Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 304

The War We Never Fought

 Here is an extract from my
forthcoming book ‘The War we Never Fought’, about the non-existent ‘war on
drugs’ which this country has pretended to fight for the past 40 years. Two
groups of people gain from this fraud. The first are the government, which
fools the public into thinking it is seriously trying to interdict the use of
illegal drugs. The second are the legalisers, who falsely claim that tough
enforcement (which they misleadingly describe as ‘prohibition’) has failed, and
that therefore all laws against drug possession should be scrapped.  

 

I don’t expect, and will not
get, a reasoned response to this book from either of these groups, both of whom
have a powerful interest in maintaining the Big Lie of the ‘War on Drugs’. But
I hope the book will prove useful to anyone who is actually interested in the
truth of the matter. The extract begins here :

 

 

THE DAY BRITAIN LOST THE WAR ON DRUGS

 

The British Establishment formally surrendered to the drugs culture at a
Cabinet meeting shortly before lunch on Thursday, February 26, 1970.



It was the quiet end of a war that had been surprisingly brief and gentle, if
not actually phoney.



Since that date there has been no serious official resistance to the view
that the use of drugs, especially cannabis, is inevitable and not specially
damaging.



It is generally accepted that those who use them are either the pitiable
victims of others or are pursuing a reasonable pleasure that is no business
of the State.



There has been an near-hysterical official hostility to the production and
sale of the same drugs. But this hostility is made almost entirely futile by
the law's leniency towards those who buy the very substance whose supply and
sale is considered so villainous.



This contradictory, self-defeating hysteria has successfully given the
impression - to credulous and illinformed observers - that a non-existent 'War
against Drugs' is taking place.



The idea is spread, in debate and in popular TV dramas such as The Wire, that
most of the evils caused by drug abuse would end if we legalised drugs.



This change, it is argued, would break the connection between drugs and
criminal gangs. It would also enable drugs to be sold in 'safe' quantities
and without 'impurities'.



This argument claims that the law, not the drug, is the problem.



A moment's thought shows that this argument is ridiculous.



In one sense, all crimes are caused by laws.



But the logic of 'less law, less crime' leaves out the issue of crime's
unpleasant effects on its victims.



It does not consider that there might be good reasons for laws against
cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine and heroin.



The drugs named in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 are illegal for a simple
reason.



The State still accepts that, even in their pure form, there is no safe dose.



Leaving aside its possible but unmeasured effects on mental health, cocaine,
especially in its smoked form, has serious effects on the heart.



In powder form it can physically destroy the user's nose.



It is also associated with strokes, brain haemorrhages, hypothermia, agitated
delirium, cardiac arrest, irregular heart rhythm and convulsions.



It might make people behave more badly than they would if they had not taken
it: in an analysis of 1,000 people arrested for violent offences in Greater
Manchester, more than 400 tested positive for cocaine use.



Heroin is likewise extremely bad for the user's metabolism, general health
and longevity, most especially if needles are shared with other users, as
they often are.



Large-scale habitual users of all these drugs often (although not always)
make themselves unfit for productive work. They become at one and the same
time devoted to an expensive pleasure and unable to work to pay for it
because they are either too stupefied or too agitated by the desire for more.



This is why they so often take to ruthless thieving, often from their own
close family, and increasingly from the taxpayer, who provides them with
methadone, a substitute pleasure.



This combination of costly indulgence and disinclination to work is surely
one we should not encourage.



But how else, apart from laws forbidding and punishing its possession, are we
to do so effectively?



Indulgence and so-called 'treatment' has certainly not done so.



Rather than compel the criminal drug user to abandon his habit, the
authorities force bus drivers, postmen, doctors, nurses and school dinner
ladies to buy stupefying drugs for criminal parasites, who would otherwise
steal directly to obtain them.



The phrase 'legalised theft' can seldom have been more apt.



The annual national bill for supplying drug-takers with methadone is roughly
£300million, not much less than the £380million spent on trying to control
the supply of illegal drugs.



The law has failed to deter, because it was severely weakened by the Cabinet
decision of February 1970, and was from that time no longer really intended
to discourage the use of any illegal drugs.



It has been particularly weak against cannabis, because that drug has been
given a special official status, which suggests to users that it is in some
way 'safer' than other illegal drugs.



Cannabis has, from time to time, been reclassified from 'B' to 'C' and back
to 'B'.



But the significant part of the classification is the implication that -
officially - cannabis is less risky than the bogeymen of the narcotic world,
the Class 'A' substances such as heroin, LSD and cocaine.



The truth, if ever we find it out for certain, is more likely to be that
cannabis carries a greater risk of irreversible damage than heroin or
cocaine, and is at least as dangerous to the user's mental health as LSD, if
not more so.



The cannabis user can cause terrible distress to others.



He could wreck his life and the lives of his friends and close family through
irreversible mental illness.



He could destroy his good prospects.



Its use by teenagers is associated with under-achievement in school.



Many who fail in school go on to fail in life, and so become an unquenchable
grief to those who love them, and a costly burden to us all.



Campaigners for cannabis legalisation often claim that the drug, especially
in comparison with alcohol, promotes peaceful behaviour.



I am unconvinced by this broad claim, partly because of the frequent
newspaper accounts of violent acts by people who are known cannabis users.



In some but by no means all of these cases, cannabis has been u s e d with
alcohol.



This is not, I believe, uncommon among cannabis users and it must remain a
matter of speculation which of the two drugs had the greater influence, or
whether it was the combination of the two that destroyed the individual's
inhibitions.



There are also several cases, which I have for the most part set aside, of
killings by mentally ill people who have been taking cannabis.



It is not possible to say whether they were ill in the first place because of
cannabis, or whether they were already ill for some other reason, and
cannabis has made their problems worse.



This raises the question of alcohol, a horribly damaging and dangerous drug
which - being legal - devastates the lives of millions.



If alcohol had recently been invented and was as widely used as cannabis is
now in our society, I would support the most severe legal measures to
penalise its use and drive it out of our society.



But alcohol is too wellestablished here for such measures to work.



A key part of this debate is involved here. Once a substance is legalised, it
is extremely difficult to declare that it is illegal.



That is why we should be so careful about legalising currently illegal drugs.




If this turns out to be a mistake, it will not easily be put right.



In the late Sixties and early Seventies there remained a stubborn and very
large section of the population that still held to the old values.



Even now, in the second decade of the 21st Century, a powerful minority (I
suspect it is a dwindling one) remains unreformed on the subject of drugs.
However, as the restrictions of wartime weakened and the post-war generation
got its hands on the controls of cultural power, a few rich, successful,
famous and glamorous people began to take drugs.



They enjoyed them, believed they did them no harm and saw no reason why they
should not continue to do so.



A strange series of events was to align these rather trivial and silly people
with a very serious campaign to change the world. The campaign began in 1967.




It exploded into prominence with an extraordinary full-page advertisement in
The Times on July 24 of that year.



The Times, then, was a newspaper whose reputation was far greater than it is
possible to imagine now.



The advertisement called for the legalisation of cannabis, and bore the
signatures of all four members of The Beatles (each mentioning their recently
awarded MBE decorations), the artists John Piper and David Hockney, the Tory
politician Jonathan Aitken, the Nobel prizewinner Francis Crick, Labour MPs
Brian Walden and Tom Driberg, theatre director Peter Brook, TV producer Tony
Garnett, the novelist Graham Greene, broadcaster David Dimbleby, the
revolutionary student leader Tariq Ali, journalist and TV presenter Brian
Inglis, the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, the publisher Tom Maschler, the
psychiatrists Anthony Storr and R.D. Laing, the philosopher Alasdair
MacIntyre, among several others.



Many celebrities still endorse the unending campaign for weaker drugs laws or
the sympathetic treatment of drug abusers. Businessman Sir Richard Branson is
an open supporter. So is comedian Russell Brand, who was invited to testify
to the Commons Home Affairs Committee. He argued for decriminalisation of
drug possession, and said heroin abusers should be treated with compassion.



The Times advertisement coincided with the other drug drama of 1967: the
arrest of two of the Rolling Stones.



Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were first imprisoned and then rapidly
released on bail pending appeal.



The day after their release, the famous 'Who Breaks a Butterfly On a Wheel'
(the headline misquoted Alexander Pope's line 'upon a wheel') leading article
was published in The Times.



William Rees-Mogg, the editor at the time, thought Jagger's possession of an
amphetamine bought abroad was not serious.



Something certainly changed the general attitude towards drugs, which had
been confined to insignificant fringe minorities for the first two-thirds of
the 20th Century. Although it is hard to believe now, Britain had no
significant drug problem at all before 1964.



According to the Wootton Report (whose full and significant title was 'Report
of the Hallucinogens sub-committee of the Advisory Committee on Drug
Dependence', published on January 3, 1969), United Kingdom convictions for
cannabis possession stood at four in the whole year of 1945, rising to 79 in
1950, 235 in 1960 and 626 in 1965.



Then something happened.



In 1966, the figure almost doubled to 1,119, and in 1967 doubled again to
2,393.



Government figures show a rapid increase in cannabis arrests in the United
Kingdom, from 51 in 1957 to 2,393 in 1967. By 1972, they would reach 12,599.



Yet these figures are as nothing to those that followed the full
implementation of the Wootton Report.



By 2009 there would be almost 163,000 cannabis arrests in England and Wales
alone. And these would take place despite a general lack of interest by the
police in troubling cannabis users at all.



Baroness Wootton was the pioneer Leftwing battleaxe.



Her greatest and most damaging achievement in a long life of radical campaigning
would be to give official force to the baseless and scientifically absurd
belief that cannabis is a 'soft' drug, not to be bracketed with 'hard'
substances such as cocaine and heroin.



Her committee invented the system, unique to Britain, of classification,
which has ever since been part of the country's drug laws. Its bias leaps
from almost every page.



This was evident to the then Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, who acted to
forestall the report before it was published. He said on January 23, 1969 in
the House of Commons: 'To reduce the penalties for possession, sale or supply
of cannabis would be bound to lead people to think that the Government takes
a less than serious view of the effects of drug taking.'



It is almost impossible to believe that Callaghan willingly submitted to
defeat at the hands of his Cabinet colleagues a year later at that meeting in
February 1970.



It was the only time the Labour Cabinet ever split on class lines.



The party's working-class trade unionists wanted to carry on the fight. Its
middle-class, universityeducated radicals wanted to give in.



The middle class won, as they have almost ever since, in Labour's internal
squabbles.



And their decision would be endorsed by Ted Heath's even more middle-class
Tory Cabinet six months later.



The Bill, which became the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, had survived a General
Election and passed from a Labour government to a Tory government.



Here is what Jim Callaghan said as his own Bill, which he had reluctantly
piloted to the Commons, returned there under new management: 'The plain truth
is, as far as I know it and as far as the most recent market research that I
have seen has gone, that over 90 per cent of young people are in favour of
stringent penalties against those who smoke "pot".'



So ended the last serious argument ever to be offered by a senior member of
the British Establishment, against the de facto legalisation of one of the
most dangerous drugs known to man.



The War We Never Fought, by Peter Hitchens, is published by Bloomsbury
priced £16.99.

 

Victoria’s Secret, Part Two

I gather from twitter that Victoria Coren couldn’t be
bothered to read (or reply to) my response to her ‘Observer’ article last week.
Well, if that was too much of an effort, she has an alternative. 

I
wrote a brief letter to the ‘Observer’, explaining my objections to what she
had said. I had hoped that newspaper, once the standard-bearer of civilised,
fair-minded  liberalism, and respected by many for its correct and
courageous refusal to back the Suez invasion,  would publish this epistle.
But it hasn’t ( and since every letter in this week’s paper referred to a
week-old article, and none to any from further back in time,  I suspect it
now won’t).

 

So, for those who can’t be doing with my lengthy dissections
of Miss Coren’s article (including her, apparently ) here is the letter:

 

‘Victoria Coren (‘Don’t be nice to addicts. Be fair’
19.08.12) makes several mistaken assumptions about my beliefs and opinions on
illegal drugs. May I correct them?  I have no wish to ‘hate’ heroin
abusers. It is the action I loathe, not the person. You do not have to be
indulgent to be compassionate. I do not want to put people in prison for its
own sake.  If deterrents are effective, and people understand that they are
real,  they rarely need to be used. Unlike her, I don’t wish to instruct
my opponents, peremptorily, to agree with me. I just want them to consider my
arguments rationally, and to rebut them (if they can) with facts and logic
rather than with personal abuse.  

Our 'A-grade' children can't even manage a paper round

How we used to jeer at the Soviet Union for claiming record tractor production, record wheat production and record economic growth.

These fatuous lies were obvious falsehoods, in a country where the fields were full of weeds, the factories rusty museums of incompetence and waste, and life a series of queues for rare, wonky consumer goods and unfresh food.

But our own official figures are now just as laughably false. The worst of all are the annual claims that our schools are producing a new generation of brilliant wonder-children.
Tory MP: Graham Stuart said 'the standard of performance is better than it's ever been, the teaching's better and the children are cleverer than ever before'

A Tory MP called Graham Stuart, who as chairman of the House of Commons Education Committee ought to know better, actually said on the radio on Thursday: ‘The standard of performance is better than it’s ever been, the teaching’s better and the children are cleverer than ever before.’

Presumably that’s why my local newsagents now employ pensioners to deliver papers, and most of the hard-graft jobs for young people in this country are done by migrants from Eastern Europe. Our own children are just too clever to do paper rounds, or work on a building site.

If Mr Stuart is typical of our lawmakers, it strikes me that they too could all be profitably replaced by pensioners or Poles.

Does he really believe what he says?

For more than a decade, people like me have been abused and denounced because we dared to point out that British school standards were falling, and that our benchmark examinations were being watered down.

There was good evidence for this. The Engineering Council noted 12 years ago that maths standards at A-level had fallen by objective measures. They blamed a softer syllabus.

Durham University, by equally objective methods, found a similar rise in grades – unmatched by a rise in standards – in other subjects.

Now our case is absolutely proved, by the sudden halt in ever-improving grades. This was caused by a simple warning from the government, requiring the exam boards to show that any more ‘improvement’ was justified by better-quality work.

And yet the lies continue.

The BBC, which in my view rightly doubts George Osborne’s pitiful economic policies, has never questioned the absurd Stalinist claims of our education industry, or our equally ridiculous crime figures, apparently compiled in Toytown by Noddy and Mr Plod.

That is because the causes of our wretched education standards, and of our ever-increasing disorder, lie in the failed Left-wing policies of the Sixties.

The BBC passionately supports these policies, and the Tory Party has adopted them just as their utter failure has become evident to anyone with a spark of intelligence.

Trust me, this is much more fun than Las Vegas

I thought we were now agreed that what people did behind their bedroom doors was none of our business.

In that case, it seems to me that all of us, reactionary dinosaurs like me, and the wildest liberals, must accept that what Prince Harry does in a hotel room is his affair. I’m much more distressed that a member of the Royal Family should visit that smelly, tacky, Godless colony of tat, brand worship and false hope.

I’d rather spend a week in Novosibirsk than endure another night in Las Vegas.



If you want to know where all the police are, who once patrolled the streets but do so no longer, you can find them hanging about outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

If they really want Julian Assange to come out, why don’t they arrange for the sort of roadworks that everyone else has to put up with?

You know – they dig the road up for six weeks, and then resurface it. Then the gas people come and dig a hole, then the cable people come and dig  a trench, then the electricity people.

By then the water main should have sprung a leak which needs fixing in the middle of the night. By then it’s time to resurface the whole thing. He’d come out.



Forget Moscow, is spying for Brussels the new treachery?

In the days of Kim Philby, British traitors worked for Moscow. Do they now work for Brussels?

Alan Judd, whose clever spy novels suggest a close knowledge of the subject, recently published Uncommon Enemy, in which a Briton is caught telling the French about British negotiating secrets in EU talks. He also points out that this  may well have happened in  real life.

The distinguished U.S. academic, Peter Schweizer, some years ago quoted a retired French spook as saying that a British official spied for the French between about September 1985 and the June 1987 Brussels Summit.

He allegedly passed ‘invaluable’ intelligence to the French on British negotiating positions and was also said to have had his photograph secretly taken with Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission.

Is this true? And is our foreign service in any case as penetrated by Eurofanatics as it once was with Soviet fellow travellers?

It would explain a lot.



Can I put in a plea here for Ken Clarke? Mr Slippery should certainly not sack him as Secretary of State for Injustice.

The great thing about Mr Clarke is that he does not pretend to be what he is not. He is a great big soft soppy liberal who doesn’t believe in punishing criminals and doesn’t care who knows it.

Far better have him doing the job than some slick fraud who makes ‘tough’ speeches about how prison works, while letting prisoners out even more quickly than Ken does.

Maybe if people realise what sort of Government this really is, they’ll do to the Tory Party what really needs to be done to it... provided we can find a big enough wheelie bin.



If people still got married, and sorted out the basics from the start, then we really wouldn’t need George Galloway or anyone else to explain what is and what isn’t rape.

George is cleverer than he gets credit for being, but I suspect bedtime etiquette is not his strong point.



Did you notice that the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, has quietly abandoned his carefully leaked and spun plan to bring back O-levels?

He told the BBC (who else?) that he doesn’t want a two-tier system. Back to one-size-fits-all, and no hope for excellence.

As I said here exactly two months ago: ‘The return of O-levels in England and Wales is as likely as the return of the sabre-toothed tiger.’



Here’s the real reason why the BBC can’t host a statue of George Orwell (Orwell himself would have loathed the idea of such a graven image).

Orwell was neither of the Left nor of the Right, but dedicated to truth at any cost. The BBC, by contrast, can and does distort the truth to serve its Leftist ends.

Syria and Bahrain – what’s the difference?

The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, is very fond of taking a high tone with the Syrian government, as is the BBC. For them it’s a ‘regime’, though they have only quite recently discovered its regimeness, if that is what this quality is called. For decades, when Western liberal opinion had no interest in the Middle East, except in attacking Israel for its many wickednesses, Syria was ignored.

Even after the appalling Nezar Hindawi episode, in which a grisly attempt was made to use a pregnant woman to (unwittingly) take a bomb aboard an Israeli passenger jet, which would probably have blown up over London if the ploy had been successful, Syria was never really regarded as specially wicked.  We broke off relations for a bit, but eventually restored them. Syria was even welcome to US-sponsored attempts to broker a peace deal with Israel over the Golan heights, a more or less hopeless diplomatic waste of time.

Syria stayed out of the West’s bad books even after it was pretty clear that Syrian-sponsored terrorists had been involved in the Lockerbie mass murder. That line of inquiry was dropped because Syria was ‘helpful’ to the West during the first war against Saddam Hussein. It is this but of politics that is the origin of the bizarre and evidence-free subsequent claim that Gadaffi’s Libya was behind that bomb. Amazing what people will believe and continue to believe, when it suits them.

Now, as far as I can make out, Britain and the USA, driven on by Hillary Clinton in a strange emotional spasm which is very hard to square with her militant feminism and youthful leftism, have decided to take the side of Saudi Arabia in the developing division of the Muslim world. That seems to explain why we regard Syria’s repression of anti-government rebels with rage and scorn, and why we regard Bahrain’s repression of its anti-government rebels with complacency and sympathy – Mr Slippery had the King of Bahrain in Downing Street for talks on Thursday, though there was very little fuss or publicity,  six days after Bahrain police beat an unarmed teenager to death . The Bahrain interior Ministry said the dead youth was a ‘terrorist’.

Bahrain is much smaller than Syria, but at least 50 people are believed to have been killed there in street clashes in the last 18 months or so. Some of you may remember, in the early days of the supposed ‘Arab Spring; quite a lot of coverage being given to the demonstrations at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama. Since then there have been credible allegations of torture by the government, hundreds of arrests and what looked to some people rather like an invasion by neighbouring Saudi Arabia, whose forces arrived in British-built vehicles.  A  particularly unpleasant aspect of the repression has been the punishment of doctors for simply treating those wounded in street clashes.

I make no particular judgement on this myself. I don’t hold out much hope for any of these societies becoming law governed or free any time soon. What strikes me is the inconsistency of our own government, and the American government. Note also that the new Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian government recently embarked on some pretty bloody repressions in the Sinai, yet were not accused of ‘killing their own people’ . This odd charge (would it be worse or better if they killed other people’s people?) is usually made against governments which have been selected by the ‘west’ for destabilisation.

The USA’s relationship with Saudi Arabia is very old and very interesting, dating back to a bizarre summit between Franklin Roosevelt and the Saudi King, Ibn Saud,.  aboard an American warship, USS Quincy, in the Great Bitter lake, while Roosevelt was on his way home from the Yalta conference in February 1945. Arab carpets were laid on the Quincy’s steel decks, to make the King feel more at home.

But quite why it should now apparently lead to Britain and the USA supporting the overthrow of governments unsympathetic to Saudi Arabia (while ignoring the defects of Arab governments which are more to Saudi taste) I am not sure.  It may have something to do with our obsessive concern with Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons, many, many years from operational capability. Or it may run deeper. Either way, we need to drain the propaganda and the emotion from this debate, and to have parliamentarians and journalists asking ministers exactly what it is we think we are doing, and why it benefits our national interests.

Meanwhile, several reports from newspapers hitherto sympathetic to the Syrian ‘activists’ have this week recounted how many ordinary and uncommitted Syrians loathe and fear these ‘activists’, who by provoking government retaliation on peaceful neighbourhoods, ruin contented and reasonably happy lives. What for? Why do we think this tragic price is worth paying?

On Having No Sense of Humour

This is an accusation which cuts both ways, and which has some interesting effects. I have actually laughed quite a lot at the po-faced responses which my previous posting (‘What I think about Rape’) produced.  ‘Mr Hitchens! You really have no opinion on rape ! I am shocked!’ etc etc. Thanks to the Internet,  anyone can find out what I have, in the past, said about this interesting subject.  Now who has no sense of humour?

 

My point, perhaps a little satirical, is that it is now more or less futile to offer any sort of reasoned opinion on this subject. There are others, notably homosexuality,  where the same rules apply. Islam is very difficult. For instance, in my recent controversy with a Muslim journalist, I never attempted to provide an exact parallel to his remarks about cattle, in which a fictitious Christian made a fictitious comparable statement about followers of that person’s religion. I did not do so because of the danger that such a parallel might be unscrupulously attributed to me as if I had myself said it, and that enough people would then choose to believe that I had said this for it to do me serious damage.

 

As for the Thought Police,  it is true that the real police do increasingly patrol the boundaries of speech and thought (and those who doubt it are reminded, yet again, of the worrying cases described in my ‘The Abolition of Liberty’, and of the current worthy but probably doomed campaign for the revision of the 1986 Public Order Act). But the imposition of speech codes in public life is generally achieved through different methods. An excellent study of American campus speech codes (‘The Shadow University’) explores the way in which the powerful protections of the First Amendment to the US Constitution have been overridden, in places where speech should above all be free. Similar problems exist in many British universities, where there is no First Amendment, policed by militant student societies.

 

I have described (largely in vain because my howling pack of instinctive critics invariably dismiss it as personal special pleading, or complaining at my ill-fortune,  which it is not)  the demonstrable narrowness of the British book publishing industry.  Anyone here who seriously believes that the BBC is open to all political persuasions just hasn’t been paying attention. Nobody needs to be arrested. Their stuff just isn’t published, or if it is, it languishes in the publisher’s warehouse or in the back of the shop, unreviewed and unread. While the books that are approved of are widely reviewed, placed on display tables, their authors are interviewed in the papers, on BBC radio and on TV, their books become ‘book of the week’ or ‘book at bedtime’ on the BBC and (quite often) those authors are given TV series in which they can promote themselves further.

 

Then there are the broadcasting figures (this is quite common in the USA)  who are suddenly snatched from the air after they have made some unacceptable remark. The point that I was making about rape (some people even asked me if this was a coded statement of agreement with George Galloway. No. ) was that any dissent from a very hard line radical feminist view on this subject is not greeted with reasoned criticism, but with a campaign to drive the person involved out of public life. If you cannot see what is wrong with this, I am at a loss.  The result of this is – as all deterrent enforcements of rules are – an effective restriction on the expression in public of an ever wider range of opinions.  Will I end up in jail for my opinions? If current trends continue,  and I live long enough, I think it quite conceivable. How many things now take place in this country, that were unimaginable and ludicrous a mere 20 years ago?

 

By the way, I get some criticism here for writing long posts.  Nobody has to read them. This blog has almost from the start been an experiment on doing what others don’t do, which I rather enjoy and which I know some readers appreciate.   I have spent many years writing for newspapers with absolute limits on length. I still do so. Here on this weblog I rather enjoy not having such constraints. If I want to dissect and rebut an argument I disagree with, I can do it here at as much length as I want.  In that way, I come to understand my opponents better, and occasionally, they come to understand me better as well. Some people, I know, quite like this. Others don’t. That is as it must be. I cannot please everybody, and don’t seek to.

 

I personally find it useful for clarifying my own thoughts. It also compels me to research and to learn. One result of it is that I am now planning a book, provisionally titled ‘ The Phoney Victory’ which will discuss the national illusions and self-deceptions over the British role in the Second World War. I’m currently reading an excellent book on British-Polish relations in 1939,  and a companion volume by the same author (Anita Prazmowska) about subsequent relations between the two countries. I’d never have done that if it hadn’t been for long discussions we have had here on the subject. I’m also, quite incidentally, deep into ‘A Line in the Sand’  by James Barr, kindly sent to me by a reader, Richard Carey, which explores the extraordinary conflict between Britain and France in the Middle East and which everyone remotely interested in the question should read.  Current French posturing about the wickedness of the Assad regime is particularly ridiculous, in the light of that country’s far-from-gentle record as the colonial power in Damascus. As for William Hague…

 

But of course, if you prefer Twitter, you can always go there, and read its illuminating , if brief, articles, which almost universally agree that Peter Hitchens is a ****, and has no sense of humour. QED.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Mr Rifkind’s Second Remonstrance – and a reply

Hugo Rifkind yesterday posted a response to my retort to him. Here is my reply to that (my answers are interleaved with his original words, and marked with asterisks ***) . 

1)    You ask "what is Nick Griffin doing here?" Well, you argue that his positions have no bearing on yours and that he does not share your principles. I agree with you. That is why I wrote that a traditional view of Britain has been “hijacked by the Nick Griffins of the world” and should not be “discredited by the unwilling association”. This, to me, seems to be exactly what you are saying. I am saying it, too. I am not using him to smear you. I am explicitly using him to say you should not be smeared. Why are we fighting about this?

***This seems to be having it both ways. If you think the traditional view 'shouldn't be discredited by the unwilling association', why mention him at all?  He and his organisation are both busted flushes. They played no significant part in the Olympic controversy.  I think his purpose becomes clear later, as I shall explain. You then give a summary of that sort of Britishness which is patronising, shallow and supercilious (scones, cricket and monarchy, tee hee).

 

2)      I meet quite a lot of conservative opinions, as it happens.

I’m the child of a former Conservative cabinet minister, after all. I frequently manage not to “mutter ‘BNP’, or ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ and shut (my) mind” over Sunday lunch. I did not call you ‘racist!’ or ‘bigot!’ or ‘fascist!’ or ‘homophobe!’ as you seem to suggest. I called you wrong.

*** You'll be lucky to find many conservative opinions anywhere in the Conservative Party, let alone in the regions of it graced by your distinguished and charming parent. I strive, week by week and hour by hour, to dispel this particular delusion, that the Tory party has any connection with conservatism. I even wrote a book about it. I shall have to try harder. And no, you didn't call me any of those things, but you managed, in my view, ever-so-subtly to suggest that my opinions were, well, not quite respectable. But you did so in a willing-to-wound but afraid-to-strike way which made sure you would be miles away once the act was detected. We'll be back to that in a moment. But first I must deal with the assertion 'This is precisely wrong'. 'Wrong' is a pretty absolute word. I use it myself. It's quite easy to employ it when somebody has got his facts wrong. It's legitimate to say that such and such a policy is the 'wrong' way to achieve a certain objective, especially if you can demonstrate that it hasn't worked, explain why it isn't working or risk a prediction that it won't work (if it does, then you're the one who's 'wrong').

But to tell someone his opinion is 'wrong' is another thing altogether. 'Wrong'? You might argue that I was mistaken. But a world in which an opinion is 'wrong' is a world in which another opinion is 'right', and I think we know what sort of world that is. As elsewhere in your article, you don't actually know what you're doing.

First of all, as someone who isn't part of the cultural revolution and who has been opposing and criticising it for decades, I'm in quite a good position to describe how Mr Boyle's festivities strike people of my sort. You're not. How would you know?  Nor do you explain. You just jump straight into a declaration that you admired the show more and more. I don't think you're 'wrong' to have done so. I just think that illustrates the division between us, which might be worth debating. You said 'I don't care if it was propaganda'. I do care that it was propaganda, because my experience of the Soviet Bloc told me that propaganda was (as I said on the radio), a device for telling the losers that they were powerless and beaten.  Nobody believed all those slogans and claims. They just understood that the Party was vaunting its power.  You asserted :' It was the sort of propaganda we need'. Who's 'we'?  Not me. What did 'we' need it for? To say that I'm 'wrong' to hold my opinion is to presume an authority over which opinions may and may not be held which ( fortunately) you don't have. You disagree with me, that's all. The difference is important.

 

3) Frequently, you seem

*** Ah, it's that verb 'seem' again. I know not 'seems'.  Do I, or don't I?

to be suggesting 

*** and that word 'suggesting' that is so often coupled with it. If I have said this, you can take me to task for saying it. Otherwise, let's stick to what has been said.

   that I, or others like me (I am not sure who these people like me are supposed to be, or why I am like them)...

***There are several sorts. There are the deliberate revolutionaries who are openly my enemies, like the New Labour apparatus which tried to stop me asking Mr Blair any questions during the 1997 and 2001 elections, and which actually tried to deny me credentials to attend Labour press conferences  during the 2010 election - Shami Chakrabarti and the NUJ had to intervene on my behalf - and the various left-wing journalists who say rude things about me in their publications, too numerous to mention. And then there are the pseudo-conservatives who got cross with me for failing to join in the Cameroon revolution, so that my books stopped getting reviewed in their publications. Just for instance. Are you like them?  Not sure. I've never met you, though when I read what you write you fit in quite well with the conventional wisdoms I dislike. The article in The Times is evidence that you might well be more specifically critical, though.

...are trying to silence your voice, and voices like yours, or are chiding you for holding the opinions you hold.

*** If 'This is precisely wrong' isn't chiding, I don't know what is. Look, I don't claim to be persecuted. This isn't Alexander Solzhenitsyn territory. I know better than most people how much worse off I could be. But that doesn't mean that some people wouldn't like to shut me up, or that I broadcast less than I'd like to, or that my writings get less attention than they might if I fitted in better with the Zeitgeist. if you have been directly told by a senior BBC executive that you will never be allowed to present a programme on Radio 4 (as I have been) or been subjected to a surprise show trial on that station in your absence (as I have been) or been told by a literary agent introduced to you by a friend that he will not represent you because of the political stance of your book (as has happened to me) or if you have had the same book turned down ( as mine was) by every major publisher in London (it subsequently sold more than 30,000 copies, and was published with reasonable success in the USA), then you might begin to think that you weren't exactly fashionable. Why, even one of my former editors, the delightful Rosie Boycott, said to me 'I think everything you write is complete ****'.  She added a rather nice codicil,  because she's a decent person with a laugh in her, but I'm sure she meant it. And I don't think she's that unrepresentative of the London media classes.

'Emphatically, I am not. Be as wrong as you like, with my blessing.'

***Funny sort of blessing. And why would I come to you to check to see if my opinions were wrong?

 

4)      Regarding Mo Farah and Britishness, you write “unless he means that the new ‘Britishness’ is so loosely defined that it encompasses anyone”. This is precisely what I mean. Well done you.

*** Ah, well, yes, that is an interesting bit. In my view it is the most interesting bit . You wrote : ' Otherwise, Britishness is reduced to a trick for letting the aliens into the club without having to stop calling them aliens — a depository for all the folk whom other British identities still secretly don't want.'

Well, if that is so, what would be so wrong with being, as you said I was : ' somebody who feels that Britishness ought only to be the first of these, and saw a great spectacle designed to usurp it in the national psyche with the second.'

You've said that the second (Spice Girls) sort of Britishness is (if I have you right) ' a trick for letting the aliens into the club, without having to stop calling them aliens - a depository for all the folk whom other British identities secretly don't want'.

Let us be direct here. I cannot see any way of examining this passage without extracting the following meaning: A loosely-defined Britishness allows secretly prejudiced persons to pretend to be inclusive'.

That is surely a pretty grave accusation against this funky formulation. I should have thought it was devastating, actually.

So why would people such as me be 'wrong' to cleave to an older, deeper concept, more comparable (again, as far as I can see from your writing) to the concept of Englishness? Surely, by doing so, I reject any idea of a secret rejection, masquerading as a public acceptance. If I say Mo Farah is British, as I do,  then I am welcoming him into the comity of nationhood fully and without reservation.  Why would I then be  *wrong* to reject a spectacle designed ( as you quite correctly state) to usurp the Britishness we believe in, and replace it in the national psyche with another, inferior version?

And why am I coupled in this with Mr Burley? As it happens, I think Mr Burley was quite innocent in this matter. The Opening Ceremony was indeed a wilderness of multiculturalism, which I and (in his Munich speech of 2011) the Prime Minister regard with some dislike.  It was, as I said on the radio, a moronic inferno. But I don't agree with Mr Burley about the Rolling Stones, and I also don't do Nazi-themed fancy-dress parties ( and I think you'll accept that if Mr Burley hadn't attended a famous party of this kind, his tweet would have gone unremarked). Mr Burley has a similar role in this argument to the one played earlier by Mr Griffin.

Well, I've criticised you for using the word 'seems' and 'suggest' to portray me as having expressed opinions I haven't. So I won't go any further into this rather odd equation myself.  But if you mean what you say, then surely I ought to be complimented for holding fast to a richer, deeper variety of Britishness. Yet I am not. There is an element missing from the calculation. I am not sure that you are conscious of the problem.

So let me strip it to the bone:

Shallow Britishness is bad because it allows bigots to pretend to be tolerant.

Peter Hitchens is against shallow Britishness.

Therefore Peter Hitchens is wrong.

 

5)      You write “As I’ve said to him, I don’t think he has the faintest idea what I really believe.” I’m afraid you are right again. I’ve certainly tried, but your lengthy blog posts and columns perhaps leave it less clear than you imagine. I have thus never taken issue with what you might believe, only with what you actually said.

*** Not sure this is quite correct. See above

 

6)      In the column which so upset you,

***Can we please dispense with this idea that I am 'upset'.  I am not.  Why should I be? I am more used than most people to being disagreed with and criticised.  In quiet moments I can turn to the Internet to see the latest insults. As for Twitter, it is almost touching to see how many people think that the sentence 'Peter Hitchens is a ****' is an argument.  As I so often need to say, I have over the years been insulted by experts.   I didn't challenge your article because I was 'upset' but because I disagreed with it, and it gave me a chance to put my case before a new and wider audience. This patronising dismissal of opponents as 'angry' or upset is a rhetorical trick. Feel free to use it, but don't imagine that it works on me.

I examined your statement that the Olympic opening ceremony had been a political show intent upon "telling people who were not part of the cultural revolution that they had lost". I thought this was wrong. Not disgusting, not old and weird, not a view that should be silenced, just wrong.

***Once again, in a world where an opinion can be classified as 'wrong' , what is the next step?

I disagree with you, Peter. Are we clear on this? I do not thus feel you should be locked away.

***You don't. Some people do. And as our law protects freedom of speech and thought less and less, and there are more and more laws under which speech and writing can be limited (the most pernicious being the Public Order Act of 1986, but see my book 'The Abolition of Liberty' for examples of this process in action), they may well get their wish.

 

7)      Rather, I thought it was, as you say, a reconciliation between a traditional view of Britishness and a modern one. Or, to put it another way, I thought that rather than being a development of New Labour Cool Britannia crassness, it was a reaction against that. The fondness for the past, the reverence for the monarch, the acknowledgment of a mythologised rural past at the core of British identity – all of these things are very anti-New Labour.

****Here I would challenge you directly. New Labour, and its allies among history teachers (see my 'The Abolition of Britain') rewrote the past in a way very similar to Mr Boyle's carnival. And was the treatment of the monarch 'reverent'? I can find you quite a few monarchists, including this one, who thought it part of the transformation of the Queen from a constitutional monarch into the nation's favourite granny, what an old trouper, eh? Dignified? Don't think so.

 

8)      To me, then, Boyle’s vision of Britain encompassed conservatism in a way that Blair’s did not. You write that you are not personally reconciled. That’s fine. You don’t have to be.

***Thank you, sir. Most kind. But who, exactly, are you to give me permission to hold an opinion?

I’m talking about the reconciliation of ideas, rather than the reconciliation of people. You are perfectly free to remain as angry about this as you seem to be about everything else.

***There you go again. Patronising dismissal. You've never met me. You have no idea what makes me angry and I doubt if you ever will.  It is possible for you to accept that someone might feel other emotions than anger about the dismantling of his country?  Sorrow, regret, pain?

 

9)      Like I said, I’m afraid I can’t quite figure out what you mean

by Britishness, or why – or indeed, if – you feel it is distinct from Englishness. I was particularly impressed by the way that Boyle managed to do this, and in a not anti-English manner. If you felt his vision so offensive, I’d love to know how you’d have done it differently. Remember, we’re talking about Britishness unswamped by Englishness here. It’s not easy.

**** Since you ask, I wouldn't have done it at all.    A couple of hymns and some decent 1662 prayers, plus verses 7 and 8 of the 4th Chapter of St Paul's second epistle to Timothy, from the Authorised Version, would seem to me to be all that was needed. Why does an athletics meeting require a political opening ceremony?  Leave that to  less happier lands. Vast vainglorious propaganda displays of this kind seem to me to be, in themselves,  profoundly un-English and indeed un-British. I've seen quite enough of them, in Moscow, East Berlin and Pyongyang.  If you want to get an idea of what I mean by Britishness, take a look at page 92 of the Continuum paperback edition of 'the Abolition of Britain' ( mostly quotations from George Santayana and Rupert Brooke)   . You might also look at page 48 of 'The Rage Against God'  (Continuum 2010)  for a description of the sort of British ceremonial I approve of.                                                            

 

10)   You write, “He is the butterfly upon the road preaching contentment to the toad, I think.” I quibble only with the preaching bit.

What I think about Rape

I have no opinions on rape. It is a subject which can no longer be debated rationally. The Thought Police and the Speech Police will immediately descend, searching for Thought Crime and Speech Crime. Normal rules of rebuttal and consideration of the opposing person’s position simply do not apply. It is not enough to say that someone is wrong and explain why he or she is wrong, expecting a rejoinder.  Instead he or she must lose his or her position, or in some other way be driven from public life. The interesting thing, which - perhaps - can be debated, is why this is so.

Victoria’s Secret

…is that she’s confused about what addiction means, and so cannot say anything sensible about it. The Victoria I’m referring to is Ms Victoria Coren, yet another metropolitan clever-dick who has found his or her way on to the comment circuit long before he or she has had time to become gnarled, world-weary etc.  Photographs show her as anything but gnarled, despite the fact that she is, I’m told, a distinguished poker player, and consorts with alternative comedians, both of which would certainly gnarl me.

 

And I would have ignored her indefinitely had she not decided to lecture me, from a very elevated position indeed,  on the subject of ‘addiction’. She did this here http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/19/victoria-coren-addiction-dont-be-kind-be-fair?newsfeed=true

in ‘The Observer’  an unpopular Sunday newspaper. But I shall now help her to become a bit more gnarled and world-weary.

 

It is an odd lecture. If I have properly understood her, she begins by comparing me to the Wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, thus : ‘On Newsnight, Russell Brand and Peter Hitchens had a pointless row about compassion. They were like Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf (one lustrous-haired and touchingly naive; the other snarling, clawing and evidently harbouring eager thoughts of the severed finger he'd popped in his pocket to eat later).’

 

Eh?  Sometimes you just have to accept that other people’s thought processes are different from your own. I assume I’m not touchingly naïve (thank heaven for that, even if it also means my hair is not lustrous, which indeed it is not). Snarling and clawing? Well, if you didn’t like me, because I have bad opinions and must therefore be a bad person,  you might choose to describe reasonable self-defence in these terms. But putting a severed finger in my pocket to eat later? What? Where did that come from?

 

 

AS for being ‘pointless’. No serious person can dismiss as ‘pointless’ a public argument about principles which makes others think.

 

 

Anyway, it then gets (slightly ) more coherent and to the point. As in : ‘But compassion is irrelevant to the categorising of addiction. Accepting it's an illness doesn't mean you have to care.’

 

**Oddly enough, I should have thought it did mean exactly that. If someone has fallen ill through no fault of his own, you are rather obliged to care, be sympathetic, be concerned in healing him. That’s why the difference is important. If this person has deliberately, having ignored a thousand warnings, inflicted the wound on himself, you must of course still care about his grief and his wound, but in a significantly different way. This raises another simple point;  that those who would use fear of punishment to deter people from self-destruction don’t necessarily lack compassion. They just don’t mix it up with soft-headedness.

 

Ms Coren is apparently giving up smoking tobacco. Good luck to her, I hope very much she succeeds, as I know in some detail what will probably happen to her if she doesn’t.  Many people do give up , though it is obviously extremely hard. The difficulty arises not least because cigarettes are legal, openly on sale in many shops. They are also socially acceptable in many places  (such as poker games,  and for all I know among alternative comedians).  Perhaps that is why, as Theodore Dalrymple says, from his observations of heroin abusers while working as a prison doctor, that it is harder to give up smoking , by some way, than it is to give up heroin.

 

The remorseless logic, or remorseless something-or-other,  continues as follows : ‘They say heroin feels good to begin with. Smoking doesn't. But, if you're a natural addict, you press on.’

 

**Here we go. Into the argument this curious assertion hops, unexplained, simply stated as if an uncontested fact. ‘If you’re a natural addict, you press on’. How many huge questions does this raise? Who is, and who is not ‘ a natural addict’? How does one test objectively for the presence of this condition in the human body? Do ‘natural addicts’ still fall victim to their ‘natural addictions’ in societies that Ms Coren would no doubt regard as ‘repressive’, that is, ones in which people are taught from their earliest youth to control their urges, to delay gratification and to mistrust pleasure that has not been earned? Would the hundreds of thousands of alleged heroin ‘addicts’ in modern Britain have become ‘addicts’ had we maintained the culture,  laws and morals that we had before about 1960? 

 

If these are significant variables, can the phrase ‘natural addict’ have any validity? Human weakness is universal and lies in all of us. Mine is particularly unexciting.  I eat too much (not usually fingers, though) . I could stop if I really wanted to. Sometimes I do. I keep it under reasonable control most of the time. But I don’t care enough to get it fully under control. My guess is that it will kill me only very slowly and not too unpleasantly. It’s also unlikely to make me a burden on other people. But the fault is in me, in that I could try harder if I really wanted to. I can’t blame anyone else. I would despise myself if I did.

 

As for smoking, I think many people start doing it not because of how it feels, but because of how they think it makes them look. The ancient problem of what to do with your hands (and face) in an awkward social situation is solved. The advertisements - when they had them - played quite cleverly on that, getting non-smokers to envy the cool, socially adept, sophisticated person they would become once they began sporting that particular smart packet (don’t believe that isn’t important, especially to women), and lighting that particular brand with a practised flourish. It might make you cough and vomit to start with, but passing through that stage was a necessary step to becoming the new cool you.

 

Now that it’s socially less acceptable, and often banned in resorts of pleasure, and now that everyone knows how dangerous it is, aren’t quite a lot of ‘natural addicts’ either giving it up or never starting? In which case, how natural were they? The phrase doesn’t really help at all. It’s certainly not the objectively scientific term Ms Coren seems to think it is (because it suits her to think so).  As for Heroin users, *nobody*, but *nobody* is ignorant of the risks of this drug, and I believe it takes several goes to reach the stage where you imagine you can’t live without it. So could it be that you just press on because you’re a naturally selfish, thoughtless,  inconsiderate little toad  who places his own pleasure above all other considerations (as most of us are, when the mood takes us)?  How much nicer, though,  to be called a ‘natural addict’ . It takes away the crucial aspect,  that you might yourself have been involved in choosing whether or not to poke a sharp ( and quite possibly dirty) piece of metal into your body and using it to pump an illegal poison into your bloodstream -  which you already knew was a stupid thing to do.

 

 

Ms Coren continues :’Once you're hooked, it still doesn't feel good, but (and here's where we fall in with our junkie cousins) it now makes you feel normal. QED: if you have to take something to feel normal, it doesn't matter if it's a fag or a needle or a Nurofen, you're not well.’

 

**Once again, this is an assertion, and a self-serving one as well. Ms Coren was born, I think , in 1973. Long before she could talk or read, it was established beyond all doubt that smoking was terribly dangerous to your health, and particularly to the health of women. Why, even in my Jurassic childhood I can remember a pair of huge scary billboards outside Portsmouth Town Hall (circa 1962) with the legend ‘Ashes….to Ashes’.  The first showed an ashtray with a lit cigarette. The second portrayed a large urn of human ashes marked ‘RIP’ .

 

She *must* have known what she was doing. I have never quite been able to get out of my mind this fact about many members of my generation. I think the problem with them (the smell of smoke has always repelled me, and my sense of smell has always been very strong. My attempts to start were foredoomed) was that the coolness, the sexual signal (the smoker is surely more worldly, more humorous, more available than the non-smoker, as Hollywood has for years been at pains to suggest) , the ability to satisfy the craving for something to taste without the risk of getting fat, the membership of a club of sophisticates, simply overrode all the warnings, of a peril which seemed so distant anyway. What if we might one day die? We all have to die of something. Ho ho. Well, I know a bit more than I  did then about what cancer does to the human frame towards the end, and it’s my view that we might make a bit more of this in propaganda. It’s quite important, it turns out, which something you die of, not least because dying can take quite a while these days.

 

But of course the advertisements and the general social acceptance made each decision to give up an individual, solitary,  slightly priggish one, and each decision to continue a collective, socially acceptable, even cool one.  I think that has begun to change among educated, professional people, partly thanks to office smoking bans, partly thanks to advertising bans and pub and restuarant bans,  partly because that selfish generation have children of their own and a) want to see them grow and b) don’t want to give them a dreadful example. In a small but limited way ( necessary because it's very hard to ban something in wide use which has always been legal) the threat of the law has helped to reduce this scourge. In the case of heroin and cannabis, already illegal, we have a much wider scope for preventive, deterrent action.

 

Ms Coren declares : ‘Unlike Nurofen, the addict's substance is both treating and creating the agony.’

 

**Agony? Isn’t that putting it a bit high?

 

Ms Coren again’  So every smoker/junkie, however desperate (** ‘desperate’. This overused word needs to be examined every time it’s employed. It has suffered severe inflation. In this case, doesn’t it actually mean , at most ‘ desirous’ . In which case, can’t the person involved control the desire? Of course he can. But he doesn’t want to)  ‘…to keep going, wishes he had never started. If you saw someone repeatedly smashing his arm against a wall, 40 times a day, unable to stop, would you say he was a self-indulgent hedonist? Or would you just know he was ill?

 

**My reply. It’s all very well saying you wish you had never started. But why? Where is the surprise trick ending? What didn’t they tell you?   If you really wished that, you actually wouldn’t have started.  You wanted to start. You did so knowing this would happen. You wanted to. You didn’t care. Likewise, if you really wished to stop, you would stop. The true desire to stop is the heart of all abstinence programmes, as everyone knows. If someone got pleasure or other advantage from the sort of self-harm described, then yes, hedonism could explain it.

 

Then I get :’ Fear not, Peter Hitchens; that doesn't make you Pollyanna.’

**No, indeed. No danger of that .It’s Ms Coren I’m calling Pollyanna, and Mr Brand too.

 

 

Ms Coren :  ‘You can still hate and blame the patient.’

**Who said I hate these people? I’m rather famously (the religion is famous, not me) not allowed to hate people by my religion, a religion Ms Coren may know little about and might well, given her generation and milieu, despise. I don’t presume to know (as she presumes to know so much of my mind) , so I am happy to be corrected if I am mistaken.   I can loathe actions, but never the people that do them. As for the use of the word ‘patient’, once more an assertion not backed by evidence,  this simply assumes a conclusion which is not proved or agreed. How could I blame a patient? But I can blame a wilful criminal, and I do.

Ms Coren  ‘No need to feel compassion’. **On the contrary. But compassion is not the same as indulgence of wrong actions. It may actually require a serious attempt to deter or punish those wrong actions.

 

Ms Coren : ‘but we all benefit from clarity. So: accept that addiction is an illness, then simply admit it's an illness you don't care about.’

**This is perhaps the most threadbare and unattractive part of the whole article. It is similar to Mr Rifkind's recent instruction to me to knuckle under to the new moral and cultural order, apparently because I am in the minority, and unfashionable. It mingles a self-righteous assumption of superior personal goodness on the part of Ms Coren with a shrill series of commands that I must henceforth think as she does because she says so.

 

The superiority is of the usual sort. Only liberals care. I supposedly ‘don’t care’ because I insist that drug abusers have free will. Even on the most basic logic, how can it be said that I ‘don’t care’? It’s a subject on which I have chosen to speak and write many times, amongst other exposing myself to the incessant, smug,  priggish jibes of fashionable liberal know-alls who - despite expensive educations - are so unschooled in moral questions that they have never even considered that there might be a different point of view to theirs. Then there’s that word ‘accept’, used in the imperative.

 

Doesn’t it have about it more than a slight air of ‘I am right! You will obey!’ . Why should I ‘accept’ this, or the other demands she makes below? Where has she proved her case in fact or logic? But she doesn’t need to persuade, for fashion is on her side.

 

Listen to Victoria, ordering me to get my mind right: ’Accept that prison can't possibly be a deterrent for people who are already giving themselves the death penalty’.

 

** Why should I ‘accept’ this proposition? The great wasteland of thoughtlessness in this peremptory stuff is obvious to anyone who can think independently of fashion. From my point of view it’s obvious that if a person has free will,  the real fear of a deterrent punishment will help him or her to decide to stay away from a habit that is nasty and destructive, and which it will take a great deal of effort to shake off. It will also give the criminal justice system the power to threaten unpleasant consequences to those who won’t try to give up, and the power to keep them out of the reach of the drug while they do give up.  It would be ( if we used it ) a perfectly sensible use of the  law for good ends. If we treated the possession of heroin as a crime, then many fewer people would use heroin in the first place.

 

But what if we accept Ms Coren’s fact-free psychobabble, her pseudo-scientific assertion, that ‘addiction’ is a hopeless disease, rooted in an incurable weakness and itself all but incurable too?   All right, let’s do so, for the sake of argument.

 

Surely in that case we are justified in the most fearsome deterrent measures to stop the individual taking the first fatal step. If she really believed what she purports to believe, the logic of her position would lead her to support deterrent punishment, to save these ‘natural addicts’ from what will otherwise be their inescapable fate. I can see no way out of this for Ms Coren. Her own logic is a stronger argument for deterrent punishment of drug possession  than mine is. How compassionate is it, when you can stop someone becoming an ‘addict’ to destroy or undermine the only credible deterrent to this fate?

After that, it just descends into puerile jeering, worthy of Mr Brand himself :’ you're still free to argue that junkies should be in prison, eg because they've committed theft or just look a bit horrible.’

 

Thieves, if properly convicted,  should be in prison for theft. That’s a reasonable statement. How can it possibly be equated, in the mind of an educated person, with the idea that someone should be in prison for looking a ‘bit horrible’ ?

 

By the way, I’m all in favour of abstinence rather than the worse-than-useless Methadone, a worthless and morally destitute scheme under which the government mugs the public on behalf of  drug abusers.  But abstinence that is not backed by deterrent punishment is unlikely to succeed ( as Mr Brand’s own BBC3 programme seemed to demonstrate).

 

I wouldn’t mind so much, but there is no doubt Ms Coren, like Mr Brand,  takes her own self very seriously indeed, and so do some others. So, alas,  we must do so too.

 

 

Pussy Riot and Selective Outrage

You can’t really make excuses for a country with a bullying, overbearing leader, a country that locks up journalists and political opponents of the government. The fact that it has elections doesn’t make it free, does it? Well, no. The country I am in fact describing here is Turkey, which at the last count had 95 journalists behind bars, and where the bizarre and sinister Ergenekon prosecution is a pretext for the arrest (and often lengthy pre-trial detention) of opponents of Mr Erdogan, the country’s bossy, thin-skinned premier. The Economist, and other respectable organs , ceaselessly call Mr Erdogan’s government ‘mildly Islamist’ . What does he have to do to stop being called ‘mild’, I wonder?

Turkey, I might remind readers, is a longstanding member of NATO, or ‘ally’ in the current struggle by the ‘West’ to  turn Syria into a sectarian bloodbath in the name of ‘democracy’ . It is possible (though I think now unlikely) that it will become a fellow member of the European Union, with all the dubious blessings of the European Arrest Warrant, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Europol and Schengen.

Eh? I thought this was going to be about those sweet, demure young women who have been locked up by the wicked Mr Putin? Oh , but it is, it is. I make no excuses for Mr Putin. I have many times used very rude words about him, and his government. I shall continue to do so. His spokesman won’t talk to me.   I just wanted to point out that if you were a media organisation wishing to get exercised about a serious threat to free speech in an important country, you might pay some attention to Turkey. But hardly anyone does. Rather the reverse.

But Mr Putin is the object of a great and continuing storm of piffle and exaggeration. We are told that the trial of three young women, for behaving badly in a church, is comparable to Stalin’s show trials (before which the defendants had been tortured and blackmailed and at the end of which the defendants were shot in the back of the neck) or (more modestly) with the Daniel and Synyavsky trial which marked the end of the Krushchev Thaw in 1965 , at which, if memory serves me, there was not a large Western media circus, or much in the way of demonstrations outside the courtroom. In fact, as far as I know, only scrappy smuggled accounts reached the outside world, and Moscow’s then wholly-Communist media (nowadays by contrast startlingly varied and plural), ran a bitter co-ordinated campaign against the two. Their supposed crime was entirely a matter of freedom of expression.

But here come the New Cold War merchants (they want one, and soon)  , trying to tell us that militarily decrepit, non-ideological, oil-dependent, rustbucket Russia is in some way comparable to the USSR, a vast militaristic imperial power allied to a global ideology which maintained its rule over many countries well beyond its true sphere of influence, , language and culture.

As to Pussy Riot itself, I’m not keen on desecrating anyone’s religious buildings. There’s something specially selfish and arrogant about trampling on the deepest sensitivities of others in this way. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you could get into quite serious trouble for doing a ‘Pussy Riot’ type of action in St Paul’s, Notre Dame de Paris, St Peter’s, Washington National Cathedral, and in major religious buildings in many other free countries. I wouldn’t recommend doing it in a Mosque anywhere, free country or otherwise.

It’s not just free speech we’re talking about here. It’s attention-seeking disruption of someone else’s sacred space, quite easily classified as some sort of breach of the peace in any legal system. Now, for me, a penalty along the lines of six weeks spent publicly scrubbing the cathedral steps on their knees rather early in the morning would be rather more to the point than some penal colony. We should make much more effort, in the world in general, to make the punishment fit the crime.  I don’t regard these women as specially pleasant, let alone as heroines of the struggle for free expression. Struggle to gain attention, more likely. You’ll note that there’s never been any suggestion that the authorities have the wrong people, so if Russian law is in any way comparable to the laws of counties like our on this subject, and if it unquestionably bans such behaviour in cathedrals, and prescribes certain penalties for it, then that’s not lawless. And if they’d performed their little concert in a Moscow café, I doubt if anything would never again have been heard of it. It was the location, location, location that did it. They got the publicity. Maybe they underestimated the reaction,. And if Putin’s repressive hellhole was as bad as they say it is, how come they did that?  Cause that sort of trouble even in Brezhnev’s Red Square, let alone Stalin’s, and it would have been a guaranteed one-way ticket to the far side of the Urals.

So, while the penalty is harsh and unjustified, this isn’t really a matter of free speech (unlike Turkey’s behaviour) , and it isn’t a matter of a trumped-up charge because they did do what they’re accused of, and it isn’t lawless, because they broke a pre-existing law.  I don’t think much of Russia’s criminal justice system. But then again, in quite different ways, I don’t think much of ours either, and ours is getting worse all the time, whereas Russia’s has in recent years got a bit better than it was under Communism. Not much. Not enough. But a bit. Press allowed in the court,  for a start.

It’s all really a matter of degree. You can think the penalty harsh ( as I do) , without necessarily endorsing the view that this is the most worrying and important  breach of human liberty on the planet just now.

And in my view, as I’ve said before, Russia gets it in the neck (and loyally globalist Turkey doesn’t) because Russia still stands up for its own national sovereignty (and that of other countries) and the Globalist League, headed by the ghastly Hillary Clinton, want to teach Russia a lesson for that. Hence the ‘New Cold War’, a pointless conflict against a country that’s no threat to us, and isn’t by the (admittedly grim) standards of the modern world outstandingly repressive, and the wild excitement over ‘Pussy Riot’(You must add into this the dubious media delight in,  and the public’s dubious response to,  film and pictures of young women in cages or in handcuffs. Fifty shades of what, did you say?).

A couple of other points. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is a very interesting building, and the decision by the women to misbehave in it might have been informed by facts not known to most Westerners.

It was always a bit political. It was originally built as a monument to Russia’s survival of the Napoleonic invasion. It was never very beautiful. Moscow had many other older, more graceful churches (though a terrible number were lost to Communist hate and destruction in the Stalin era,  and their riches plundered to decorate the Pharaonic , slave-built Moscow metro, a precious few survived the decades of neglect and state spite. The repeated anti-religious campaigns,  the theft or silencing of bells and the general marginalisation of God in the Soviet Empire ) .

Its position, in a  commanding spot visible from many part of Moscow, made it specially irritating to the Communists, who wanted Moscow to be a Godless city. They also wanted to build a hideous ‘Palace of the Soviets’ on the spot, topped by an enormous statue of Lenin, so replacing a cathedral dedicated to the saviour of mankind, with one dedicated to a mass murderer.  On a winter’s day in 1931, the Bolsheviks blew the cathedral to pieces A famous photograph of this moment can be found in many places on the Internet. (See below)

The palace of the Soviets was never built, though the foundations were. Moscow rumour, when I lived there, stated that engineers had warned that the foundations would never support the planned structure, which was intended to be more than 1,600 feet high. Whatever the reason, the foundations languished for many years, until the whole site was turned into an enormous open-air swimming pool. This pool still occupied the spot all the time I spent in Moscow, and when, ten years later, I returned, the single most astonishing change was the rebuilt cathedral. I was glad to see it, not because it was a particularly attractive building but because it emphasised that the Communist period, the real reason for the Cold War and the real cause of most of Russia’s miseries, was definitively over. Whatever happened next, that was not going to come back. I suspect quite a few ordinary Muscovites, who have lived in a country where God was banned,  feel the same way. But who cares what they think?

Dragging Nick Griffin into it

I promised a response to Hugo Rifkind’s Times article. Here it is, a little later than planned. He argued that, for the past 20 years, there have been two sorts of Britishness. And do you know, one of them has ‘has often been hijacked by the Nick Griffins of the world’.

Now what is this person, Nick Griffin, doing here? There is, and I point it out here quite a lot, a perfectly good tradition of honourable British patriotism, based ultimately on Anglican Christianity, free of bigotry, not aggressive or expansionist or triumphalist or crude. It’s from that tradition, and from the writings of Edmund Burke, that I seek to derive my position. I believe that all my aims and political desires are consistent with that.

Nick Griffin, a man who once went to Libya to seek the help of Muammar Gadaffi? Nick Griffin, whose party was (is it still? I can’t keep track) explicitly racialist. Nick Griffin, who has, er, a thing about Jews? Well, he has adopted, and no doubt will adopt, many positions which I have adopted, or positions similar to mine. All kinds of people do. But that has no bearing on whether what I say is legitimate or right. These others do not say the things they say, or think the things that I think, for the same fundamental reasons. They do not share my principles. So the fact that they hold other, disagreeable views has no bearing on what I think. So why mention them? 

In Mr Rifkind’s case, I doubt if he has much idea why he does it. It’s just what people of his generation tend to do, when they meet conservative opinions. Their mental world, furnished or rather cluttered with stand-up comedians, pop music, TV ‘satire’, and the general post-Christian, post-patriotic, post-hierarchical, post-personal responsibility, post-deferred gratification post-puritan, deconstructionist world view with which their minds have been filled, cannot cope. So rather than think about it, they shudder, mutter ‘BNP’, or ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ and shut their minds. They have been raised in a world in which all views but their own are assumed to be tainted by a suspect bigotry. Don’t go there, or you might become one of them, and lose all your mates.

So if people such as me say anything which gives them pause, or to which they are secretly attracted, or which sets the little rodent of doubt gnawing in their intellectual vitals, they sheer away with a muttered ‘racist!’ or ‘bigot!’ or ‘fascist!’ or ‘homophobe!’ or whatever it is.

Sometimes, they may even be right to do so. There are bigots and racialists and would-be despots in our society. But Mr Rifkind’s generation will not discriminate between them and people such as me. I have met such bigots. I have had letters from them. I have sometimes tried to persuade them to alter their views, or withdraw their support from Mr Griffin. That’s one way of knowing for sure that they aren’t the same as me.

On the other hand, I have also known people who are publicly right-on leftists, but who in private use abusive terms for other ethnic groups, or people of different sexual tastes,  terms that I would never think, let alone speak. And no, I won’t say who they are or were.

Mr Rifkind defines one kind of Britishness as a sort of sentimental theme park – The Queen, Parliament, cricket and scones. Well, maybe. But I’m no sentimental monarchist. I don’t own a single Coronation mug or Royal Wedding plate, and hope not to. Parliament, pure and simple, does little for me. It’s the adversarial tradition, the inch of difference in which we all live, that has produced jury trial, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights and constitutional monarchy, that do it for me. In fact, if I had to choose between jury trial and Parliament, I’d choose jury trial (though as it was before Roy Jenkins, not the poor wounded thing it is now). Cricket? I don’t much care, though, as Michael Frayn once put it, I want to want to like it. The Armed Forces, more or less right, though not, I suspect, in the way Mr Rifkind imagines. He’d have to tell me what he thinks. Even then, I might have some difficulty expressing myself to him about the Royal Navy. He wouldn’t understand the terms I used. Mr Rifkind completely misses the force of poetry and literature, of the Authorised Version of the Bible, Shakespeare and Cranmer (and for me Wordsworth, Gray’s ‘Elegy’, Tennyson and Larkin). Not to mention landscape – not necessarily the spectacular or the picturesque, but the handsome, the unwrecked and the wistful.

Mr Rifkind attempts to describe another sort of Britishness as ‘a more nebulous idea. So nebulous, indeed, that Will Self soars beyond it. This is a Britishness of Spice Girls, Minis and multiculturalism’.

But surely a national cultural feeling cannot co-exist or be synonymous with multiculturalism. It’s an oxymoron. The Spice Girls are a void of noise, the Mini is built by a German company, and sold on an association with the King’s Road sixties, ie the very cultural revolution which blew Protestant Britain out of the water, while appropriating the Union Flag as a marketing device.

Then he expresses some curious thoughts on whether it is easier to accept that Mo Farah is British than he is English. I know what he is driving at, but in the end I don’t see any fundamental difference - unless he means that the new ‘Britishness’ is so loosely defined that it encompasses anyone. Personally, I think that Mo Farah could become British in my way (people will say ‘What about religion?’, and I would reply ‘I don’t want to make windows into men’s souls’. A different religion will work, provided the person who holds to that religion accepts that this is a fundamentally Christian country.)

In his article (I wish I could show you the whole thing, but it is behind a paywall), Mr Rifkind muses: ‘Ultimately, Farah has to be both. Otherwise, Britishness is reduced to a trick for letting the aliens into the club without having to stop calling them aliens — a depository for all the folk whom other British identities still secretly don't want.’

There’s something struggling to get out of this segment.  But it can’t quite escape, though you can make out its hunched shape, pacing in the half-light behind the bars. The clues are the words ‘trick’, ‘ aliens’ and ‘identities’ and ‘secretly don’t want’. I think it has something to do with the idea, or belief, that there is a covert racial bigotry behind all this somewhere. I’ve written at some length to Mr Rifkind about this, and will await his reply before forming a hard judgment. But that’s what I tend to think at the moment.

Then we come to what seems to me to be the heart of it all. Mr Rifkind wrote: ‘Now. Find me somebody who disapproved of Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony and I'll show you somebody who feels that Britishness ought only to be the first of these [The Queen, Scones, Cricket bit, PH], and saw a great spectacle designed to usurp it in the national psyche with the second [Spice Girls, Minis etc, PH]. I offer you, by way of example, the now infamous MP for Cannock Chase, Aidan "multicultural c***" Burley, and also the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, who yesterday complained on the radio that the ceremony had been a political show intent upon "telling people who were not part of the cultural revolution that they had lost".

I don’t regard myself as being much like Mr Burley, I’ve never attended a Nazi-themed party in my life, don’t use lavatory words in public writings, and I loathe the Rolling Stones. My idea of Britishness doesn’t fit either of Mr Rifkind’s models. As I’ve said to him, I don’t think he has the faintest idea what I really believe. In fact this passage demonstrates how effective the cultural revolution has been in destroying the old concepts and cutting the young off from them. It’s like the conversation between Winston Smith and the old man in the prole pub. Winston’s mind is so full of propaganda about the past (propaganda that he thinks is fact) that he can’t begin to grasp the truth.    

Mr Rifkind informed me: ’This is precisely wrong. I've been mulling over Boyle's vision for a fortnight now and every day I look back and admire it more. This was not a revolution of one sort of British over another. Rather, it was a reconciliation of both.’

I have asked him to explain why this is so. Doesn’t reconciliation involve concession, and acceptance? What significant thing did Mr Boyle and Mr Daldry (a man who, I suspect, knows his Antonio Gramsci, or at least knows what Gramsci meant) concede to me or people like me? When did I accept it? Would I want to offer any concession to them? And am I not better-equipped to judge this than Mr Rifkind, since I am the one who is unreconciled, and has been prepared to say so in public despite an almost overpowering wave of mental conformism since the Opening Ceremony? He is the butterfly upon the road preaching contentment to the toad, I think.