees and Lord Leverhulme).

Most continental countries nationalised railways as a matter of course, as they saw them as strategic assets which could not be left to the caprice of the market. Even the most laissez-faire countries have tended to nationalise railways in fact, if not in name, during wartime. I simply cannot see what is socialist or radical about this. As I have pointed out before here, Charles II nationalised the British post office, Neville Chamberlain nationalised electricity generation and supply, Eisenhower nationalised American Interstate Highways (on the absurd pretext that their main purpose was as evacuation routes in a nuclear war).  Margaret Thatcher nationalised local government. Michael Gove is currently nationalising English and Welsh schools, though the ‘academy’ scheme. Roy Jenkins nationalised the police, through compulsory force mergers and the creation of central bodies which selected and trained chief officers, and gave the Home Office more or less total operational power over them. Successive labour and Tory governments have been nationalising the magistrates courts, replacing local JPs with centrally-appointed ‘District Judges’, and closing small and convenient local courthouses.

Many of these measures  (though not officially described as nationalisation) are far more intrusive in the lives of individuals, and more potent menaces to freedom , than the nationalisation of the 8.45 from Guildford to London Waterloo. Yet Telegraph-reading persons get far more worked up about state-owned trains than they do about a central state police, or by state interference between parents and children. Why? Because they don’t think, that’s why. 

The left in Britain lost interest in nationalisation after the 1945-51 government. It did not produce the utopia that the trades unions had hoped for – there were often severe conflicts between the unions and the nationalised industries.  Meanwhile the Soviet experiment which had seemed in the days of Yuri Gagarin to have something to offer, had turned out in the end to be an unproductive mess (though in my experience the Soviet railways were quite good, an d could be a pleasure to travel on,  as were those of several of the Warsaw Pact countries. The old Czech dining cars were particularly enjoyable, as were the Mitropa restaurant cars that ran between Hanover and Berlin, but I digress).

The point is that the connection between the left and nationalisation was a brief marriage of convenience, mainly driven by the temporary dominance of the unions, which ended long ago. The danger now comes from a completely different direction, as Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland made clear long ago. The problem with British political conservatism is that it is largely thought-free, never had any ideas of its own and so cannot understand the ideas or aims of its enemies. That is why, as Al Johnson rightly pointed out in Birmingham this week, the main function of Tory governments is to clear up (or try to clear up, it’s like the Augean stables now) the economic mess made by Labour. Al failed to add that, once they have finished, Labour then comes back to continue making a mess of the economy. But that’s not Labour’s main purpose. New Labour’s main purpose is the creation of the post-Christian society its leaders yearn for.  It could end up having privatised railways, just as long as it had nationalised private life.

People really should learn to distinguish between propaganda and truth, and to penetrate the disguises in which history advances itself.

An Interview with the London Evening Standard

Some of you may be interested in reading an interview I recently gave to Richard Godwin of the London Evening Standard. It can be found here

It's inevitable, I think, that I'm both pleased at the attention, and irritated by some aspects of the interview. This time, I have the opportunity to offer a small critique and riposte. Here it is, in no particular order. Mr Godwin (who drank mint tea during our encounter) appears to think coffee is comparable to cannabis and alcohol. It isn't.  Is he a Mormon?  He hasn't quite got my hangover problem right. The 1971 Act didn't make cannabis illegal. It already was.  It changed the way in which it was illegal.  And then there are the inevitable sausage-machine questions about my brother, asked and answered so many times before in one shape or another. Did I spend 'much of my life' at war with him? Depends what you mean by 'much', I suppose. As for 'tearing into each other' on debating platforms, we debated three times (Conway Hall, 1999,  Grand Rapids 2008 and Washington DC 2009 ) , and I'd say that all three were pretty courteous, and good-humoured.  .  Plus ...thrill of horror here 'He (me) wants to bring back....hanging!'(Automatic bad person alert! Huge credit to interviewer for being prepared to share the same airspace as such a despicable pariah! Say no more!).  

I'm not quite sure what this 'vision for the country' may be, which 'sounds like Downton Abbey'. I have no vision for the country. I admit my cause is lost.  And even when I made a joke (about Rimbaud) he was convinced that I was being serious.

And I recollect a couple of passages differently from the writer. It's Cancer of the Oesophagus that I said was a family disease, not excess. Excess doesn't really make sense in the context, does it? And the children skinning up on buses - which I have seen in Oxford as it happens  - were nearer thirteen than ten. That could just be a mishearing of the tape, though.

He may have misunderstood the point of my answer about the whisky and cigarettes. I was trying to say that being admired for smoking and drinking might not necessarily be a good thing for the person being admired.

 And did I really say I was against all forms of self-indulgence? That was a hostage to fortune, if so. And why does an unwillingness to forgive yourself for past stupid mistakes 'deny the concept of learning from your mistakes'. I should have thought that you stopped learning from them as soon as you started excusing yourself for them, or minimising them. As the Prayer Book confession at Holy Communion expresses it 'The remembrance of them is grievous unto us. The burden of them is intolerable'. That's the point of Divine Grace. You are forgiven for those things of which your conscience is afraid, and for which you cannot forgive yourself. Not much use explaining that to metropolitan liberals, though, I suppose. Divine? It's an expression used by Noel Coward. Grace?  It's a girl's name.

Still, why quibble too much?  It's the first time the Evening Standard has ever come close to reviewing any of my books, in more than ten years.