Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 299

Martin Narey's second contribution - on DNA

THis is Mr Narey's second contribution, following his earlier posting on the death penalty. I will respond when time allows.

 

The case for a National DNA database

Almost exactly twenty-nine years ago, Colette Aram, a 16-year-old trainee hairdresser from Keyworth in Nottinghamshire was abducted, raped and strangled.  The case was so shocking that it featured on the first ever edition of Crimewatch. There were a few clues and at the outset of the investigation the police must have been confident they’d get their man. They had a stolen red Ford Fiesta and a paper towel used by someone who had eaten a ham sandwich in a nearby pub and was noticed to have blood under his fingernails. But the killer was confident that he would not be caught and – chillingly - left a handwritten message to that effect. He was right to be confident. Despite a massive police operation and the interviewing of twenty thousand individuals, and for twenty-seven years, he remained free.
Then, in June 2008, the murderer’s 19-year-old son was arrested for careless and inconsiderate driving. He was photographed by the police who also took his fingerprints and a DNA sample by swabbing his cheek.
A few months later the driver’s DNA profile was flagged as a close but not perfect match to the profile of the probable killer of Colette. Plainly, he wasn’t the killer; Colette had been savagely murdered before he was born. But his father and two uncles were arrested and had their DNA taken. And in December 1978, just six months after his son had been stopped for careless driving, 51 year old Paul Hutchinson, pleaded guilty to murdering Colette and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Detections of crime due to the presence of DNA are increasing. Between 01 April and 30 June of this year the National DNA Database produced 29 matches to murder, 91 to rapes and 6,094 to other crime scenes. Since 1998, more than 300,000 crimes have been detected with the aid of the Database

But the potential of the database is limited by the fact that it is incomplete. Had all adults in the UK been required to provide a DNA sample, a relatively minor inconvenience, then we would not have had to wait for Colette’s murderer’s son to drive inconsiderately before his father was brought to justice.

The database is not a panacea. It will not stop a large amount of low-level crime committed generally by young people who are reckless about the chances of getting caught. But I believe that it will act as a deterrent to those contemplating serious offences, including sexual offences. Some sex offending is opportunist. But some of the gravest crimes are meticulously planned and the victim sometimes murdered to prevent apprehension. DNA makes that hateful ploy much less likely to be successful and, with its help, convictions can nowadays be obtained whether or not a body is found.

My proposal that all adults should contribute to a national DNA database appears to enrage Mr Hitchens: “If this idea doesn’t make your blood boil, then in my view there is just something fundamentally wrong with you.” But why, when he’s aware that DNA evidence can secure liberty as well as bring it to an end for the guilty. DNA evidence led to the conviction of Robert Nipper for Rachel Nickell’s murder bit simultaneously exonerated Colin Stagg.

We live in a society where we all bear inconveniences for the maintenance of public order. We accept curbs on our liberty in a myriad of ways. Contributing to a national DNA database would, by a fraction, increase those curbs. But it would also not only aid the detection of serious crime it would deter serious crime. It would save the lives of girls like Colette Aram.

 

Why Nationalised Railways Would be Better

Ben Holmes writes : ’I really do not see the benefits of nationalisation for the rail industry. What makes this particular industry so special that Mr Hitchens would rather have this nationalised, yet would not accept the nationalisation of major energy industries such as coal? What makes him so confident that the poor service, lame apologies, closures at every possible turn, would cease under a government that manages public services incompetently and at enormous expense? Not to mention that due to the restricted nature of train travel, it is a far less convenient mode of transport than cars or even buses, as they only come along at certain times and you must plan your journey around them. With cars you can come and go as you please. You are given a greater degree of freedom. I do not believe that the railways can meet the needs of modern Britain, which requires a greater degree of precision and speed than trains will allow.’

I don’t know why Mr Holmes thinks I am against the nationalisation of major energy industries. I think there was a case for nationalising coal, made in the 1920s and accepted by many people for non-dogmatic reasons. There are many questions about what form of state ownership is best (these days most governments have abandoned the responsibility of ownership, and opted for the power-without-responsibility system of tight regulation, which has virtually abolished accountability. Is this better?

I have always believed that the electric power grid should be nationalised. I think it should be renationalised  as a prelude to an enormous programme of nuclear power station building, without which we face an appalling energy crisis within 20 years.    I also recall that when British Gas was privatised its national monopoly structure was maintained ( and a good thing too).  The Post office’s problems are largely caused by the EU ‘s postal directive, which have robbed Royal Mail (or whatever it is now called) of the premium services which enabled it to cross-subsidise a cheap, efficient and accessible network of letter deliveries and sub post offices. The old pre-EU GPO worked very well. It was nationalised, I think, by that dogmatic Trot, King Charles II.
 
He asks  ‘What makes him (me) so confident that the poor service, lame apologies, closures at every possible turn, would cease under a government that manages public services incompetently and at enormous expense?’

I answer, in itself, nothing. I don’t imagine a nationalised railways system would be perfect, just significantly better.  But privatisation has shown that private ownership does not in any way get rid of these things, which have increased since the sell-off. Thus they are not diseases of nationalisation. In general, the problems of the railways are caused by 80 or so years during which they have been starved of investment, which has been diverted to gigantically subsidised nationalised roads and to air transport, provided with airports and air traffic control by initial state spending,  and vastly subsidised by being exempted from fuel tax . The government subsidy which is given to the railways  (much of it now diverted into the trousers of the train operating companies) allows them to continue to operate, but not to expand in response to demand (in fact they were forced to contract on the eve of a great expansion of population and transport need, by Richard Beeching’s ill-thought-out cuts) , not to electrify the network properly (a task which should have been completed decades ago, and was so completed in comparable European economies).

 

The railways are always apologising because they have been starved in this way. Their ancient diesel engines break down. Their signalling systems are antiquated and unreliable. Their financial structure, and decades of route contraction, compel them to cram as many passengers as possible in smasller and smaller trains. Meanwhile nationalised roads are constantly lavished with funds for expansion, widening and so-called improvement - despite the known fact that their capacity is severely limited, and even with all this spending cannot keep pace with the demand it creates, which tends to do no more than shift bottlenecks about). Railways, being a far more efficient means of transporting people and especially goods, would if expanded give far better returns on investment than roads, and be much better able to keep pace with demand.  

 

The nationalised railways managed to preserve a level of competence in maintenance and management which seems to have eluded the new privatised or semi-privatised companies. I suspect ( see Ian Jack's work on this in that fine book 'The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain') that the two things may be connected. 

 

They also sustained a native industry of locomotive carriage and wagon building which is now almost entirely extinct. They also managed to maintain the track at night and on Sundays, without the levels of disruption now common. 

Mr Holmes adds : ’ Not to mention that due to the restricted nature of train travel, it is a far less convenient mode of transport than cars or even buses, as they only come along at certain times and you must plan your journey around them.’

Well, this isn’t a problem for the Burkeian conservative, who can see nothing wrong in a transport system in which people must apply a small amount of self-discipline in return for more orderly and peaceful society ( which a car-free society certainly would be) . Most car journeys are irrational and unhealthy short-hops which could just as easily be done on foot or by bicycle. But car-owners, who have been compelled or cajoled by the Great Car Economy into buying or leasing these expensive monsters, quickly realise that they spend most of their time depreciating at the roadside, and feel the need to use them a lot to justify their enormous cost.

Cars in modern Britain are also fantasy objects (there’s a book to be written on TV and cinema commercials for cars, which contrive to suggest that the buyer will transform his life in some way if he owns the machine, or simply portray the car as an object of worship, or idol, self-evidently desirable. People who like cars, or think they’re normal  artefacts  live in a sort of Clarkson reverie).

Have car enthusiasts any idea how odd they seem to those who are unconvinced by the merits of the motor car?  They do seem to have an unreasoning attachment to these things which even Freud might have some difficulty explaining.  I’ve yet to see a car advertisement that portrays the car’s use in this country use honestly,  ie, parked in the rain for most of its life, losing value while being of no use, and cluttering up a large area of urban space, , then  stuck in a traffic jam, or series of traffic jams,  and then searching for ages for a parking space close to one’s destination rather than parking where a space actually is, and walking , say, half a mile to the destination. During all this time, the owner and his family are suffering chronic declining health owing to their being spared the need to take basic exercise,  an apparent convenience which will end in avoidable heart disease, the driver is developing lower back problems, and the car must be fuelled by oil imported from the most appalling despotisms on earth. Not to mention what happens if there’s a crash. Which is much, much more common in cars than in trains.

Mr Holmes says : ‘With cars you can come and go as you please. You are given a greater degree of freedom. I do not believe that the railways can meet the needs of modern Britain, which requires a greater degree of precision and speed than trains will allow.’

Well, the car owner can, up to a point, come and go as he or she pleases (traffic jams, roadworks and jammed-up car parks permitting) . Though if you design and subsidise a transport system around his or her needs, you leave out what I believe is the majority of the population which either does not own a car or cannot drive.  This freedom’ is restricted to the car owner, and deprives the non-owner of the freedom to live without constant engine and tyre noise, or without constant dirtying of the air with petrol and diesel fumes,  or without constant danger on the roads from large erratically-driven hunks of steel , glass and rubber which are as safe or unsafe (for the passenger, the pedestrian or  cyclist) as the driver who happens to be at the wheel at the time, and variable according to the driver’s temper, mental state, drink and drug tastes, and sleep patterns. To be modern  isn't necessarily to be more civilised than old-fashioned Britain was. Modern often means noisy, cheap, bland, throwaway.

Then there’s the problem of goods , which are pushed on to road by the heavy subsidies paid into maintaining and constantly extending  the nationalised road system by the taxpayer, compared with the pitifully inadequate subsidies provided for  maintaining rail freight transport (and hardly ever for extending it) .

As for ‘precision’, the reopening of many closed railway lines (and German-style rules compelling factories and warehouses which are close to railway lines to maintain sidings permitting rail freight access) would make the railways a good deal more precise (just as sensible restrictions on the use of  heavy lorries in populated areas would make the roads less so). I cannot for the life of me work out what he means by suggesting that roads allow greater speeds than railways. I should have thought this was simply untrue.

 

 

 

Riding my Bicycle in a 'Smug, Racist Way', and first thoughts on Birmingham

I was in Cambridge on Sunday and Monday for an interesting conference on youth crime, at which I was the more or less lone spokesman for the British people. Cambridge is one of my favourite places on the planet,  which I first saw in 1963, where I went to boarding school between 1965 and 1967 and which I have visited countless times since. A reader complains that it is false for me to call Oxford and Cambridge ‘serene’ because of the mass tourism, half-witted town planning, ill-mannered modern architecture and slimy commercial greed which have done so much damage to both places.

Well, I was in fact referring to the past, when they were still linked by a railway line, in another country now as vanished as the lost City of Atlantis. But even so, the wise traveller knows that, in the depths of winter or in the still of the very early morning, these two places regain their mystery and beauty, and are still – if you know what they mean and what they are for – among the great sights of the world. Those who come to see them with understanding can still see that, through the mess. Others, bussed there in ignorance, unable to see their point or unwilling to recognise that they were, above all, built to the Glory of God, will experience nothing more than a theme park.

Anyway, as seemed sensible to me, I took my bike with me on the train, so that I could get round the town easily, quickly, quietly and cleanly. But the Twitter Mob were there before me. One person has recorded on the Electronic Mob Site that I ride my bicycle in a ‘smug, racist way’.  I wonder if someone could explain to me how I would have done this. Smugness I’ll confess to. Why try to deny such an accusation? Everyone’s smug from time to time.  But then we come to Racism.

This word,  as most people who read my words know by now,  is an expression which appears to mean one thing (racial bigotry) but actually means another (cultural and moral conservatism) . It cloaks a real attack in a false accusation. The real attack would,  if challenged require a real debate on what - if anything – is wrong with cultural and moral conservatism, and why the accuser thinks so. That would be interesting, and would compel the attacker to engage in actual discussion.  It cloaks it by camouflaging it with a false and defamatory suggestion that the cultural and moral conservative is (axiomatically) a racial bigot.  Thus, there’s no argument. The person dismissed as a ‘racist’ is not worthy of inclusion in the human family, and there is no need to debate with him. We can instead despise him. Thus, such people have no need to engage in a proper debate with their opponents. They subject them to what is in effect a citizen’s arrest on behalf of the Thought Police. The offender is carted off and never heard from again.

This, in my view( as explained in detail in my ‘Cameron Delusion’) is the deep reason for the disappearance of the specific word ‘racialism’ used in the 1960s, and its total replacement by the word ‘racism’ .

There are other reasons ‘ Racist’ is easier to shout and easier to scribble on a wall than ‘racialist’. But the real, serious purpose is different, and much more important.

Now, quiet how one rides a bicycle in a ‘racist’ way, I don’t know. If one rode it in a  ‘racialist’ way, that would presumably involve being discourteous and dangerous to people of a different skin colour, an objectively observable and proveable allegation. That’s why this word is so little use to my enemies.  It involves an accusation that can either be proved, or not proven. And that would never do. They’d need to justify it with facts.

‘Racist’, by contrast, is a matter of impression and the subjective prejudice of the accuser who assures himself that ‘people like me’ are morally despicable and seething with irrational hatreds. Oh, the irony.  As the subtext is an attack on cultural conservatism, was the problem that I wasn’t wearing skin tight Lycra shorts and a plastic helmet ? Or perhaps that my bicycle has unfashionable straight handlebars, an even more unfashionable bell and a profoundly unfashionable basket. Maybe my accuser could write in and say.

I am, as I write this, trying to listen to the Prime Minister’s speech to the Conservative Party trade fair and lobbyists’ festival in Birmingham. (By the way, I am sorry some people may have been misled into thinking that I was taking part in a  debate there on Tuesday evening. I turned down the invitation to do this in July, because I had no intention of subjecting myself to the ghastliness of these empty ‘conferences’ again. I am shocked to find that my name still appears on at least one guide to conference fringe events, and I hope nobody as misled by it)

I have found it hard to pay much attention to this oration, since Mr Slippery claimed to have exercised his veto in Brussels during last winter. As readers here will know well, he did no such thing.  There was no proposal made which was of the kind that he could have vetoed, and so he couldn’t and didn’t veto anything. He opted out, and was willingly allowed to do so by the rest of the EU, many of whose members welcomed his opt-out as it suited them too. Really, to claim this act as some sort of defiance of Brussels is on the outer limits of unscrupulousness.   The statement is terminologically inexact. And it is a very poor reflection on my trade that he was allowed to get away with it at the time, and hasn’t been found out since.

It is hard to hear anything else because of the noise I am making grinding my teeth in frustration that this piffle will once again go unchallenged. Now he’s saying that he wants for our children what he wants for his.

Oh, really, is that so? Then somehow everyone can have access to a chic, oversubscribed Church primary school with a tiny catchment and fierce annual competition for places? And later ( assuming he isn’t out of politics and free to go private by then) to some other wholly exceptional establishment which is in fact selective, but pretends not to be?  Exclusively for everyone? Does he believe what he is saying? Does he even think about it?

More analysis of this ghastly event will, I hope follow later.

 

 

 

British Rail Lives On

Time to expand on my column point that British Rail still exists. How do I know? Because the Transport Department tells me so. My discovery came because of my preoccupation (rude people would call it an obsession) with the all-but-abandoned railway line between Oxford and Cambridge.

I am fascinated by this line . It is an amazingly useful strategic piece of track. (or it was)n the only significant East-West railway link in Southern England, a double-track line linking ( or easily able to link) all the main lines out of London (the Great Western Paddington line at Oxford, the Great Central Marylebone line at Bicester or Verney, the Euston London Midland line at Bletchley, the St Pancras Midland line at Bedford, the King’s Cross Line at Sandy , and the Liverpool Street line at Cambridge. It even links ( and in this case still does ) with the Bicester Military railway, a fascinating appendix of our railway system on which I have never travelled.

Properly strengthened and maintained it would have been, and would be a hugely useful part of any sensible goods and passenger network, allowing people and freight to avoid London on long cross country journeys. It was also rather picturesque. I still remember the platform at Marsh Gibbon and Poundon, which seemed to have sunk into the Otmoor swamps (readers of C.S.Lewis’s Narnia stories might have half-expected to find that the station master was a Marsh Wiggle, related to Puddleglum), and which was still lit by gas. It rambled through some of the most English parts of England, not spectacular, just quietly handsome.  It was hallowed by the fact that C.S.Lewis had used it to travel between his Oxford home and his Cambridge academic duties. And in any case, what could be more sensible than a direct link between these two lovely, serene places, which meant that you had no need of a car to travel from one to the other?

Dr Richard Beeching, the murderer of much of Britain’s railways system did not actually recommend that the Oxford-Cambridge line should be closed .  Even he could see the point of it. The decision seems to have been taken by Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister at the time, for reasons which remain unclear. I still think the whole destruction of the national railway heritage in that era, and the involvement of that interesting man, the late Ernest Marples, needs properly explaining.

As was so often the case with 1960s rail closures, a vital section of the line between Bedford and Cambridge was rapidly sold off for development,  so rather coincidentally making a complete restoration very difficult and expensive. But up until privatisation, there was still a functioning railway line between Oxford and Bletchley, and on to Milton Keynes. Goods trains ran, and at Christmas there were even occasional shoppers’ specials from Oxford to Milton Keynes ( which tells you as much about Oxford as a shopping centre as it does about the state of the railways).

I went abroad soon after privatisation, and only gradually became aware that this activity had quietly stopped. Oddly, the short Oxford to Bicester line, the first segment of the route, had reopened, and was doing flourishing business carrying commuters and travellers to the Bicester Village shopping centre.

But at Bicester the trains go no further (though there is a plan to link up with the Marylebone line and run direct trains from London to Oxford by the back way, which may well come to pass).

But what about the rest of it? Before John Major stepped in with his unhinged privatisation scheme , we know there was a functioning track. But now there isn’t. In recent years I have done an annual bicycle ride from Oxford to Cambridge, and for part of the way my route follows the old line. And it has gone. There are large sections which are completely overgrown. Level crossings and signals are no more. In some places it is obvious that the track has been lifted (officially or not, I have yet to find out). In others the vegetation is do sense that it hard to see what has happened. What is certain is that an important national asset has been allowed to decay to the point where it would cost many millions to bring it back to what it  was before, let alone to raise it to modern standards. I find it hard to believe that it would have made more sense to maintain and develop it, and keep running trains, than to let this happen.

So I asked Network Rail (which I thought controlled all the remaining BR track since Railtrack’s unlamented demise)  to explain. At first they were boisterously defensive. Then they came back and said it wasn’t theirs at all, but was still owned by something called British Rail Residuary. Where was this to be found? Why, in the Transport Department. I’ve asked them to explain – they’re preoccupied at the moment with the West Coast Main Line saga, but I will let you know.

It is hard to imagine any serious country allowing such a valuable possession to disappear in this way, and just shows how the British state (which in the past 20 years has spent many millions upgrading roads between Oxford and Cambridge, though it is still a rather horrible journey by car or bus) is uninterested in developing or maintaining a railway network fit for our modern needs.  

 

Which is more sinister - The Swastika or the Hammer and Sickle? Some thoughts on the death of Professor Eric Hobsbawm

Sometimes I see a young person wearing a hammer and sickle badge, or some other trinket of Communist kitsch. And I say to him or her ‘would you wear a swastika? They look at me, baffled. I explain to them that the badge that they are wearing was also worn by guards in terrible, deliberately murderous concentration camps. They look at me blankly, or swear at me. Maybe one day I’ll get through. But I continue to be amazed at the way in which our educated classes – who most certainly know better – excuse the apologists of Stalin when they would never excuse the apologists of Hitler.

 

 I’ve mentioned before that Alan Bennett could write an acclaimed play about the traitor Guy Burgess,(An Englishman abroad’) which was quite sympathetic to Burgess. Imagine what would happen if he did something similar about John Amery, a traitor from the same class who offered his services to Hitler. I think Mr Bennett’s status as National Treasure might be called into question. Not, of course, that it would ever cross his mind to do so. So why did it cross his mind to write the Burgess play? And why did Eric Hobsbawm get a free pass, when he never abandoned his faith in Joseph Stalin? Whereas his sort of equivalent on the other side of the 1930s dogmatic chasm, David Irving, is a reviled outcast. Well, it’s true that Hobsbawm is a better writer and a better historian than Irving. But that’s just not enough. Hobsbawm did at one stage say that Stalin’s murders were ‘shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification’. But on another famous occasion, discussing the matter with Michael Ignatieff, he said the achievement of Communism’s aims would have been worth millions of deaths. Of course, its aims were and are unachievable.

 

Like all such Towers of Babel, they are built on corpses and cemented with human blood, and invariably collapse in horror and failure (usually including the savage deaths of their own designers). It is amazing that any educated, intelligent person born into the 19th or 20th or 21st century could not by now have grasped this. But, leaving that aside, I think the reason why old Communists get a free pass from academia and most of the media is much more straightforward. Stalinist Communism, for all its faults, is seen as the force which ‘saved’ us from Hitler’s National Socialist tyranny. In the end, they turned out to be all right. The trouble is that this is not true. I marked the death of Eric Hobsbawm firstly by boycotting the BBC’s syrupy radio tribute to him , hosted by Simon Schama, who made such a sycophantic twerp of himself that I shall now feel able to ignore his thick works with a clear conscience; secondly by reading the memoirs of Margarete Buber-Neumann ( variously published as ‘Under Two Dictators’ and ‘Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler’); thirdly by taking a trip up to the British Library newspaper library in the wastes of Colindale, there to study the files of the ‘Daily Worker’. I thought I would share this with you. You will see why later.

Margarete Buber-Neumann was the girlfriend (today some people would say ‘partner’) of a prominent German Communist, Heinrich ('Heinz’) Neumann. As such, she was an early and militant opponent of Hitler, though thanks to Stalin, the German Communists had a mad policy of hostility towards the Social Democrats, who should have been their allies, which almost certainly helped Hitler into power. Leaving that aside, Margarete and Heinz ended up in exile in Moscow, where first Heinz and then Margaret were arrested by the NKVD for imaginary thought-crimes, and dragged off to prison in conditions of miserable brutality . Heinz was later murdered, after a secret ’trial’ which of course was no such thing. Margarete (who never found out in her lifetime what had happened to Heinz) was sent off to the vast camp empire of Karaganda, where she toiled as a flea-ridden, half-starved slave labourer among violent convicts and prostitutes. But after the Stalin-Hitler pact, and the erasure of Poland, she was suddenly cleaned up, given proper clothes, fed properly, taken back to Moscow and generally smartened up so as to make her publicly presentable. After several months, she found out why. Along with several other German Communists, she was to form part of a prisoner exchange between Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo. The exchange was made on a bridge over the River Bug at Brest-Litovsk, that most fascinating and ill-omened city. I believe the Gestapo sent some of its prisoners over in exchange, because Stalin wanted to murder them himself, but Margarete did not see them passing.

 

After some months of confused imprisonment, while the Gestapo wondered what to do with her, she found herself in a striped prison uniform marching in bare feet round the National Socialist concentration camp for women at Ravensbrueck. She faced nearly as much hostility from Communist prisoners (who quickly realised that she had broken with their cause, but refused to believe her accounts of what life was really like in the USSR) as she did from the SS Guards. I won’t recount the whole book. Please find it and read it yourselves. We must thank God that she survived to write it. It really ought to be on every school and college reading list. It illustrates perfectly the bankruptcy of all utopian dogmas, and especially the cesspit of utter moral filth, too foul for the gentle English language to describe without a descent into profanity, which lay beneath the grandiose towers and spires of Communism. Communism is , paradoxically, even worse than National Socialism, because of its gross pretence to be a force for good. At least the National Socialists were open about their murderous intentions and about their pagan hatred of the gentleness of Christ. Nobody could really have been surprised when they turned out to be mass murderers. The Communists mocked God and Christianity, but claimed they were better and kinder.

 

Now to the Daily Worker, the organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, as it then was. It wasn’t a bad piece of work, technically, given how short of money they must have been. The design in 1939 was quite snappy and modern (and I’m told the racing tips were among the best available) . Apart from the obvious bits of propaganda, it looked pretty much like a real newspaper. But during August and September 1939 it went completely mad, first slowly, then rapidly. In late August (21st), a headline cried out ‘Get on with that Pact’, but it was in fact a plea for an alliance between the USSR, Britain and France, then being negotiated unsuccessfully in Moscow. What a shock to the comrades, then, that on that very day Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s servile Foreign Minister, flew to Moscow to sign a pact with their hero, Joseph Stalin, and his servile foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. If Israel’s Premier, Benjamin Netanyahu turned up in Teheran tomorrow, posing for a smiling photo-opportunity with Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, it might provide about one tenth of the frisson of shock that this meeting caused round the world. These people genuinely hated each other. Now they were allies.

 

Struggling to absorb this information, the Daily Worker wrote ‘Soviets’ dramatic peace move to halt aggression’. They claimed it was ‘ a victory for peace and socialism against the war plans of fascism and the pro-fascist policies of Chamberlain’ (suddenly you could see why the Comintern (Communist International) always insisted that Hitler was described as ‘fascist’ rather than ‘Nazi’ or ‘National Socialist’. A ‘victory for peace and socialism against the war plans of national socialism’ wouldn’t have sounded quite the same. But by this stage the full criminal foulness of the Stalin-Hitler pact had yet to become apparent. It was just a non-aggression pact, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Just buying time? And so, when Hitler invaded Poland, the Daily Worker forgot the rule about ‘fascists’ and roared patriotically ‘Nazis plunge world into war'. The leadership of the Communist Party equally patriotically published ‘an appeal to the British people to secure military victory over fascism… we are in support of all measures to secure the victory of democracy over fascism’ On the 4th September, after Chamberlain had actually declared war on Germany, the Worker declared it was ‘ a war that can and must be won’ . Not much happened for a bit. On 11th September, the Daily Worker urged ‘a strong attack in the West can save Poland’. It recorded that the Nazis (that word again) had inflicted ‘mass bomb terror over Polish territory’.

 

Then everything went completely haywire. For on 17th September, the Glorious Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army rolled over Poland’s eastern borders and snapped up the parts of the country that Hitler had not already grabbed. Their brains seething with pain, the Daily Worker sub-editors concocted the headline ‘ Soviet counter-blow against Nazis’. Maybe they believed it. Maybe they just desperately hoped it was true . Either way, it wasn’t. One feels for them. They were beginning to discover what it was they had been supporting all these years. But by the 19th, they were printing reports (which may even have been true) that the advancing Red Army was being cheered (some national minorities in Poland were by no means keen on rule from Warsaw, though whether they had any idea what rule from Moscow would mean, who can say?).

 

‘Advancing Red Army Cheered’ said the headline. Beneath, a report spoke of ‘Rapid progress on a 3500 mile front. Millions look East to a new hope of deliverance from terror and war, before the Nazis can reach them’. It may not yet have dawned on them that the Nazis , soon to be ‘fascists’ again, had agreed a demarcation line between the two invading armies, and that then they would hold a joint victory parade in (yes) Brest-Litovsk on 25th September. I could find no account of that parade in the Daily Worker. Maybe it was there, but just not prominent. Reading old newspapers on microfilm is not ideal. On the 20th, the headline shouted ‘RED ARMY TAKE BREAD TO STARVING PEASANTS’ . Maybe they did that too. They were ‘greeted everywhere by the cheers of the working population’ . Maybe they were. By this time, the NKVD secret police squads were already rounding up potential opponents, for deportation and murder, a mirror image of what the Gestapo were doing in the west of the country. You might well cheer, if you thought it would keep you safe from that.

 

And Margarete Buber Neumann, though she probably did not know it, was inching towards the day when she would be handed back to Hitler. 

 

On the 22d September, a headline said ‘Red Army liberates Polish troops’. Having liberated them, it promptly disarmed them, which is not usually what you do to liberated allies. On 25th September ‘Warsaw cries for aid in her agony’ (as indeed it did, but no aid was coming from the USSR, which was busy digesting Eastern Poland into the Soviet system). But this contradictory, confused piffle is at least a sign of people puzzled and dismayed by events they are unwilling fully to understand. The real shock is yet to come. On 30th September the Daily Worker reports ‘an offer of immediate peace', a Soviet-German declaration, seeking the ‘liquidation of the present war between Germany on the one hand, and Great Britain and France on the other’. A statement attributed to the paper’s editorial board said ‘To talk of war to the end, which means wholesale slaughter to the youth of Europe, would be sheer madness’ .

 

By the 5th October they were bolder still ‘We are against the continuance of the war’, said a Communist Party statement. We demand that negotiations be immediately opened for the establishment of peace in Europe’. Britain, in short, should leave the war and sue for peace with Hitler, just a month after declaring war on him. It is hard to think of a more foolish policy, inviting a humiliating peace settlement. It continued ‘We are against the continuance of the war and for immediate peace negotiations’ . In the midst of all this is a pathetic little article, supposedly penned by Harry Pollitt, the relatively honest boilermaker who had been leader of the Communist Party until that point, but who was unable to stomach this policy. Comrade Pollitt actually wrote (or allowed it to be written beneath his name) ‘the decision to remove me [as leader] was correct’. The mental contortions of Marxism-Leninism are here very well expressed. This is a near as you can get to a confession at a show trial, in a free country.  This, remember, was the official newspaper of the Party to which Eric Hobsbawm *at that time* belonged and voluntarily continued to belong, also in a free country. Eric Hobsbawm spoke German, had lived in Berlin and knew in detail what Hitler was.

 

From September 1939 until Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941 (an attack Stalin refused to believe was coming in spite of many reliable intelligence reports), Communists were against the war. Stalin gave shelter to German naval warships in Russian ports (ports later used by my father when the Royal Navy was convoying supplies to the USSR after 1941) .he also supplied vital oil and other war materials to Hitler, right up to the eve of the invasion. If he was ‘buying time’ she showed little sign of it. The deployments of the Soviet defences in June 1941 were hopelessly inadequate, and there is little sign that any serious effort was made to prepare for a German attack. Stalin actually believed in the pact. That’s why he sent Margarete Buber Neumann (and plenty of others) to the Gestapo. Why shouldn’t he have believed in it? Unlike modern British leftists, he knew exactly what Communism was. He saw, in Hitler, a kindred spirit. Why, then, are Communists credited with their purely opportunistic support for the war against Hitler, after June 1941, when their deliberate opposition to it, from 1939-41, is forgotten? Eric Hobsbawm is said to have changed his mind earlier than June 1941, when , after joining the British Army, he found his views being laughed at by working class soldiers. Well, perhaps. He’d certainly have learned to keep quiet in such company. His mind can be known only to him, and he’s not around to explain.

The sheep have stampeded - and they'll sweep Ed straight into No10

Britain’s media pundits make sheep look like rugged individualists. There’s nothing they like so much as bleating the same thing in unison – even if it’s the opposite of what they bleated last night.

This week, as if a switch had been flicked in their brains, they suddenly abandoned David Cameron, around whom they had been fawning loyally for years. And they transferred their loyalties to Edward Miliband.

It’s always more or less the same. The favoured one makes a speech and the word goes out ‘That was a great speech!’, and everyone says and writes that it was. It happened to Mr Slippery in Blackpool in October 2005.

Nobody can now remember what he said (because he didn’t say anything), but if you dared to suggest (as I did) that it wasn’t actually very good, other journalists would turn on you in impatient wrath.

The implication was that I should get with the project. ‘Can’t you see, you fool, that this is the line?’ I was duly punished, in various subtle ways, for my dissent.

I’d seen the same thing with Neil Kinnock and his over-rated attack on the tiny sect called Militant, hailed as if it were one of Churchill’s finest. I’d seen the ceaseless, abominable, shameful praising of the Blair creature and his windy, rather nasty orations.

And I’d also witnessed the moments when the sheep turned feral, rending William Hague, destroying Iain Duncan Smith, ganging up on Gordon Brown as if he had been a war criminal, rather than just another not-very-good politician.

I’d watched with interest their failed attempts to turn Edward Miliband into a second Gordon Brown. I’ve met Mr Miliband. I don’t have any time for his politics, but he’s a normally likeable human being and he was quite right to say clearly that the Iraq War was wrong. That’s why he’s leader, and his pro-war brother isn’t, as anyone who understands the Labour Party knows.

Well, smearing and mockery having failed, let’s try smarm. If the Tories couldn’t win the last Election with Gordon Brown as their opponent, how can they possibly hope to win the next one, after five years of failure, and with no Gordon to kick around?

It’s pretty obvious that Mr Miliband will be the next  Prime Minister, and, in the end, our political media are power-worshippers.

That’s why a vast lake of drivel, slopping lazily backwards and forwards in the autumn winds, has been portrayed as a great speech, and why Mr Miliband will from now on find he has more and more friends he never knew he had.  He shouldn’t expect it to last.

He asked for this

Mr Miliband likes to go on and on and on about how he went to a comprehensive school. He even had the nerve to say: ‘I wouldn’t be standing on this stage today without my comprehensive school education.’

Is that so? Actually, people educated in such schools are rare at the top of politics.
But in any case, does he owe his all to his school? Or did his ultra-Left parents, like so many other dogmatic socialists who are ‘committed to state schooling’, hire private tutors to get him up to Oxbridge standard?

On Wednesday afternoon, I asked Mr Miliband’s office if he had received private tuition. At the time of writing, I have had no reply.

‘One Nation’ was always a fake

The slogan of the washed-up Tory wets who were happy to implement Labour policies for ever. It’s also not true. Britain is plainly several nations.

Above all, there is the gulf between those who work and save, and those who don’t work, don’t save and who live off those who do.

Then there is the gulf between those who make things that people want to buy, and those paid by the state to provide compulsory ‘services’ that are often poor, and frequently actively undesirable. Then there’s the gulf between those who are sick of mass immigration, and want it stopped – and those who actively wish to transform the country with more immigration.

It isn’t one nation. That’s why it isn’t and shouldn’t be a one-party state. But, looking at the policies of all three major parties, you could be forgiven for thinking that we do have only one party, all the uglier for having three heads.

The future of rail, locked in a dusty cell

There is no excuse left for railway privatisation. Sweeteners paid to train firms mean private rail has cost far more to run than nationalised lines ever did. All rail travellers know that it has meant higher fares, and more crowded, slower trains.

Its defenders mistake changes that would have happened anyway for the results of private ownership. BR would have banned smoking too. Higher passenger numbers are caused by rising population and road congestion in the crowded South East.

And I could do without the huge increase in apologies. As a regular rail user, I generally receive a minimum of 20 apologies a week, mostly made by computers, and none of them involving any genuine intention to behave differently in future.

Now, the costly mess of the West Coast franchise – for which we will pay – shows that the whole system is misbegotten. It’s not just that Richard Branson has been mistreated (I never thought I’d say that). It’s that the public have been mistreated. If British Rail came back from the dead, I for one would embrace it with tears in my eyes as a long-lost friend.

But wait. I have discovered that British Rail is not dead at all, but does in fact still exist, and is kept locked in a basement of the Transport Department, just in case. Let it out. Bring it back. All is forgiven.



A footnote to the laughable Channel 4 programme on ‘ecstasy’ last week.

One expert invited to take part, but for some reason not asked to speak, was Professor Derek Moore of the University of East London.

He has completed work that suggests ‘ecstasy’ may damage children in the womb. It found ‘poorer infant mental and motor development at 12 months with significant, persistent neurotoxic effects’ in those whose mothers had taken it while pregnant.

This strikes me as very important, and certainly something all young women should know.



I couldn’t stand Jimmy Savile. But at least his death has helped uncover one of the grossest pieces of hypocrisy in modern times.

Compare and contrast: two great and respected institutions do nothing about child molesting in their midst.

When the institution is the conservative Roman Catholic Church, the BBC cannot shut up about it. When the institution is the liberal, secular BBC, the Corporation mumbles feebly, and cancels its own programme on the subject. It wasn’t the children they cared about, you see.

Whom do the Police Serve? - Part Three

For those who still cling to the ideas that we have a wonderful police force, which it is a wicked sin to criticise, here are two more personal testimonies, which suggest otherwise. Both are reproduced with the permission of the writers, who wish to remain anonymous.

‘The police service today bears no relationship to the service my husband joined in the 1960s aged 19.  He served  for more than 30 years and retired as a Chief Inspector who had experienced IRA terrorism in the 1970s, a serious train crash and the miners' strike in the 1980s,  as well as numerous murders, rapes and the rise of drug related crime.  He wouldn't advise any young man or woman to join up now as over the years we have witnessed the insidious descent into the thuggish organisation it has become now.  Our theory is that society has become mired in so much evil and corruption, it has rubbed off on our police service and they are just as bad as the criminals they are supposed to be protecting us from. ‘

And

‘When I was 18/19 in Autumn 1989 there was a big problem in [a major English city] of youths throwing missiles at passing vehicles.  The local paper had a long campaign to try to find culprits and the police were anxious to put a stop to it.  One Saturday afternoon I was driving a service bus into the city and saw three youths on the side of the dual carriageway hurl a large lump of earth at the side of the bus.  As I was almost slowing to a standstill to an approaching queue, I stopped and gave chase.  I was happy to leave my vehicle and cash with the passengers on board.   I knew many of the passengers by name.  I caught one youth,  frogmarched him back to the bus and took him to the bus station, little more than 500 yards away.  I flagged a security guard to call the police.  In my youthful eagerness I expected the police to arrive, sirens blazing, to make an arrest.  An hour later I was due to depart on a service and left the youth with security. 

Later the following week I received a letter informing me that the boy’s parents wouldn’t be pressing charges against me as the boy’s parents were happy to let it pass.  That was it.  Most passengers on the bus passed me their details as witnesses to the whole event, but the police never bothered.’

 
 

 

Martin Narey attacks the Death Penalty

Readers here may recall that I promised a debate with Mr Martin Narey, on the subject of the death penalty. Mr Narey, now the chief of a major charity, was for some time in charge of English prisons. Here is his first contribution. I will reply to it as soon as time allows.

Mr Narey writes:

'Last week I criticised Peter Hitchens on Twitter over his support for the death penalty and his assertion that its re-introduction here would save lives. I should say that I did so rather rudely and I have apologised to him for that. But I still disagree with him and here, briefly, is my rationale and why I believe that there is another potentially much more effective, but almost as controversial, way of reducing violent crime.

First of all I observe that the debate on the death penalty is often not a debate at all. Individuals on either side take a firm stance and insist that either executions deter or they don’t. In fact the research is inconclusive. This was emphasised just this week by the National Academy of Sciences in the USA, which advised policymakers to be cautious of absolute claims – one way or another - about the deterrent effect of execution. The Academy concluded that:

Studies have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies conclude that executions save large numbers of lives; others conclude that executions actually increase homicides; and still others conclude that executions have no effect on homicide rate.

So, if the evidence is inconclusive, why am I in the anti-death-penalty camp? First of all some background: For twenty-three years I worked in and around prisons and I ran the Prison Service for seven years. So, Yes, I am the same Martin Narey who, as Mr Hitchens put it last week, “used to be a prominent bureaucrat in Britain’s pointless warehousing organisation, known as the prison system?” (there’s actually some validity in that description of the prison system, but that’s another debate).

My experience of offenders is that 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. 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. And the reason they didn’t, in my view, is the same reason that the deterrent of capital punishment wouldn’t work here. And that is that 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.

But in general, offenders, whether those who indulge in theft or those who are violent don’t believe they will be caught. And because of that they don’t contemplate the likely consequences of being caught. And that applies, in my experience, even when the criminality has been so inept that, to you and me, apprehension would always have appeared inevitable.

Most crime is committed by young men. Not always, but very frequently, by young men who have a marked inability to foresee the consequences of their actions. Some more serious offending, including sex offending, is less spontaneous, more carefully planned and with greater effort dedicated to evading justice. But almost all offenders don’t believe they are likely to be caught.

We can begin to change that. We can convince current offenders and future offenders that they are more likely to be caught and we can, in particular, deter violent crime, including murder by requiring all adults, or at least all males, to allow their DNA to be recorded. I know that position holds very little support and that it is seen by many as a wholly unjustified attack on civil liberties. I believe it would be a price worth paying if the person who this week abducted five-year-old April Jones had understood that it was inevitable that his abduction would be revealed by the presence of his DNA.

One final point on the death penalty issue: Quite properly we have a very high standard of proof in the criminal courts. As judges sometimes explain to juries, believing someone probably committed a crime is not sufficient for a finding of guilt. If a finding of guilt for murder were to lead to a death penalty – and assuming of course that the sentence was not subsequently commuted – I believe that juries too nervous of the consequence of their decision would acquit more murderers.'

 

 

'Medical Cannabis' - a Supporter Writes

What follows is a letter I have received from a reader in the USA. I think it offers a much more persuasive case for ’medical cannabis’ than I have ever previously seen – precisely because it is not part of general propaganda for weakening the law. It also shows that there are still major obstacles to its medical use. I think it most interesting, and an example of serious debate in an area where abuse is much more common. The writer prefers to remain anonymous. This is what he wrote:

 

‘Regarding your stance on medicinal cannabis, I took some time this evening to browse through the various arguments you have raised against it on your blog. You have a well laid out case, which your opponents on this issue fail to grasp. They generally met you with what I can only describe as hysterical ranting (I hope that outside of the internet you have encountered more courteous and coherent opponents). While agreeing with you in principle over cannabis (taking it is harmful and objectionable), I have a slightly different perspective that leads me to a different conclusion on the merits of cannabis as a medicine (a necessary evil, like all medicine).

 

I therefore constructed this reply to what I see as your main arguments on the issue of cannabis and why I think there is a good case for medicinal cannabis. I also apologize for the length of what was originally supposed to simply be a courteous acknowledgment of your reply, like I mentioned before I am personally close to this subject and I believe I can if not advance your knowledge at least give a coherent counterargument. Hopefully I do not misrepresent you when I say that your main contentions have to do with the unacknowledged danger of cannabis to mental health, the use of the term medicinal as a red herring by the cannabis lobby and the effectiveness of cannabis as a medicine. The other arguments I found can all be more or less reduced to these three main issues. About the unacknowledged danger, I can only concur that there exists a willing blindness amongst most politicians and the general public to the danger of cannabis use.

 

Cannabis use is very detrimental to adolescents in that it interferes with the normal development of the brain. To what extent this happens and the exact mechanisms behind it are a matter for academics, but it is clear that this is not even a remotely safe or harmless substance. For adults and adolescents alike there is the increased risk of psychosis, which is not only clear from scientific research, but from the amounts of violent incidents were cannabis is involved. Though cannabis is not poisonous in the way alcohol is (there is no such thing as a cannabis overdose) or addictive in the way nicotine or various opiates are (the dependency on cannabis has a different physiological nature), it is by no measure safe. Cannabis is potentially dangerous and the effects become quite clear when a substantial portion of the population administer to themselves large amounts of its most psychoactive variety.

 

 I simply contend that the negative effects of this rampant abuse do not automatically disqualify it as a medicine. The red herring issue is also completely true. The people you refer to as the cannabis lobby use medicinal cannabis as a vehicle to further their agenda of total decriminalization. I agree, but I wouldn't call them a lobby, as this implies a mainly political motive. I much prefer the term cannabis industry because in the hearts of these people greed plays as strong a role as the self-indulgence posing as idealism. We are talking about an industry that employs many thousands of people and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States alone. Not only is this industry immoral in its intentions, but it also often criminal in its operations. Even in countries were the cannabis industry enjoys some form of acceptance by the authorities it often remains mired in crime because it is run by people who are at heart nothing more than petty criminals. This noxious combination of greedy criminals and often selfish 'idealists' has understandably ruined your and any other reasonably minded persons view of 'medicinal' cannabis.

 

The reason that you have never heard anyone advocate medicinal cannabis while disavowing recreational use is because these people are a tiny minority. My estimate is that only a hundred or so people worldwide who reside mostly in academia, government and a few pharmaceutical companies are genuinely interested in medicinal cannabis for its own sake. And even they often make the grave error of mistaking the cannabis industry for their allies, thinking that tagging along with them is a necessary evil to help genuine patients. Even worse is that this tactic is working. The cannabis industry is winning, lawmakers are acquiescing to their demands and the voices of reason are being ignored. However, beneath the disingenuous argument of the cannabis industry and the convenient silence of the well-intentioned minority (though not always voluntary silence, those involved with government projects are somewhat prohibited in expressing their views in public) there exists a genuine case for the pharmaceutical applications of cannabis.

Unfortunately this case has, at least for outsiders, become indistinguishable from the propaganda surrounding this politically charged issue. As to the effectiveness of cannabis you raise several very good points throughout your blog and in your email. The conflicting views about effectiveness, the problems with administering and measuring dosage, these are major problems and I think I can shed some light on them.

 

Concerning the effectiveness, I would argue that especially in the case of afflictions of the nervous system cannabis is uniquely suited to contribute to the health, well-being and overall quality of life for patients. Responsible cannabis use under guidance from a physician can be less harmful and more effective than the combination of different medications that such patients usually receive. For AIDS and cancer patients it has the unique benefit of increasing appetite (often considered a minor effect, not so for these weakened people) and reducing or even eliminating their reliance on other pain medication, including morphine.

 

However it is not the panacea that the cultists claim it is, nor does it cure anything, but it is also not a mere painkiller or psycho-active sedative. The actual claim of pharmaceutical cannabis is that it offers an unique way of influencing the human nervous system. There are studies that support these claims and there are those that deny them. I will not argue those, but as you yourself feel supported in your views about the dangers of cannabis from the correspondence you receive from your readers I can make a similar argument for its benefits. I have met patients and seen even more emails from those whose quality of life has been significantly improved by cannabis. Ranging from MS-patients who managed to stave off their progressing illness for a couple of more years to people who with cannabis managed to control severe muscle-spasms and could finally live ordinary lives. These are ordinary people from all walks of life, not the usual aging Californian hippies who claim they have cured their dog's cancer by feeding it pot-brownies.

 

That leaves us with the other obvious problem: If it is effective then why has nobody succeeded in producing a successful medicine according to the normal pharmaceutical standards? This is the question that lies at the heart of the whole problem. Cannabis has managed to slip through the cracks of modern medicine despite its obvious potency because its effects are not easily traced back to a single active component. Attempts to reduce cannabis to THC, CBD or a combination of the two are doomed to fail. Despite THC and CBD being the main active ingredients the effect of cannabis is dependent on a range of different active agents that are lost in attempts to extract them from the plant. This also the key to the success of cannabis, in that it offers a range of subtle effects besides its obvious psycho-active qualities. Modern pharmaceutical strains emphasize these effects while reducing the more dangerous psycho-active effects.

 

The foolish habit of smoking of cannabis and the ridiculous cannabis cuisine are an unfortunate consequence of the simple fact that the only effective way to administer cannabis is through ingesting it. Attempts are being made to manufacture a more traditional pill or extract, but a solution to this problem is not foreseeable in the immediate future. Administering a measured dosage is possible, but only through the use of a vaporizer and using completely standardized cannabis, the latter which is currently only available in the Netherlands. Admittedly cannabis still does not fit very comfortably in the mould of modern medicine and is in dire need of more research effort, but I do not think it will completely fit any time soon. One could argue that these problems are grounds enough to reject cannabis as a viable medicine, mostly on the grounds that it still features too much unknown risks to be considered as an alternative to more established treatments. Against this I would argue that for a specific group of patients the huge benefits clearly outweigh the problems and that pharmaceutical cannabis would actually be less harmful and more effective than the medication they are currently taking. Cannabis offers a unique way of tackling problems with the human nervous system that no other medicine can emulate and it would be shameful if it was relegated to being a political prop in the ongoing culture wars. I hope that this long reply has not wasted your time and maybe given you a new insight in the mind of at least one of the supporters of medicinal cannabis. But please, do keep on spoiling the party for people like Russell Brand and the rest of that lot in your lovely country.

My First Reply to Martin Narey

Mr Narey is right that very few people enter the death penalty debate with any interest in changing their minds. I am a former longstanding opponent of the death penalty, who reluctantly changed his mind over many years, and even then took some time to admit this in public. I know full well that most educated people in Western countries now believe that support for capital punishment is a personal failing.

To them ( and not all that long ago it was so for me) It is not a point of view like any other, but a test of whether the person involved is decent and civilised, or cruel and barbaric. Imagine, therefore, the difficulty I had in admitting that I could no longer sustain my opposition. And imagine my impatience with the snooty scorn of my former allies, who had now become my opponents. Even so, I am used to it, and generally swim grimly through the curling waves of rhetorical slurry which come sloshing towards me whenever I raise the matter. I long ago gave up any hope of achieving the proper restoration of capital punishment in this country. If it does happen, it will happen under a populist despotism, in conditions I cannot possibly support. I only engage in the argument as an exercise in moral courage, because I’m not prepared to be silenced by abuse.

 

Anyway, to Mr Narey’s case. The research isn’t as inconclusive as all that. 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 George Orwell so magnificently said (though he didn’t quite like to see it through to its conclusion) : ‘..the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with barbarities and anachronisms. Our criminal law is as out-of-date as the muskets in the Tower. Over against the Nazi Storm Trooper you have got to set that typically English figure, the hanging judge, some gouty old bully with his mind rooted in the nineteenth century, handing out savage sentences. In England people are still hanged by the neck and flogged with the cat o’ nine tails. Both of these punishments are obscene as well as cruel, but there has never been any genuinely popular outcry against them. People accept them (and Dartmoor, and Borstal) almost as they accept the weather. They are part of “the law”, which is assumed to be unalterable.

‘Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in “the law” as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible. ‘It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like “They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong”, or “They can’t do that; it’s against the law”, are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of Conscientious Objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a “miscarriage of British justice”. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

 ‘An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is “just the same as” or “just as bad as” totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you.

 

'Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all-but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horsehair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.’