Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 306

Quibbling with The Guardian

 

I just thought readers here might not be aware of a brief exchange I have just had with ‘the Guardian’. (I read it, so you don’t have to). On Monday their media column said I had only ‘quibbled’ about the Olympic opening ceremony. Today(Wednesday) they have published my letter in response, which reads:

 

‘You know how to hurt a man. You say (Media Monkey's diary, 6 August) that I "only had quibbles" in my Mail on Sunday article about the Olympic opening ceremony. Quibbles such as "It was a social worker's history of Britain", or "It is a strange sort of nation that can turn a hospital bed into a symbol of national pride, especially in an era when you can die of thirst in one", or "most people under 40 have been taught not to have pride in their country, so the Health Service is all they've got left. They have been cheated of any real knowledge of history". I don't regard these as "quibbles" and I shouldn't think most of your readers would, either.’

 

Actually, ‘The Guardian’ is quite good at allowing people to reply to attacks on them in its pages, or correct the mistakes it has made.

Quote Unquote – getting it straight with the Huffington Post and Mehdi Hasan

 

 

Interrupting my holiday one more time, I hope this will be my last thought, for now,  on the matter of Mr Mehdi Hasan and ‘What the Papers Say’. The matter will soon disappear into the corridors of the BBC, and may not emerge for some time. Patience, I keep telling myself, is a virtue.

 

But before we go, I’d like to ask again here, as prominently as possible, a question I’ve been asking since Mr Hasan posted his riposte to me in an article for the ‘Huffington Post’. I’m asking it here because I have asked Mr Hasan directly (I’ll tell you what his answer was in a moment). And I have asked the legal and public relations departments of the Huffington Post, and what I believe to be its editorial department though it is hard to contact and like many Internet organisations, doesn’t seem to have a phone number. I have also posted it as a comment on Mr Hasan’s article.

 

And I have yet to have a clear answer. The question is: Does Mr Hasan have a contemporaneous note of, shorthand or longhand, or a recording of, or a contemporaneous witness to, the words which he quotes me as having said in his article?

 

The quotation (and its context) are as follows : ‘Almost exactly three years ago, I rang Peter Hitchens, the Mail on Sunday columnist, who is a friend of a friend, to ask his advice. A right-wing, anti-Islam blog had edited together, totally out of context, various quotes from me speaking in front of a group of British Muslim students in Manchester and made me look like an ultra-Islamist loon. Would the right-wing tabloid press jump on this "story", I wondered? Would I end up appearing on the pages of, say, the Mail, under the headline of 'Extremist!"? "Don't be silly," replied Hitchens. "I don't think anything you've said is worthy of publication in a national newspaper. You've got nothing to worry about so you should just calm down." ‘

 

Note that the words attributed to me are unambiguously displayed within inverted commas. The convention on this is clear. This means direct quotation of actual words spoken, without addition or subtraction.  Direct quotation is the hard currency of journalism. If you have someone’s actual words, reliably recorded, then you have a very valuable commodity. But you do not say you have it when you do not. And you do not reproduce it in this form unless you can show that these were the exact words, incontrovertibly spoken by the person involved. This is easiest where the person has written them down, or said them on TV or radio, or at a meeting where they have been recorded on film and tape, or anywhere else where an independent, permanent record exists.  I can still recall, during the 1983 general election, the scrabbling with notebooks and tape recorders among the travelling press, to try to work out what the late Michael Foot (who tended to yell and rage in an up-and-down voice) had actually said at a meeting at Oxford Town Hall, which had quite a stormy echo. Various other politicians had been recorded saying very embarrassing things at such meetings during that bitter campaign,  meetings which were in those days unscripted and uncontrolled. Few if any of us were politically friendly to the poor old Labour leader.  Some of us *thought* Mr Foot had said something rather shocking about the late Lord Hailsham. But in the end, nothing was written because there wasn’t a good contemporaneous note or recording. And I should say this incident involved some of the most leathery and ruthless reporters, for some of the most, er, rumbustious newspapers in what was then Fleet Street. Leathery they may have been. They had entered many a stricken home, as Evelyn Waugh puts it in ‘Scoop’. But the rule remained the same : No note. No quote. No story.

 

In private or one-to-one conversations, it’s even harder. Interviews these days are generally recorded by both parties to avoid disputes, a practice which was started, I believe, by Tony Benn (he was also said, I think by the late great Alan Watkins, to have once possessed a magnetic loop which he would wave over the recorders of journalists he didn’t like or trust, to erase their tapes).  Totally private conversations between individuals are the most difficult. They’re private and based on trust. People are speaking freely on the assumption that their words will go no further.  People generally don’t take notes or record them. It would seem rude. Much political journalism is based on lunches (See my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ ) where the source of the story is never identified, and quotation doesn’t need to be verbatim.  Telephone conversations are even harder. There are quite strict rules about recording them, though I believe a good contemporaneous shorthand note is still considered acceptable as evidence.

 

Now, until quite recently, almost everyone in British journalism had been through a long apprenticeship in which they had learned this rule, usually on local weekly and evening papers. They learned ( I learned)  shorthand, and a speed of 120 words per minute was usually required. You had to get it right, especially in the legally sensitive area of court reporting, which was the meat and drink of local papers. You can report a lot of very interesting things in court, but you have to be accurate when you do it. Quotation had to be right, above all.

 

To this day, most reporters of my generation keep great bundles of old notebooks in case there is ever a query about a quotation.

 

You see how important this is.

 

Now, I’m not *disputing*, let alone *denying*  Mr Hasan’s quotation. It may be correct.  I’m in no position to be prescriptive about what I didn’t say. I have no note of my own words at the time, and I have learned to mistrust memory in such matters. But is Mr Hasan in a position to be so prescriptive about what I *did* say? I have explained in a previous post how I could have come to say the words he attributes to me.  But, my goodness, to someone who hadn’t read that explanation, there’s a bit of a ‘Gotcha’ element in the precise words ‘I don't think anything you've said is worthy of publication in a national newspaper.’

 

And as a result, I have a strong curiosity to know for certain that I said them.

 

Now, when I asked Mr Hasan by e-mail if he had a note of the words he says I spoke, he replied (before breaking off communication with me):’ I have a very vivid memory of our conversation on that July weekend in 2009’ . This isn’t a direct reply to the question, but it is the best I seem likely to get. I can only say that it leaves the question unresolved. Vivid memory is often , even so, wrong, and three years is quite a while. He also mentioned a third party who ‘remembers me telling him exactly what you said to me at the time.’. But this doesn’t really affect the matter. Both Mr Hasan and I are sure the conversation was on the telephone, so no third party could have heard precisely what I said or be able to vouch for it. He would at best have heard Mr Hasan’s version of the conversation, and couldn’t have been a witness of it.

 

I have repeatedly asked the Huffington Post about this, and will continue to do so. But I should point out one thing before I finish. My quarrel with Mr Hasan began when he caused to be read out, on the BBC, a quotation from an article by me. But, when it was read it out, three important words were missing. I have now embarked on the long road to discovering exactly how and why this happened. This, again, was a grave breach of normal conventions, and one for which the BBC has now (inadequately) apologised on air – a very rare thing for them to do and a sign of the seriousness with which they regard it.

 

Why did I make such a fuss? Why did the BBC apologise? Why am I still making such a fuss? Because it’s important. Accurate quotation is not some decorative feature. It is the ore, the core, the skeleton, the load-bearing part of journalism. I cannot begin to say how important it is. To Mr Hasan, (or plain ‘Hasan’, to use Mr Hasan's oen harsh style) and to the editor of the Huffington Post, I pose this question: do you have a contemporaneous note, to justify publishing those words in inverted commas? I shall keep asking. Count on it. In fact, you may quote me on it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘What the Papers Say’ says ‘Sorry’ (up to a point), Cows, Quotes, the BBC and Me

If there were an Olympic contest for apologies,  how would Britain be doing? Badly, I fear. We’re good at quantity, in fact the railway operators alone must put out scores of them every day. But the quality is poor. We’re much given to apologies for failings we have no plans to amend (the railways again) and apologies which being ‘I’m sorry if you were offended’, which mean ‘I’m not at all sorry for what I’ve done, but I‘m annoyed and a bit surprised that you can be bothered to complain about it’.

Anyway, last night at eleven o’clock, the BBC read out an apology to me (!) on air, an apology offered because of my complaints about the way I was treated a week before on the programme ‘What the Papers Say’.

I am of course glad of some acknowledge that something wrong was done. But I did not in fact agree the wording of this apology, for reasons I explain below. I did manage to get it toughened up a bit (for instance, the word ‘inappropriately’ was dropped and replaced by ‘inaccurately’.  The version read out was as follows: "In last week's What The Papers Say, a Mail on Sunday article by Peter Hitchens was edited inaccurately. This led to a misleading impression that Mr Hitchens was comparing the Olympics of London 2012 to Moscow in 1980, rather than to May Day in the Soviet Union. We apologise for this mistake."

As I wrote to the BBC,  I am puzzled as to how something can be edited ‘ inaccurately’. The adverb doesn’t fit the verb.  You might as well say someone had drunk a cup of tea accurately, or exploded elegantly.  So far as I know (and I imagine this applies to the BBC as well as to the newspapers for which I have worked for the past 39 years, and the independent radio and TV companies for which I have written and edited scripts), editing in free countries is done for length or style, to remove repetition or to *correct* inaccuracy, though this latter would hardly be the function of your programme when dealing with already-published items.

In editing material already published elsewhere, style and accuracy are not the concern of the editor, as he or she is quoting matter for which another publication has already taken responsibility in these matters.  He or she can only edit such pre-published material for length. He may point out that it contains inaccuracies; he may criticise its style. But he may not legitimately *make* it inaccurate, nor can he make it capable of being interpreted or described as inaccurate by adding to or subtracting from it. There are quite strong rules about this in print, such as the use of dots and square brackets, to denote significant missing material , or to denote significant inserted matter, even where this has been inserted – as in the substitution of a noun for a pronoun – to clarify the meaning of the passage. Radio, not being able to use these devices, has a special responsibility to quote accurately and precisely, without significant subtraction or addition. I should have thought this was part of BBC training and practice.

It is only in countries where there is censorship and control over expression and news (and where the individuals so treated have no power to protest, resist or seek redress) that material which has already been published elsewhere is edited, as my article appears to have been, with the intention of altering its meaning. As I have repeatedly pointed out, and as you have not attempted to dispute, the only plausible explanation for the removal of these three brief words is that someone wished to alter the meaning of the passage. This is not a question of inaccuracy. It is far, far more serious than that. It is, as John Henry Newman once said in another context, poisoning the wells, by which he meant the wells of truth.  

I also said to them :’Nor, as I have pointed out once already, do I accept that this action was a ‘mistake’. No evidence has been adduced for this odd suggestion, that someone somehow just lost three significant words out of an already short quotation, by mistake. If the material was cut and pasted from the web, it would have taken a very curious ‘mistake’ to delete those three words and no others. If you were working  from a printed edition of the Mail on Sunday, you would have had to cross out, and indeed obliterate, those three words. Could this be done by mistake, leaving the rest of the passage untouched? I should like to see such an error demonstrated under laboratory conditions.  Did someone spill coffee over just those three words and no others?  This defies belief.   A mistake implies that there was no intention to mislead, that this was just accidental incompetence without any greater significance.

 

Unburying the Hatchet?

 

Mehdi hasan, whose thoughts on livestock and other matters I highlighted on Sunday, riposted in the Huffington Post, here.

I have a number of thoughts about this. I first came across Mr Hasan many years ago, when he e-mailed me out of the blue (in those days I published my e-mail address) about Israel.

We had some lengthy and quite punchy exchanges from which I at least learned quite a lot. Later on Mr Hasan turned up in the London left-wing media. I bumped into him from time to time, we had further exchanges about this and that, I once addressed a New Statesman fringe meeting, at a Labour Conference, at his invitation. When I was scrambling up the ladder of journalism, I was given a lot of help and encouragement by more experienced people. I always felt that it was a sort of duty to do the same to others on their way up, as Mr Hasan plainly was. He’s a bright and unusually committed voice, even though our disagreements are and always will be profound, and he’s very cross with me at the moment. I hope I did encourage him in this interesting trade.

As I said to him when we spoke on Friday night, I couldn’t recall the conversation we had, which he quotes in the Huffington Post with such precision. I don’t deny having it, or even contest the general tenor of it. I just don’t recall it.  I asked him if he had a shorthand note of it, or a recording, as he quotes so precisely from it, using direct quotation in speech marks, rather than reported speech. From his terse and bad-tempered e-mailed answer, it appears he has no such note or recording, and is reproducing his version of the event from memory, and from the memory of someone he says he told about the conversation at the time. As I don’t have a clear recollection, I don’t and can’t deny the specific words spoken. But he has produced, as direct quotation, precise words supposedly spoken by me to him on the telephone, of which he appears to have no shorthand or longhand contemporaneous note or contemporaneous witness. How can he be so precise?

I do , having dredged my memory, have some recollection of feeling that Mr Hasan needed reassurance and of offering it. I was at the time rather unsympathetic to the neo-conservative view of Islam, as expressed by voices as diverse as Melanie Phillips, Nick Cohen, Charles Moore and Michael Gove. It seemed to me to have been exaggerated to justify the Iraq and Afghan wars, and also to allow conservatives to cuddle up to atheistic left-wingers. And in the tiny space between Blairism and neo-conservatism, proper conservatism was being crushed. There’s a chapter on this subject in ‘The Cameron Delusion’, called  ‘A Comfortable Hotel on the Road to Damascus’.

So I was inclined to reassure Mr Hasan, whom I saw almost as a protégé, and certainly as a friendly rather than a hostile person.  I don’t really regret that impulse, though it was probably , from the personal point of view, a waste of  generosity.  I’ll explain why in more detail later. Also, at that time, I was only aware of the first of the two quotations, and I tend to think (as it seems Mr Hasan does too) that the second one is the more disturbing of the two. The other thing worth mentioning is that, at that stage, Mr Hasan wrote only for a small left-wing magazine. It was one which shared the general problem of the modern London left, of liking multiculturalism while becoming increasingly worried about some of the aspects of Islam which conflicted with the moral and cultural revolution. Conservatives have the opposite problem, of loathing multiculturalism but seeing some virtues in Islam’s view of the moral and cultural revolution.

He didn’t then present any programmes for the BBC, at least if he did I wasn’t aware of it.  Had he done so, and had he by then achieved the media profile he has since attained, which includes being the joint biographer of Ed Miliband, a man who may well be Prime Minister in 2015,  I suspect my answer might have been different in simple practical terms. Obscure people can say things that the less obscure can’t say.

In the following months, we had an internet debate about BBC bias, after an exchange in the New Statesman. A sample of this may be found here.

This debate cooled any friendship we might until then have had, at least on my side.  I found his debating technique lacked the generosity which I think one has to have for one’s serious opponents. I felt a blast of something which appeared to be hostility. He even excoriated me for not responding quickly enough to his postings, despite my having many other things to do in a busy week. As someone who prides himself on being swifter than most in my trade, and who had felt kindly towards his antagonist, I found this curiously irritating.  I let it be, but thought I would in future avoid any commerce with him. A good debate is a joy. A bad one is like a bad meal, troubling for some time after you eat it, and sticking in the memory.

I’d mention here an interesting reflection on my treatment of Mr Hasan, who accuses me of a ‘hatchet job’. Well, I’ll concede that the spirit is not specially friendly.   But observant readers will note that Mr Hasan, in his Huffington article, gives an account not only of an old exchange, but of a recent conversation we had. I’ll not go into much of it, save to note that my requests for help in finding material which he deemed important are portrayed as my stupid failure to have read and researched every word Mr Hasan has ever written or spoken. This is a task that, if not beyond me physically, has never seemed that important.

But note this. The conversation took place only because, as I prepared my column last Friday, I took steps to contact Mr Hasan so that he could have the opportunity to defend himself in the article I planned to write. Compare and contrast : if Mr Hasan had been in any doubt or confusion about the meaning of my reference to May Day in Soviet Moscow, as it appears he was in his broadcast, he could have got in touch with me in the same way. But he didn’t.  Hatchet, anyone?

I’ll also deal briefly here with the ‘out of context’ defence. It is quite true that it is possible to take words out of context and so misrepresent their import. One way of doing this is to edit them to suit the attack the writer seeks to make. But I plead ‘not guilty’ to any such accusation. The import of Mr Hasan’s words, quoted accurately and at length, is not seriously altered by context. He said these things. They are pretty long quotes, carefully transcribed. I have not provided a tiny snatch but big, internally coherent chunks.  I don’t believe that listening to or reading the entire speech alters the meaning of the words spoken in either case.

Now, what do I say about these words in my column? I make no direct comment upon them.  I don’t call on anyone to do anything about them. I speculate on their meaning and indulge in a bit of mild mockery on the subject of cows.

Having checked some Koranic sources over the weekend, I’m inclined to believe  that these strictures may apply to ‘disbelievers’ in general, that is to say, non-Muslims and atheists alike. Christians aren’t permitted by Islam to be neutral on this, as Islam specifically denies several tenets of the Christian creed, notably the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, the Divinity of Christ and the existence of the Holy Trinity. As a soppy inclusivist on matters of faith, I’d prefer to say, each to his own, and good luck to you. But I get the impression this wouldn’t be acceptable to the more militant Muslims. I also get the impression that, among normal Muslims, soppy inclusivism is not unknown, but it is rarely expressed and such things are very hard to measure. My own encounters with Muslims have mostly been very enjoyable and I have always felt they prefer a serious believer to an indifferent person.

The Koran is not always easy to interpret, and it is notoriously difficult to translate into English in a way that satisfies scholars, so I only offer this as a passing thought.

I simply say that, had the words spoken by Mr Hasan been said by a Christian (let us say, some imaginary presenter of ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4) about heretics, atheists and/or Muslims, that person would have been taken off the air forthwith and never , ever have been allowed to broadcast on the BBC again.  I think this is just a simple statement of incontrovertible fact. Does anyone disagree? Does Mr Hasan disagree? This does not require a huge effort of the imagination. Can’t you see the headlines   ‘Bishop/Vicar/ Editor Of Church newspaper says non-Christians are cattle’. I’m not saying this would even be right, though I have to say that it would be predictable .So it would be a  pretty silly thing to do, and the result would be one that most wise people would foresee.  I’m stating it, I repeat,  as a fact.

Further, I’m saying that while Mr Hasan has been given a presenter’s chair on the BBC, from which he has been allowed to excoriate me for my Olymposcepticism, I, though in my view at least equally qualified for such a task, have not been.

What I didn’t realise until a week ago  was that Mr Hasan had become a presenter of ‘What the Papers Say’. After a hard evening’s indexing, on my way to bed a lot later than usual, I found myself listening to him presenting it on the evening of the 27th July (alas, the recording of this programme is now no longer available).

I had for some time had a vague feeling that this programme (which I had once presented myself when it was still on TV) was not making much of an effort to give a voice to moral and cultural conservatives. When I did catch it, the presenters seemed to come from a pretty narrow stable of metropolitan clever-dicks with little sympathy for Edmund Burke or the reoccupations of the suburbs. But I had never got round to looking into the detail, and didn’t care much.

Nor would what happened next ( as described last week) have bothered me quite so much if Mr Hasan hadn’t begun his attack on me and the other Olymposceptics by having a dig at Aidan Burley MP, in these rather striking terms. ‘If I was a Tory MP who had recently attracted the media’s attention for attending a Nazi-themed stag party,  I might think twice about attacking the ethnic diversity of the Olympic ceremony.’

Ah. It crossed my mind on the instant that here was an example of sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander. Or of people in glass houses being wise not to throw stones. Mr Burley’s attendance at such a party was indeed stupid. I don’t defend it.  Burley is a child in political terms, born in 1979, not very good at expressing himself and far too young to be an MP. But on the other hand, he had not actually attacked the ethnic diversity of the Olympic ceremony. He had used the words ‘leftie multicultural c***’. And, as I have pointed out here already, multiculturalism has nothing to do with ethnic diversity. It is about cultural diversity. The clue’s in the name.

Shouldn’t people who had themselves attracted some attention for remarks which many might find rather shocking be cautious about using a BBC programme to drag up the records of others and lecture them sternly, in a way which was arguably entirely irrelevant?

This idea had only begun to form vaguely in my mind, and would probably have led nowhere,  when I found that I was next on the list to be traduced. Well, Mr Hasan can say what he likes about me in the New Statesman and the Huffington Post. And I can reply.

But here he was, using the transmitters of the British Broadcasting Corporation, an institution set up by Royal Charter, financed by a licence fee which you can be prosecuted and imprisoned for not paying. That’s different. The BBC maintains against all comers that it is impartial. The BBC’s reputation rests, justly or not, on a record of absolute integrity stretching back for decades. And here was Mr Hasan, using its microphones to attack me , whereas I knew ( I was once told so by a very senior BBC Executive) that I would never be allowed to present a programme on Radio 4. Before some wiseacre points out that I am ‘always’ on (that is, perhaps three times a year on Radio 4, two or three on BBC-TV, perhaps half a dozen on Radio 2), let me explain. My appearances there are either as part of panels on which I am outnumbered three to one by people who disagree with me, I do not choose the subject under discussion and can be shut up by a presenter; or they are brief debates, in which I am again ‘balanced’ by an opponent and can be shut up and/or cut off at any moment. This is utterly different from being a presenter who influences the choice of subject, picks his interviewees, decides the axis of argument and always has the decisive last word.

The BBC says it’s impartial on matters of public controversy. It insists on rigorously high standards of journalism – remember the terrible fate which befell Andrew Gilligan. In the course of telling what most people regard as the truth about The Blair government’s cavalier treatment of evidence for Iraq’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’,  he was condemned by Lord Hutton for what he (Mr Gilligan) described as ‘two flawed sentences in one unscripted early-morning interview, never repeated, when I said that the government "probably knew" that the 45-minute figure was wrong. I attributed this to David Kelly; it was in fact an inference of mine.’

Thus, Mr Gilligan, a fine reporter,  ended up resigning from the BBC.

Well, obviously I’m not comparing my problems with the Iraq War, or Mr Hasan with Mr Gilligan.  But even in the smaller scale world of ‘What the Papers Say’,  rigour is rigour and truth is truth. What to do? The oceans will dry up before the BBC  will admit that the programme was hopelessly biased against me and those like meThe BBC will never admit that I received this pasting because of an institutional mind which regards me as so despicable that the impartiality rules don’t apply to me. But as an episode of institutional bias, the event is so near-perfect that it ought to be put in a display case and exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Alas, the BBC acts as always as defence, prosecution, court clerk, bailiff, judge, jury, appeal court and Supreme Court in all cases regarding itself, and it has been quite funny reading its various attempts to justify the way in which I was selectively belittled, mocked and generally jumped up and down upon.  By the way, I’ve no objection to this in principle. It’s the fact that it only happens to me that I mind.  I was at one stage promised examples of other people who had been subjected to comparable treatment, but this offer has quietly evaporated, and I don’t expect it to be repeated because, you see, there won’t be any such examples. A bit of mild joshing, maybe But not the all-in, five star working–over to which I was treated  (openly biased presenter, openly biased selection of quotations, openly biased amount of time given to opposing cases, openly biased deployment of mocking voices, plus the bonus of a mysteriously altered quote). If I’m not careful I could get big-headed about this.

The problem is that altered quote. It’s not excusable under any code. It has to be explained. And it has to be recognised by the BBC as what it is, a severe lapse from the Corporation’s own self-proclaimed standards, of a kind that could never have taken place if I hadn’t been the object of it.

One of the most comical suggestions made by one BBC person was that the programme was ‘irreverent’. This piffle was not repeated after I pointed out that irreverence, by definition, was generally directed against the prevailing view, against conventional wisdom, against those who normally experienced reverence. But in this case, the alleged ‘irreverence’ was directed at the dissenting minority, while actual reverence was given, especially in the voices used to read their contributions, to those bowled over by the spiritual joy, alleged, of the Olympic Torch Cult. What we actually got was majoritarian bullying of dissenters, which is not ‘irreverent’.

As to the offer of a presenter’s chair, this was made by a comparatively junior person.  Well, long ago, I was once in the running to be a panellist on ‘The Moral Maze’, a BBC Radio 4 programme to which I think I would have had much to contribute. I was even given a few try-outs, though far fewer than were given to some others being considered at the same time ( several longstanding panellists had left at once, and the panel was being reconstructed). Scenting a fixed race, I inquired and discovered, with some difficulty,  that I had no chance, as a senior executive had flatly vetoed my appointment. No explanation was offered or given. It didn’t really need to be. Although the BBC is a public body,  decisions of this kind are taken in deep privacy.  It was then that I discovered just how strong was the objection to me on that station, and how high it went. People still don’t believe me when I tell them about it, but it is absolutely true. Here, by the way,  is a good moment to remember the curious case of my show-trial (in my absence) on the BBC Radio 4 ‘Feedback’ programme, recalled here.

I did in the end get redress for this, but as the ‘What the Papers Say’ event shows, nothing fundamental changed in the institutional bias against people of my opinions. That’s why I’m determined to pursue this matter

So, I didn’t and don’t take this latest offer very seriously. Were I to accept it, my campaign to get the BBC to admit its faults and reform itself would be hopelessly compromised.

I’m told they’d been planning to make the offer for some time, but had just never got round to it. This is quite possibly true, in fact I think it may be,  but alas it doesn’t alter the fact that they didn’t make the offer till after they’d worked me over and I’d publicly attacked them here ( I hadn’t yet begun the process of complaining). And that delay, between thought and action, doesn’t seem to me to be accidental.  Even in small organisations, an executive may say he or she wants something, but that doesn’t mean it will happen, What you want to do, you do quickly. What you don’t really want to do, you put off, often indefinitely. In big organisations, inertia can be even more overwhelming . And the institutional bias against people like me in the BBC would put the brakes on any such offer becoming real, or on it turning into a real long-term engagement even if I now accepted it. So I can’t possibly accept it, until this dispute is resolved.

 

A note on bicycling

 

A number of readers complain that many bicyclist behave very badly on the roads. So they do, and I agree that this should be curbed. If only we had a proper foot-patrolling police force this menace, like that of drivers talking on mobile phones while driving, would be got under control. But this is not an argument in favour of driver behaving badly.

My own view is that a period of urban cycling, accompanied by an experienced cyclist, should form part of the preparation for the driving test. Many drivers simply don’t understand how their actions affect cyclists. I simply don’t agree with the contributor who says that good, careful drivers are killing good careful cyclists. The general selfish standard of driving, marked by arrogance, impatience, violent braking and acceleration, failure to signal until the manoeuvre is already under way, inconsiderate parking etc, is frightening many potential cyclists off the roads. Many of those cyclists who remain are, alas, militant and self-righteous.

Am I an 'animal', a 'cow' - or just another victim of BBC bias?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Do you think the BBC would give a presenter’s chair on a major channel to someone who said that non-Christians were ‘cattle’ or ‘animals’? No, nor do I. In fact, I doubt such a person would ever be able to broadcast anywhere on the Corporation’s airwaves.

But they do give such a chair to a man who appears to believe that most of us are cows, because we are not Muslims. For reasons that will soon be clear, I have to quote this person fully and exactly.

Mr Mehdi Hasan, biographer of Labour leader Ed Miliband, can be found on YouTube saying as follows: ‘The kuffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Koran; they are described in the Koran as “a people of no intelligence”, Allah describes them as not of no morality, not as people of no belief – people of “no intelligence” – because they’re incapable of the intellectual effort  it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God. In this respect, the Koran describes the atheists as “cattle”, as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world.’

On a separate occasion, jabbing his finger as he speaks with some force, Mr Hasan is recorded as saying: ‘Once we lose the moral high-ground we are no different from the rest of the non-Muslims; from the rest of those human beings who live their lives as animals, bending any rule to fulfil any desire.’

I am not sure whether Mr Hasan thinks that Christians, such as me, are ‘cattle’ or just ‘animals’. It is unclear to me whether he classifies Christians as atheist cows or as non-Muslim ‘animals’. Either way, the statement is not one that could be made about Muslims or atheists by any Christian known to me. Nor do I think it would be made by the great majority of Muslims.

Yet Mr Hasan has for some years been a regular presenter of a Radio 4 review of the newspapers, called What The Papers Say. And from this highly privileged, licence-fee financed position, he this week chose to launch an attack on me, for my dissenting views on the Olympics.

In the course of doing so, he apparently doctored my words, so that he could sneer at me for having said something I hadn’t said. The BBC’s response to this has (so far) been to ring me up,  simper repeatedly about how lovely my voice is (they’re right, of course) and offer me – for the first time in history – a regular and well-paid presenter’s slot on the very programme where Mr Hasan had just attacked me. They say they’d been thinking of this for ages, but hadn’t got round to mentioning it before.They do admit that doctoring the quote was a mistake.

In the interest of fairness, I contacted Mr Hasan, and he wrote: ‘The remarks you refer to have been taken wholly out of context, as they were aimed at Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In hindsight, I accept that they could and should have been phrased better. I have always been a strong supporter of religious pluralism and a secular society and I would urge your readers to judge me on my large body of published work.’

I’m sorry if this seems self-indulgent, as it concerns my own problems. But there’s a much bigger issue here, in the contrasting BBC treatment of the man who thinks I’m an animal, and its treatment of me. But even cows have horns.

Mr Slippery's condemning himself

Aidan Burley MP seems to me to  be a silly boy. But he spoke for a fair number of people when he said he didn’t like the Olympic Opening Ceremony, and that – as an MP – is his job.

It seems to be almost illegal at the moment to attack multiculturalism. And people seem to think that multiculturalism is the same as multiracialism.

It isn’t. It’s the opposite. You can have many ethnic groups, and one culture. In fact, it’s the best recipe for harmony. And you can have one ethnic group and two cultures, which is not always a success.
This has happened in modern Japan, where ethnic Japanese people who have been living for decades in South America have migrated to their ancestral land.

Far from fitting in, they have often been rejected by Japanese-born neighbours, who dislike their funky Brazilian customs and manners.

Anyway, Mr Slippery, who led the attacks on Mr Burley, is on the record as being against multiculturalism himself. Speaking in Munich in February 2011, he said: ‘Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate  lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values.’

For once, I agree with him. But does he agree with himself?

Only selection can unlock talent

There is a fuss because so many of our Olympic successes went to private schools.

Lord Moynihan, chairman of the British Olympic Association, rightly says: ‘There is so much talent out there among the 93 per cent [who went to state schools] that should be identified and developed. That has got to be  a priority for future sports policy.’

Talent is identified and developed through selection. Without selection, and the reinforcement of success, it will come to nothing. But will Lord Moynihan, or anyone else, recognise that this is yet another argument for the rebuilding of the grammar schools Tory and Labour governments so stupidly destroyed?

A proud past being buried in silly hats

I’ve never minded being in a minority – it’s usually the surest sign that you’ll turn out to have been right later. The mob can be relied  on to be wrong about anything important.

But there’s still something downright odd about the universal praise lavished on  the Olympic Opening Ceremony, recognised  by many Leftists as a triumph for their version of truth.

It’s as if the Olympics are now going to be what the Millennium Dome was supposed to be, and failed to be – the founding ceremony of a new age in which our proud past is ridiculed and our history rewritten.

Personally I find it creepy and disturbing that the Nelson statue in Trafalgar Square and the Duke of Wellington’s statue, have been officially defaced and trivialised. I think people like me are being told this isn’t our country any more.

   ..............................................

Bradley Wiggins seems to suggest cyclists should be made to wear helmets. This would only achieve a sharp drop in the number of cyclists. It is because of the tyranny of the car and arrogance of drivers that cycling has become so dangerous.

The answer is not to deck cyclists in  body-armour, but to get drivers to respect them. Bradley Wiggins would be good at that.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Two Valuable Voices Lost in One Week

It’s hard to think of a less likely pairing that Gore Vidal and Maeve Binchy, both of whom we lost this week. But I would happily recommend anyone to read Maeve Binchy’s superb novel ’Light a Penny Candle’ , and Gore Vidal’s tremendous historical novel ‘Lincoln’, in the same breath.  ‘Penny Candle’ is a fine piece of work which has great power to move, and lodges in the memory. It would be silly to dismiss it as an airport book r a light romance. I wish I had met Miss Binchy, who I am told by people who knew and worked with her was a lovely, kind and humorous person.

I’d also like to have met Gore Vidal, but long ago, before he became a bit silly (Craig Brown rather naughtily showed him up as knowing almost nothing about real politics some years ago, when he first began to set out his exaggerated conspiracy theories about the decay of the USA, which were not entirely justified by the facts. He thought Britain’s intelligence service was called ‘M Sixteen’). I had a lot of pleasure out of reading his novels in my twenties and thirties, though I never got round to his famous homosexual tale ‘The City and the Pillar’ and am not sure I can be bothered now.

His real strength was his intimate knowledge of Washington DC, his Southern political heritage and his mixture of an outsider’s observation (thanks to his sexual tastes) with an insider’s understanding. I would recommend his early, brief novel ‘Washington DC’ to anyone. As you read it, you are transported in that strange city’s humid, insect-haunted twilight and its endless scheming and betrayal.  He was always very conscious of its closeness to the South, where his own family came from – the great forests and swamps of the haunted Southlands that begin just over the Potomac , full of Civil War graves and ghosts, that reminder that, as John Keegan rightly says, America is a wilderness, whereas England is a garden. It was still just detectable, this feeling of being on the edge of the wild, when I lived in DC 20 years ago. But the city has now swollen into a megalopolis, and it is much harder to sense, anywhere much north of Fredericksburg.

I do hope that there will now also be a revival of the film that was made of his play ‘The Best Man’, about one the last proper American political conventions, when the nomination was not already sewn up by the time the delegates assembled.  Maybe I’d think differently now, but I thought when I first saw it that it was probably pretty truthful about how politics was actually done. But that was the old 19th-cenury politics of America, corrupt, often brutal , but at least not controlled by marketing men and billionaire donors, as they are now.

But the thing for which I think he will remembered is ‘Lincoln’, a historical novel of charm and power, which is also thrilling and moving. Many of my conservative American friends loathe Abraham Lincoln, and I can see why. But I can’t share their view. There is something about this wry, sad, gaunt, shrewd man that is terribly likeable (my view of him is influenced by the hilarious portrayal in George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman novel set in pre-Civil War America’ Flash for Freedom’. Lincoln is one of the very few people, real or frictional, in all the Flashman books, who ever sees through Flashman’s lies and bluster, and realises what he actually is – a lying, untrustworthy, lecherous coward. Yet Lincoln lets him off with a jest, and pretends to believe Flashman’s ludicrous tale about himself ,while making it clear he doesn’t really.’  I suspect this is a true picture. I like to visit the Lincoln memorial in Washington because it has, carved deep in the marble, the amazing words of the Second Inaugural Address, one of the most overwhelming pieces of political prose ever crafted in any language and full, incidentally, of a Bible Lincoln did not believe.

Vidal’s portrayal,of a man conspired against by his Cabinet and his generals, plagued by a wife on the brink of madness, fearful of her wild expenditure, devastated by the death of a beloved son, living in a rickety, insecure White House where there is no privacy, is very, very moving.  So is his account of Lincoln’s own grief at the deaths his war is causing. One night, sleepless again, he complains to his secretaries that he has had to ‘watch this room fill up with blood’. He is also constantly observant and funny about what a disease-ridden, insect-haunted swamp and dump the American capital was until very recently.

There is also a very touching scene where he visits wounded Confederate soldiers, so powerful that I sometimes pull the book form the shelves to find it, and am astonished by how brief it is. But then, Lincoln himself was most powerful when he was brief ,a s the astonishing Gettysburg address shows.

As for Maeve Binchy, I would be very proud to have written anything remotely as good as ‘Penny Candle’. She wrote good spare English, she knew how to tell a story in such a way that you longed for more, she created credible characters about whom the reader must care,  and her conversations rang true. She is also a great explainer of the Irish to the English, a job that badly needs to be done all the time, as we should get on so much better than we do. I can’t comment on any of her other books, as I rather suspected she wrote them to please her publishers, and had said what she wanted to say in ‘Penny Candle’. It was worth saying. And it is worth reading. And snobbery should never cause anyone to ignore her.

What the Papers didn’t Say –and What They Did

Some readers here have mentioned the treatment meted out to me on the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘What The Papers Say’ on Sunday night, 29th July. It is still available on i-player for those who wish to see what the discussion is about. And I now have to interrupt my holiday to initiate various necessary actions, do a lot of transcribing,  and make a lot of inquiries about what happened, so I shall be limited in what I say here, especially about the presenter of the programme, a person reasonably well-known to me called Mehdi Hasan. He has, let me just say, some interesting views.

 

Once upon a time, when ‘What the Papers Say’ was still a TV programme on BBC2, I used  occasionally to present it about 15 years ago. I counted this a great honour, as I had watched the giants of my trade, such as Paul Foot and George Gale, presenting it in my teenage years and later, when it had a prime-time slot on ITV, and when I was starting out in Fleet Street in the late 70s and early 80s.  I had to stop presenting it when I went to work for a Sunday newspaper, which made the enjoyable but hard-working  Friday trip to Manchester , for final filming, impossible. It was then shown on Saturday, though I think it used to move round the schedules a bit too much for its own good.  I was sorry when it vanished from our screens, and pleased when it was revived for radio, even as a late night Sunday event, way past my bedtime.

 

I don’t listen to it that often because I am, genuinely, usually asleep at that time. I have for many, many years been an early riser because I have had to be. But for one reason or another I was listening on Sunday evening. I noticed how Matthew Norman, Christina Paterson, Giles Coren and others were all quoted at length, and respectfully,  in normal voices, on the Olympics. They were all full of joy about it, and the actors involved were using their normal voices, in some cases imparting a  sympathetic warmth which might well have been taken to imply approval of the sentiments expressed ( this was particularly so in a quotation from a London Evening Standard editorial). then, in a departure from the practice of the old days (when you had to use quotations form newspapers – and I had to make a special fuss one week to have excerpts from American ones), the quotations diverged into Twitter. Toby Young’s complaint that the Olympic opening ceremony was a Labour broadcast was quoted and – tellingly – Mr Hasan had a few words of rebuke for Toby (I rather agreed with him, actually. Toby’s party-political  plaint was a bit weak given that several Tories had endorsed and backed the whole thing). But I wondered at this stage whether I would have been allowed by the producer  to editorialise so strongly in the days when I presented it, and thought not. I was permitted to make points, but mainly through my selection of excerpts and my choice of subjects.  There was then a reference to the Tory MP , whose problems with Nazi fancy dress were quickly alluded to. He was awarded a rather silly voice.

 

But it was nothing like as silly as the one I was awarded. It is true that there was a stage Australian voice in one excerpt, talking in a sort of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ Strine; and an attempt to reproduce Boris Johnson’s patrician tones, plus a rather accurate rendition of Andrew Rawnsley which almost amounted to mimicry.  There was also the standard raucous pearly king tone used for a Sun headline, not intended to portray any individual. But the voice which was used to read out a rather brief passage from my Sunday article was, well, judge for yourselves here.

My voice has been described as a plummy baritone, and it certainly isn’t Estuary English, but I don’t think that I or  any living Englishman, speaks as I was portrayed as speaking on that programme. It was the sort of voice used in 1960s satire programmes to denote the thoughts and opinions of a ludicrous tweedy old buffer. It might do for a very old-fashioned butler in a provincial Agatha Christie stage production.  And I was the only individual writer singled out for this caricature.

 

But that wasn’t all.  I was not accurately quoted. The change was trivial in a way, and less trivial in another. I had complained that the event reminded me of May Day in Soviet Moscow, which it did (I witnessed this event in 1991, the last time it took place, and had a special  ticket for a rather good position in Red Square next to Lenin’s Tomb). It was the awful feeling that one had to be enthusiastic, that jollity was being enforced, that you could get into trouble for not being keen. But the BBC version left out the words ‘May Day in’.

 

Reasons of space? If you like, though the quotation from me already seemed much shorter than the extracts from the pro-Games writers (I haven’t had a chance to check this yet) , and only a second can have been saved. But the odd thing was that Mr Hasan then went on to rebuke me for something I hadn’t said – that is, for comparing the London Olympics of 2012 with the Moscow Olympics in 1980. I made, and intended, no such comparison. (I wasn’t at the Moscow Games in 1980, and they didn’t happen on May Day anyway)  and if he had been in any doubt, he knows how to find me.  Now, if the reference to ‘May Day’ had been left in, this neat ending would not quite have worked. Once again, I invite readers to draw their own conclusions, and above all, to listen to the programme while it is still available.

 

The really funny part of this is that a few years ago Mr Hasan and I had a brief and unsatisfactory internet exchange about whether the BBC is biased to the Left. He seemed to be claiming that it was biased the other way, an idea I found so preposterous that it was hard to summon up the strength to oppose it. I don’t enjoy Mr Hasan’s approach to debate, which in my view lacks generosity of spirit, and mistakes forbearance for weakness. But whatever he or I think about the BBC, its official position ( enshrined in its Royal Charter) remains that it is impartial, and I am sure that the producer of the programme, and the management of Radio 4 in general, are aware of that.  It is, in itself, an interesting example of that impartiality that Mr Hasan is presenting ‘What The Papers say’ and I am not. As to the impartiality of this particular programme, I have many inquiries to make and words to transcribe.

 

Meanwhile, on the subject of  the legitimacy and reasonableness of my view of the Olympic ceremony, let me quote to you from an article by Chris Blackhurst, a former colleague of mine, and no fool,  now Editor of the Independent newspaper. You can read the whole thing here.

 

Chris (who I do not think would describe himself as a man of the right)  said : ‘Did I think I was being preached to? Was I aware that the director was ramming his vision of a leftie Nirvana down all our throats? Yes to both. Did I mind? Not in the least’

 

He also conceded :’There could have been more use words, more acknowledgement of our contributions to the arts and our faith in individual liberty’(these are my principal complaints about what was lacking. But he added ’This was an occasion for television, more than those lucky enough to be present’.

 

He makes a curious comment about multiculturalism, mistaking it – as so many seem to do – for multiracialism, a wholly different thing. He said ‘swathes of the population, not those perhaps in the stockbroker belt or secure in their gated communities, those of different ethnic origin living side by side is how it is’. Let me say it again. Multiculturalism is nothing to do with race. It is to do with abandoning the idea of one unifying national culture to which all are expected to belong, and choosing instead to promote a series of solitudes with their backs turned upon each other (some readers say, trying to be clever, that we no longer have much of a British culture to offer, but that is precisely because we abandoned it so long ago). Those who have sought to defend a unified national culture have been, and are still being, smeared as racial bigots, when this is the opposite of the truth. I am sad, but not amazed, that this still needs to be explained.

What sort of country has a hospital bed as a symbol of national pride? And how free is speech in Olympic Britain?

 

I reproduce below an article which I wrote on Saturday for this week’s Mail on Sunday. It was necessarily brief, so I couldn’t resist the temptation to say a little more on the subject of the Olympic opening ceremony, and on the curious treatment – and subsequent behaviour - of the rather unattractive Tory MP who dared to criticise the event. By the way, I am also responding, ever so slightly,  the small platoons of Twitter users who, on Friday night, seemed to be hoping for an attack on the ceremony from me. And I am reinforcing my point, made in my Sunday column, that there is something unpleasantly totalitarian about the near-unanimity on the wonderfulness of the Olympic Games. I don’t claim to represent a majority opinion. What polls exist seem to suggest that my view is a minority one. But I do think that many people are keeping quiet about their doubts, much as they did during the Diana frenzy. Also, I think the fear of having the ‘wrong’ opinion is at least as great as it has been in any period of peacetime, and that is the really serious matter. The range of opinion which it is permissible to hold, without the fear of ostracism and possibly career damage, is getting narrower.

Here’s my Sunday article: ‘It was a social worker’s history of Britain, a nation of simple peasants, crushed and besmirched by evil top-hatted capitalists, but rescued in the end by the NHS, immigration, the suffragettes and the egalitarian strains of pop music.

I half-expected the giant Voldemort to transform itself into a menacing Thatcher figure, trampling, slashing and cutting every nice nurse in sight, and tossing bedsteads out of the stadium with a callous sneer.

It is a strange sort of nation that can turn a hospital bed into a symbol of national pride, especially in an era when you can die of thirst in one. 

But most people under 40 have been taught not to have pride in their country, so the Health Service is all they’ve got left. They have been cheated of any real knowledge of history. I’m not talking here about the Armada or the Empire – it’s hard to trumpet military glory when you’ve scrapped the armed forces, and the Olympics might not be the place for that in any case.

It’s our dogged insistence on liberty of thought, speech and assembly, that needs to be celebrated, in a world where arbitrary power and censorship are stronger every day. It is our greatest gift to mankind and we don’t even know it’s ours.

I’m sure Danny Boyle could have found a way of portraying that great tradition of limited government and human freedom that grew out of Magna Carta and flows through our history, and that of the world, like a mighty stream.

But to do that, he might have needed a few more words and a bit less drumming, miming and dancing. It was strange how little use he made of that other great possession of ours, the English language. Where were Dickens or Wordsworth, Keats or Tennyson?

As for Shakespeare, I suppose it would now actually be subversive for such an occasion to include the thrilling words of John of Gaunt’s dying speech ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’, for ‘England’ and ‘English’ are words that social workers don’t like to hear.’

Before I go any further, can I respond to the people who kindly pointed out that I had put Haverhill in the wrong county, and apologise to them. I shall correct this, as one who cares a lot about the counties.

But I do urge them to search the film clip out on Youtube (Haverhill, Cyclist, and Olympic Torch will bring it up) and then see if they care all that much where it was. It is astonishing to me that this hasn’t attracted more attention and criticism. I don’t, for instance, think the boy has ever been found or interviewed. There is a Dalek-like police comment referring to a ‘male on a bicycle’, which rather misses the point.

Also, may I respond to the ‘why do you never say anything cheerful?’ and ‘lighten up’ comments? Because it’s not what I write about, because there are plenty of others who do, because I think I should use my limited space to say what is not being said elsewhere but what, in my opinion, is important. I am suspicious of those who get annoyed by critical writing. My suspicion is that they do not want to see *any* such writing. After all, they don’t have to read it. My page is only one among dozens in the MoS.  Attacking me for writing it is an odd response. They are, unwittingly, doing the work of the new soft totalitarianism., which has already succeeded in closing down large areas of debate, and in demoralising this country’s patriotic conservatives to such an extent that they have lost the will to pass on their opinions to the next generation. The purpose of propaganda, especially lying propaganda, is to demoralise opponents.

Now, to that Tory MP, Aidan Burley, whose name keeps escaping me. He’s obviously a bit of a ninny , as we know from his dressing-up antics. But his remarks about the opening ceremony on Twitter were perfectly within the compass of British conservative opinion, and legitimate. I didn’t agree with him. I don’t think the Olympics are the place for military display or warlike patriotism, and I think the Churchill cult has more or less had had its day. The Battle of Britain was 72 years ago. It really is time this country achieved something else. As for the Rolling Stones, the Tory Party’s inability to understand that Jaggerism (the new hedonist cult of the self) is not their friend is one of the main reasons they are finished.

But was he wrong to detect a leftist tone in it? How about this, from the Guardian website on Sunday:

‘Paul Flynn, MP for Newport West, praised Danny Boyle for highlighting the NHS, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the futility of war. "Wonderfully progressive socialist sentiments and ideas were smuggled into the opening romp," he wrote during a weekend that saw Prime Minister David Cameron and Tory loyalists distance themselves from a tweet by Tory MP Aidan Burley, who called the event "leftie multicultural ****".  

The Sunday Telegraph also reported that some Tory cabinet ministers, shown film of the opening ceremony rehearsals, expressed doubts about them at the time. This very interesting account is buried deep in the story, which is to be found here

Spin doctors have obviously been at work trying to make sure this one never got off the ground. Everyone is happy now. Or so they say.

Then there was Carl Sargeant, minister for local government and communities in the Welsh assembly government, who tweeted that the opening ceremony was "the best Labour party political broadcast I have seen in a while".

Mr Flynn, an independent-minded and thoughtful MP (with whom I disagree about much)  who has some very sensible things to say about antidepressants, and also about the route taken by the corteges of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, is no fool. He can see what I can see, and what Mr Burley can see. How can Mr Burley be citicised for pointing out a fact that it is obvious to lefties themselves?

But Mr Burley seems to have been got at  by some sort of Thought Police, surely a matter of interest for any who still harbour the pathetic belief that the Tory Party is in some way conservative. It is his membership of the Tory Party that has exposed Mr Burley to this pressure.  This is from the BBC website: ‘Speaking later to BBC WM Mr Burley re-iterated that he had not been having a go at multiculturalism.

"I agree it should be celebrated," he said.

"I wasn't having a go at multiculturalism itself, I was having a go at the rather trite way, frankly, it was represented in the opening ceremony."

He added his tweets might not have been the greatest thing for his career, but if it started a debate then it can only have been a good thing.

"We all love the NHS but really for all the people watching overseas, 20 minutes of children and nurses jumping on beds, that seems quite strange.

"And then we had all these rappers - that is what got me to the point about multiculturalism."

He said rap music was enjoyed by a relatively small section of society, young people mainly.

"Is that what we are most proud of culturally?"

This is all very odd. First he attacks multiculti. Then he says he's all in favour of it and that he celebrates it. I thought that multiculturalism as an idea had been disowned by the British establishment some time ago, in various major speeches, such as this.  Speaking in Munich in February 2011, a man called David Cameron said  : ‘Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values.’ As I recall, this was reported as an attack on multiculturalism, which usually means that the spin doctors have told the political journalists that this is what it is.

Yet Mr Burley is now celebrating it. I could go on, but is this a case of being at war with Eurasia this week, and Eastasia next week? Mr Burley must be confused. Many others are to, Multiculturalism has nothing to do with race. On the absolute contrary, opponents of multiculturalism reject the idea that race determines anything, and urge that the host country ensures that migrants, for everyone’s good, adopt the culture of the country they have chosen to live in. 

The crucial difference between meaningless  'race' and significant culture is explored by the excellent Dr Thomas Sowell in his book ‘Race and Culture’. It is also, interestingly, illustrated in modern cultural conflicts in Japan (where ethnic Japanese migrants from South America have had major cultural differences with neighbours raised in Japanese culture, and in Singapore where ( as recently reported in the impeccably liberal New York Times) mainland Chinese people are encountering hostility from Singaporean Chinese people, entirely because of cultural difference.

In both cases, culture is shown to be far more signoiicant than ethnic origin, and wholly separate from ethnic origin. Yet those who seek to preserve national monocuture as smeared as 'racist' bythe left. This is demonstrably false.

This is why many civilised people are increasingly wary of multiculturalism, which creates competing solitudes and undermines the essential national fellow feeling of national communities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Join the smiley Cult of the Five Circles? Sorry, but I have a democratic right to be bored (and I'm exercising it while I still can)

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Enthusiasm is compulsory only in totalitarian dictatorships. Anywhere else, we are free to be keen if we want to, and bored if we want to.

So I wish people would stop telling me that I should enjoy the Olympics, or be proud of them, or think that they will in some way benefit this country.

But they won’t stop telling me. Hardly a day goes by without another previously independent mind surrendering to this pseudo-religion of obligatory smiles.

And that makes me suspicious. What is this strange cult? In the end, the Olympics is nothing more than a large athletics meeting.

Before Hitler and Dr Goebbels made it into a torch-lit and grandiose spectacle, you could be in the same city as the Games and barely notice.

Are we really that interested? And if we are, are we interested for good reasons?

Personally, I find it very odd that large crowds have turned out in the street to see a glorified pilot light carried about in a large cheese-grater.

Even odder is the fact that there has been no fuss at all about the appalling treatment of a boy on a bicycle who had the temerity to ride alongside the procession in Haverhill, Essex, on Saturday, July 7.

It is hard to see from the film, but he looks about 12 to me. As he comes level with the portly torch-bearer, he is seized by a baseball-capped ‘Torch Guard’, spun round, clasped by the neck, thrown to the ground, almost in front of a moving car in the procession, which visibly brakes hard, pinned down on the road and finally hustled on to the pavement. You’d think he’d tried to assassinate the Monarch, not ridden his bike too close to the Goebbels flame.

I can’t see much difference between the behaviour of the ‘Torch Guard’ and that of the menacing Chinese goons we all disliked so much four years ago when they escorted Dr Goebbels’s candle round the world.

The event happens so quickly that most of the crowd barely notice. But I have now watched it several times, and it makes me angrier every time I do so.
This is supposed to be a light-hearted, generous-spirited event.

But it isn’t really. It’s an overbearing, officious, self-important celebration of corporate greed, unpunished corruption, tolerated cheating and multiculturalism.

As for it being a demonstration of the greatness of Britain, what can I say? If they gave out Olympic medals for fatherless families, deindustrialisation, graffiti, violent disorder, traffic congestion, illiteracy, swearing or really high train and bus fares, we’d be going for gold in a big way.

I suspect these are features of our country we want to hide from potential investors – in which case, why is the stadium adorned by a structure that looks like an abandoned and vandalised blast-furnace?

And then there are the alleged economic benefits. Ho, ho, ho. No doubt these will be calculated according to the Martian mathematics under which something we were told would cost £2.3 billion actually cost £9.4 billion – and this was announced as an ‘underspend’.

Will the world be impressed? Well, would you be impressed if a family in your street, who were jobless, undischarged bankrupts with delinquent children, whose roof leaked, whose wiring was dangerous, whose garden fence was rotten and whose unmown lawn was full of weeds, suddenly hired a marquee and a brigade of maids and waiters, and invited everyone to a noisy champagne party?

Count me out of the compulsory joy. It reminds me all too much of May Day in Soviet Moscow. I once thought that was all over, but now I realise that it’s coming here.

Another mass killer, another link to drugs

An intelligent person would surely wonder why rampage massacres are becoming increasingly common.

America has always been full of easily obtained guns. But Finland isn’t, and nor is Norway, and nor is Germany – yet these horrible events happen there too.
What’s more, even in the USA mass killings  of this type have become common only in modern times.

The other obvious line of enquiry is legal and illegal drugs, from steroids and antidepressants to cannabis. The culprits in these events are often found to have been taking one or more such drugs. The suspect in the Aurora shooting, pictured in court, where he looked physically ill, has been reliably reported to have been taking the prescription medicine Vicodin, which is often abused.

The New York Post quoted one of his neighbours as saying he had seen him smoking cannabis, a drug whose carefully created ‘peaceful’ image is contradicted in many trials of violent or homicidal people.

I might add to this the strong circumstantial evidence that Kiaran Stapleton, the terrifying young man convicted of the random murder of Indian student Anuj Bidve, is a cannabis-user. And I should mention the appalling case of David Leeman, who shot his wife Jennie dead at close range with an (illegal) gun.

An Exeter jury convicted him of manslaughter rather than murder after hearing evidence that he might have lost control of himself due to antidepressants he had been taking.

Yet when I call for an inquiry into this increasingly worrying correlation, I am invariably attacked angrily. Why? Because cannabis, antidepressants and steroids are now so widely taken, in some cases by quite influential people, that each drug has a powerful lobby fearful of what such an inquiry might conclude. That is all the more reason to hold that inquiry.

The 'Mandela' you've never heard of

Even Nelson Mandela must get tired of the adulation he attracts. Yes, he opposed a nasty tyranny; yes, he was generous to his defeated foes. But others, equally if not more deserving of honour, are forgotten and ignored.

One of these is the incredibly brave Oswaldo Paya, who for many lonely, hard years defied the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. Unlike Mandela, he never supported the resort to violence.

Now he is dead, in a rather mysterious car crash. It comes nine months after the even odder decease of Laura Pollan, another brave foe of the Castros, who went down with a mystery illness and was cremated within two hours of her death.

In an unintended compliment to Mr  Paya, secret police arrested 50 of the courageous Cubans who dared to attend his funeral. You have probably never heard of him because most of the British media – especially the BBC – are still soft on the Cuban communist dictatorship. But he is as great as Mandela, if not greater.

I was shocked to see two heavily tattooed police constables in London’s Whitehall last week. Should I have been? The disfigurements were visible only because they were in shirtsleeves, but that’s not new.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

What’s that noise? They’re Building a Coffin for Liberty

Is it in the film of ‘Far From the ‘Madding Crowd’ that the closing scenes show Farmer Boldwood, condemned to death for the murder of a rival in love,  sitting gaunt in his narrow cell, listening to the prison carpenter making his coffin? Something like that. This rather unpleasant image comes to mind again as I read a pamphlet I wrongly neglected when it first came out ‘The Rise of the Equalities Industry’ by Peter Saunders, published last November by one of the better think tanks, Civitas. We are not sitting in a cell. Nobody has told us we are to die in the morning. But if we listen carefully we can hear the hammering, sawing and planing of the crude coffin in which our liberty is to be nailed down and buried.  Or perhaps it is the scaffold on which it is to be guillotined (no honest British gallows for this execution). We listen, we don’t understand what we hear, and we do nothing. Probably it is too late to do anything anyway.

 

The pamphlet attracted very little attention at the time, as such work often does. Finding it on one of the slithering heaps of unread material in my office (and planning, as I am to take two weeks away from my desk to write the index of my own new book) I thought ‘This could be interesting’, and picked it up. So gripped was I that I was still studying it two days later during the interval of a very fine open-air ‘Hamlet’ (performed in the majestic courtyard of the Bodleian Library in Oxford last week).

 

I think Professor Saunders (interesting as he is) does not know the half of it.  The real nature of these matters is known only to those of us who were part of the revolutionary project and have defected from it. But he has done a lot of the necessary spadework, and those who read his work will find they have at least understood the architecture of the new totalitarianism which is slowly but relentlessly rising out of the ruins of British law, the wreckage of our mixed constitution, the remains of our limited government,  and the void where our impartial civil service and competent, thrifty local government used to stand. If we had a properly educated middle class, which knew how to think instead of what to think, I don’t think this project could succeed. But the enemies of liberty began, very wisely, by wrecking the schools and the universities.

 

What’s it about? First of all, it comes close to grasping why egalitarianism is such a danger. For me, ‘equality’ is not a particularly attractive objective anyway. Why should it be?  But I always find people are shocked when I say so.

 

Let me explain . Equality before God simply exists, for the religious believer, as an absolute in Eternity. It reminds us that no human worth, achievement, wealth, fame, beauty, honour or praise has any importance before the throne of the Heavenly Grace. We brought nothing into this world and we can assuredly carry nothing out. We should live our lives in this knowledge. But the idea that this should in any way be reflected in some sort of absolute material equality, in this life,  is fatuous. We all have different gifts, and in many cases these gifts do not shine very brightly in this world, however glorious they may be in the next (and vice versa). Kindness, hospitality, charity, generosity are all required from those to whom much is given. Equality is not.

 

Equality before the law is more persuasive, and is certainly an ideal to be aimed at, even the certain knowledge that it might be approached but cannot be attained. But any practical, wise and experienced person knows that this equality is a fantasy, and will always remain so. Also, that any serious attempt to achieve it will suffer from the usual defects of Utopianism – it will fail, people will be killed and imprisoned in the process, and at the end of it the law will be more unequal than it was to start with.

 

Material equality is plainly absurd, cannot be brought into existence and is only maintained as a propaganda fiction in societies whose elites keep their privileges secret through censorship, and preserve them inviolate through terror. It is not desirable, for if all are rewarded equally, and people vary in their talents and energies, then many will suffer, talents will wither unused and corruption will be widespread . Some instances : under the Soviet system, all doctors, good or bad, were paid the same. It did not take long for the acute citizen to find out who the good ones were, but their services could only be secured through bribes. The same rule applied to places in better schools, or the allocations of apartments in better districts. Elite privilege carried more weight than bribery, but was in itself corrupt, as it secured the silence and uncritical support of those (the ‘Nomenklatura’) whom the elite admitted to privilege.

 

I know more about this than most,  because during my time in Soviet Moscow I was able to live in a Nomenklatura apartment, with the Brezhnev and Andropov families as my near neighbours. I have never had such magnificent quarters – 14-foot ceilings, chandeliers, oak parquet floors, a sweeping view of Moscow from the University to the Kremlin on one side, and of the Moscow River on the other. And this was in the Homeland of Equality. As a foreigner I could not take advantage of the dacha (country cottage) in the forest outside Moscow , which came with the apartment, as it was too close to an anti-ballistic missile launch site which I was not supposed to see. Nor did I qualify for entry to the special secret restaurants where the elite ate, or the special elite shops where they bought their privileged supplies of fresh meat and vegetables.  Nor was I allowed to use the special hospitals, in lush gardens behind high walls,  where the elite were treated. But these things existed, and my experience of this secret inequality was only the foothills. The truly powerful Communists lived in secluded woodland mansions with battalions of servants,  and roared down the city streets along special (Olympic-style?) lanes, which were heated in winter so that they never iced over.  So much for material equality. Later, as the Bolshevik privileges faded, I had to pay for my Moscow privileges with hard cash, the way you do anywhere else.

 

Professor Saunders explains that the equality pursued by the British government is not, as it pretends, the equality of treatment (which is more pernicious than it sounds); nor is it equality of opportunity (which is the only kind compatible with a free society). It is *equality of outcome*.

Professor Saunders shows that this is the hidden, third element on which the entire strategy is based’ . It is clear, when you study the actual rules, that equality of outcome is the aim (the attempt to get universities to lower their standards so as to equalise their intake is the clearest and most blatant example of this).

 

But ‘nothing is said explicitly about …equality of outcomes’.

 

He shows his lack of knowledge of the enemy by saying ‘’Unequal outcomes unthinkingly get used as evidence of unequal treatment’.

I challenge that ‘unthinkingly’. There are undoubtedly people who have thought about this, though they do not include the Equalities Minister, Mrs Theresa May. Mrs May, once a doughty opponent of all-women shortlists for MPs (She said ‘I’m totally opposed to Labour’s idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I‘ve competed equally with men in my career and I have been happy to do so in politics too’) mysteriously and so far as I know without any explanation later reversed her position, just in time for the Cameron era. She then more or less welcomed Harriet Harman’s Equalities Bill, the legislative basis for the greatest expansion of thought control in modern Britain.

 

She said: ‘I look forward to working constructively with them on ensuring that we have workable and practical legislation to provide for a fair society.’ Miss Harman thanked her for her ‘broad welcome for the package’.

 

No wonder then that the Coalition is now ’committed to the most radical form of egalitarian thinking – the belief in equal outcomes’. The Tory party, having failed to oppose the Harman Bill, is now finding that it is bound to follow it. No use blaming Nick Clegg. They sold the ass long before they got together with the Liberal Democrats and should stop pretending otherwise.  As ‘equality’ has now started to apply to class as well as to sex, race, sexual orientation, we are fast reaching the stage when an economic policy might have to be rejected because it allegedly threatens the equal rights of ‘disadvantaged’ economic groups. The courts might well rule that it did so. People’s Republic, here we come.

 

Professor Saunders also points out that this process has not been the result of popular demand, but the wilful programme of the 1960s university generation, in London and Brussels . ‘For almost fifty years, progressive politicians have been introducing laws designed to *change* the way people think and behave about issues like these, rather than to reflect them. Especially in more recent times, the law has been sued as an ideological battering ram, both by Westminster politicians and by Brussels, to forcibly redefine social norms’.

 

He traces the salami-slicing method by which a small body designed to stop racial discrimination has grown into the enormous and costly Equality and Human Rights Commission (itself a branch of the unjustly-ignored Fundamental Rights Agency based in Vienna). From protecting people against insults and outrages, it has taken on the task of ‘promoting’ equality, and now increasingly it has the power and the money not merely to promote it but to enforce it, through employment codes of practice supported by trade unions and decisive in the outcomes of tribunals, fines, the withholding of government contracts and ultimately the civil and criminal law.

 

Equality, of course, doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Linked with ’diversity’ it means that Christianity is no longer the accepted religion of this country, but one among many faiths, equal to them all and (like the rest) slightly more equal than Islam, because the British state is nervous of Islam and does not want to upset it. The effect of this is actually to make Christianity a slighted and discouraged faith, as it has to be reminded from time to time of its lost status and its new subservient role. State employees, as we have found in a series of cases, can get into trouble for trying to spread a Christian message at work  or to act at work according to Christian principles (how long before this applies to those who do it too noisily outside work?). I have yet to hear of this happening to members of any other faith. But I am sure that there will soon be a concerted assault on the remaining Christian presence in the state schools, beginning with dilution of entry requirements and the power to give preference in hiring teachers to members of a faith, and ending in effective abolition.

 

I suspect a similar fate faces the English language in time. The estate of Marriage is also now ‘equal’ to ‘any relationship’ , which one again means that it has been stripped of its former privileges and needs to be reminded of its new, diminished status by being treated with some coldness by bureaucracy, and not acknowledged in official documents (I believe the words ‘husband’ and wife’ are increasingly disappearing from forms , replaced by ‘partner’).

 

 

From a legitimate concern for the victims of racial discrimination,  what Peter Simple long ago called ‘The Race Relations Industry’  has jumped the logic barrier into other areas which are wholly different (see my chapter on the important differences between – for example – racism, sexism and homophobia in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, originally published in hardback as ‘The Broken Compass’)  for a demolition of the idea that the three are the same, or can or should be treated in the same way. There’s also an exploration of the important switch from ‘racialism’, namely a moronic, indefensible  discrimination on the grounds of skin colour  to ‘racism’ (in which racial prejudice is falsely equated with defence of indigenous cultures) , which I recommend to any interested reader.

 

As Professor Saunders points out, decades have gone by during which there has been no serious intellectual challenge to this wobbling mountain of tripe. Positive discrimination exists in all but name. Even supposedly conservative private firms adopt the rules of equality and diversity.

 

But the EHRC is in fact the nucleus of a Thought Police. Since the Macpherson report dispensed with any need for evidence for an accusation of ‘racism’ ( the same of course applies to the other isms and phobias) the subjective wounded feelings of anyone can create a thought crime. The adoption of ‘racially aggravated’ categories of crime, with much heavier sentences than non-aggravated offences, has given the police  and the CPS enormous power to pursue people who say out loud (or are accused of doing so) things which the new elite don’t like. The recent bizarre prosecution of Cinnamon Heathcote Drury, charged with ‘racially aggravated assault’ of a Muslim woman in Tesco (thrown out by a jury) shows how vulnerable anyone is to such accusations.  Yes, she was acquitted. But many people wouldn’t or couldn’t have risked a jury trial, something increasingly difficult to obtain.

 

And the modern British jury is an unreliable defence. Political correctness, egalitarianism and poor education have all found their way into the jury room, and the majority verdict has destroyed the power of the obstinate Henry Fonda character to resist a rush to judgement. ( see the chapter ’Twelve Angry Persons’ in my book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’).

 

Actually, I suspect we are just at the very beginning of a process which will end with a true Thought Police. The Police themselves are feeling their way, cautiously.  They would like to act more, but it is too soon. Remember those bizarre inquiries one Welsh force made about public figures who had allegedly been disrespectful of the Welsh? I asked them what law they were applying. They never answered. But I suspect they had in mind Section 5 of the Public order Act of 1986, a sloppily drafted and silly piece of work originally aimed at football hooligans  (now the subject of a worthy campaign for reform whose fortunes it will be interesting to observe) . Section 5 makes it an offence to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour” or to display “any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting” within the hearing or sight of a person “likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby”. Combined with Lord Macpherson’s view on what constitutes a racist incident, this is of course irresistible, especially once police, CPS, the Judges’ bench and the Appeal courts have all been thoroughly politically corrected, a process close to completion.

 

I think the police officers who in 2005 and 2006 investigated  various public figures who had said unfashionable things about homosexuality  (one of these was Sir Iqbal Sacranie, then head of the Muslim Council of Britain, another was the Christian pro-marriage campaigner Lynette Burrows ) on the radio were also relying on the same Act. Again, they never followed through (see below for the reason why not) . At the time they said homophobic racist and domestic incidents were ‘priority crimes’. They then told the media ‘We can confirm that a member of the public brought to our attention an incident which he believed to be homophobic. All parties have been spoken to by the police. No allegation of crime has been made. A report has been taken but is now closed.. Note that ‘which he believed to be homophobic’. In law, that’s all that is necessary.  

The Public Order Act 1986 is the law used against the elderly preacher Harry Hammond, who was arrested (yes, he was) after being pelted with lumps of mud,  pushed to the ground,  pelted with mud and abused by homosexual rights campaigners (who were not arrested). He was then successfully prosecuted before magistrates  for annoying them. An appeal, held unusually after his death, failed. He had held up a placard bearing the words ‘Stop Homosexuality’, which was his basic message, He had offered no personal insults. One fascinating feature of this case is that the two police officers at the scene disagreed openly about what to do, and have evidence on opposite sides in the courtroom. The younger, more PC police officers who are now pretty much universal have for long been trained in equality and diversity. There is a steady dribble of cases of preachers and others arrested and sometimes tried for speech code offences of this kind. My guess is that the police and the CPS they are restrained mainly by the existence of a strong free press. There is a steady dribble of cases of preachers and others arrested and sometimes tried for speech code offences of this kind.

 

Well, listen to the sound of saws and chisels. Lord Justice Leveson is busy making a coffin for that. And when the strong free press is gone, wait for the knock on the door. Antonio Gramsci is well on the way to scoring his first victory, and the European regions on these islands will be the first to learn that revolutions don’t always happen through noisy and violent convulsions. Indeed, the most effective revolutions take place while people are looking the other way, as everyone has been. All the buildings are left standing. But the laws, liberties, traditions, morals, faith and loyalty are destroyed, and carted away  to some place of desolation where the remnants can be desecrated and burned.  Quomodo sedet sola Civitas (you can have fun looking that up).

 

NB : I expect that this will be my last posting (apart from my Mail on Sunday column which will be posted as usual) till after the Olympics.  . I may be tempted to engage in other verbal combat, but I may not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cowardice, Words, Drugs, Guns and Reason

Cowardice, Words, Drugs, Guns and Reason I thought it was time for some dialogue, and some responses to comments, in a slightly random order. Mr Barnes suggests that in my travels abroad I have been guarded by some sort of ‘posse’ of protectors. Not so. Only the BBC can afford this sort of thing. I also have never worn a bullet-proof vest or a helmet. But I have had some very brave companions (in many cases female) who have certainly ben a stay and comfort in time of trouble. And I am a poltroon, a word I use because it seems to me to be more expressive of my particular kind of well-though-out self-preservation, not because I expect people will have to look it up. In fact I am amazed that so many people do have to look it up. This is another feature of the death of proper English, that as bad words come in and force out good ones, good old words die because nobody uses them any more.

Of course, I don’t know for certain if I could do brave things in combat, because I’ve never been tested in that way – and I know that people often manage to act bravely, with their hearts in their boots and their bowels melting (this, by the way, is an actual physical sensation which I once experienced when nearly killed by a lorry in Peckham High Road, the closest to death I think I’ve been), because they are ashamed to run away in front of their comrades. I also know from more than one acquaintance who has been under fire that you often don’t run away because it’s safer to stay where you are. I stress my own weakness because I dislike the cult of the noble war reporter, clad in flak jacket and sun-hat, striding off towards the front line and (in general) reporting the conflict as a drama, without any political understanding. I’m sorry when they get killed, and admire their bravery, but I actually don’t think this sort of journalism contributes very much towards the world’s understanding of conflict.

Leaving that aside, I knew perfectly well that my cautious thoughts on the possible role of drugs in the Aurora shooting would be attacked as prejudice by some of my readers. And it duly was. I must also own up to failing to spot an important typographical error. It was before 1920, not 1820, that Britain’s gun laws made those of Texas look effeminate. I have now corrected it. I am grateful to the reader who spotted the inconsistency.

The whole subject is explored in the chapter ‘Out of the Barrel of a Gun’ in my 2003 book ‘A Brief History of Crime’. It enraged so many people that I took it out of the paperback version ‘The Abolition of Liberty’ in the vain hope that the book would then get the attention it deserved. A silly delusion. I now wish I hadn’t.

My conclusion was then, and remains now, that general prohibitions on gun ownership affect only the law-abiding. Where such laws exist, criminals and terrorists will be the only people who own guns. When I lived in Washington DC, there was a strict gun ban according to local law. The north-east of the city in those days echoed each night to the sound of gunfire. (I might say that in nearby northern Virginia, where it was legal to carry a concealed gun if you were an adult with no criminal record, peace reigned. I am not saying that it reigned because of this law, or that gunfire raged in DC because of the DC law, just that laws in themselves don’t necessarily have the effect their drafters expect). This cannot possibly be the intended consequence of the well-intentioned leftists who seek gun control. So why do they do it? They do it because they aren’t thinking, that’s why, and also because they regard themselves as automatically superior to their opponents, and so feel no need to engage with the arguments of those opponents. Sensible specific laws to keep guns out of the hands of convicted felons (which of course hugely increase penalties if such persons are found in possession of firearms) are only of any value if they don’t apply to those without such records.

On the question of gun bans as opposed to drug bans, drugs have only one use, to stupefy or otherwise alter the mental state of the person taking them. Guns have many uses – including several generally accepted as good, such as defence of habitation, sport, defence of women against the danger of rape (look up Second Amendment Sisters). In my view the freedom (not necessarily exercised) to own guns is also essential for a populace which wants to be on sensible terms with the state. This has been long recognised in English law. Switzerland, which relies on a well-trained citizen army to maintain its independence, has another, comparable, argument.

As to the question of drugs and mass shootings, I am not saying crudely that these drugs *cause* shootings. I am saying that it seems to be the case that a large number of these mass murderers have been taking, or were at the time taking, legal or illegal psychotropic drugs. I would also point out that such events also happen in countries, such as Germany and Finland, here so far as I know there are strict general gun laws). I’m unconvinced, by the way, that anyone would commit a crime of this kind for the brief celebrity that it might provide. Afterwards they’ll either be dead, or locked up among unpleasant people for the rest of their lives. If they can calculate the fame, they can calculate that either they won’t be around to enjoy it, or that the price is too high to be worth it.

Only if their reason was in some way unbalanced or overthrown could they consider such an action seriously, plan it, equip themselves for it and the carry it out. And, as I often point out here, individual madness is very rare in uninjured people of normal physical health. It’s reasonable to look for a cause. A ban on press and media attention given to such events might prevent an important clue from emerging. A general inquisitiveness about the killer’s use of legal and illegal drugs could ensure that we began to see if the correlation was any more than a coincidence.

My guess is that this doesn’t happen because cannabis and antidepressants (and, as I have found here, steroids) have powerful lobbies of supporters, often in the media, who take them themselves, and don’t want to find out, let alone publicise, any bad news about them. The main barrier to knowledge is and always will be that people don’t want to know it. What would happen to the amazingly successful ‘medical marijuana’ red herring if THC came to be associated with rage killers? When it comes to legal drugs, their manufacturers are pretty hot on squashing suggestions at inquests that they might have been harmful. Who can blame them. This is a very big business.

My point is not, in fact, that drugs cause mass shootings. They don’t, any more than guns do. But what if the drugs are so powerful that random individuals can be sent over the edge of madness by taking them? Wouldn’t this then be too high a price to pay for their general availability? it would be relatively simple for governments to rein in the amount of drug taking (legal and illegal) in the modern world, if the connection were made. First, we must make a serious effort to study the matter. Who can oppose that? I am accused of having made my mind up in advance. I haven’t. I repeatedly say that I don’t know. I repeatedly call for an expert inquiry – whose conclusions I should obviously be bound to accept, if I had also accepted its membership and terms of reference. But I also think that if I kept silent about my very strong suspicion, I would be an irresponsible poltroon.