Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 307

We Had it So Good

Everyone (well, maybe not everyone, but almost everyone) has heard of Harold Macmillan’s 1957 boast (or perhaps warning) that ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’.  It must be part of the inspiration for the title of Linda Grant’s latest novel ‘We Had it So Good’ which I have just finished. (This is not to be confused with Dominic Sandbrook’s popular history epic with a  similar title). It is of course about that lucky, selfish generation that went to co college in the 1960s and now rules the world. It is at least an attempt to write about a major, serious subject of our times.

Ms Grant is not my ideal modern novelist.  If I had to say what I liked most, I’d go for Philip Roth’s trilogy (not his other books), William Boyd, Alan Judd (a recent, welcome discovery – why doesn’t he get more attention?) and – to my surprise – A.S. Byatt.  But she is interesting, especially to me. I now know that ms Grant must have been at the University of York round about the time I was there in the early 1970s – as were Greg Dyke, former BBC Director general, Harriet Harman, queen of PC, Helen Dunmore (whose novel about the Siege of Leningrad is extraordinarily good). I can’t recall any of them, except for Greg Dyke, and Harriet Harman says she can’t remember me either, though it was in those days a very small university and I was quite noisy, not always in a good way.

Greg Dyke keeps telling a story about me turning up late for some tutorial saying I’d been busy starting the revolution. I think I know, the (boring, obscure) origin of this fable, namely a lame excuse I offered for being late with an essay after a weekend spent servicing a Bolshevik cell of trade unionists in Scarborough. I wouldn’t have used such a phrase, though – and I am more or less certain that Mr Dyke and I never shared a tutorial group (in those days York University still aspired to this Oxbridge way of teaching). I’ve tried a few times to correct it on ‘Wikipedia’, but someone seems so anxious to have it there that I can’t be bothered any more, and if it makes Greg happy, now he is Chancellor of the University, who am I to mind? I mainly remember him being unfashionably attached to the Labour Party, a body which all true leftists despised by the end of the 1960s, and looking pretty furry.

Who could have thought, as we lazed on the subsidised lawns and strolled round the subsidised lake, that we would all end up as we have?

This is why I was interested in Linda Grant’s book, as it takes as its theme a 1960s student couple who emerge in our era well-off, still married and yet deeply discontented, unfulfilled, baffled by their children and quite lonely. It doesn’t, I might add,  parallel my life, as by the time I got to York I was a puritan Trotskyist, sometimes jeered at as the only person on the campus who didn’t smoke dope, and resolved – having ceased to be a teenager – to stop listening to the popular music that I then thought would fade as my generation grew up. I was already too serious for my own good, and was destined to get even more so.

Of course, they didn’t grow up. Most of them still haven’t, which is why so many of them  hang out at Glastonbury, or in Hyde Park late at night, listening to the screech of tortured metal which they refer to as ‘music’(I won’t risk any exact categories, as people seem to care so much about this. But it’s not J.S. Bach) .  I was lucky in a way, though it was quite hard-bought luck. I’d had my teenage revolt and found it led quickly to squalor and worse.  I’d done what teenagers were expected to do and been dissatisfied.  I’d worked for a living for a bit, done my own laundry and and paid my own rent.  I’d been more or less compelled (thanks to my own earlier folly) to study hard and unsupervised to get the A-levels I needed to make it to university. I had been, at 17, the cause of a serious road accident in which I was also (thank Heaven) the only serious victim. So I had an unusual experience of pain and fear. And I had always known that the moment the University days ended, I would have to earn a living. I could expect no inheritance and very little help.

Now, one of the things that made me read Ms Grant’s book was that I had been astonished by an earlier novel of hers ‘When I lived in Modern Times’. Though she couldn’t possibly have remembered it herself, she seemed to have found out or understood  something about British colonial life in the Mediterranean in the 1940s that I had also absorbed. It’s very hard to communicate , but there’s an effect of the light, of the architecture and the smell in the air which I always get when I’m in Jerusalem, or Nicosia or Gibraltar or – even more so – Malta. I expect I’d find it in Alexandria if I ever managed to get there. It’s a feeling of a time which, as her title suggests, seemed very modern and urgent to those living through it, which was still very much in the age of concrete and motor cars and radios. But, thanks to the abrupt collapse of the British Empire it is now as remote from us as any other archaeological remains. They were modern times, but modern in an old-fashioned, archaic way – an old-fashioned future like thenone envisaged at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Perhaps if the Empire had survived, it would have been the future we actually got.

I suspect I inherited this sensation. I was in Malta for less than a year after my birth, and can’t possibly have any direct memory of the place , though when I go back it seems curiously familiar .

My parents probably had the best years of their lives in Malta, then the headquarters of the British Mediterranean Fleet where my father was stationed from 1949 to 1952. They were spared the privations of rationed Britain. They lived on the nice allowances which officers in HM forces tended to get only when abroad. I assume there were servants.  I know there were pleasant clubs to which they belonged. The luxuries of life were duty free, and the never-resting sea lay at the end of every vista.

I am dimly aware of this in some way that resembled memory, but it isn’t. In the same way, I was once jolted to my core when, during a weekend spent in a warship, I half-woke from sleep to hear a particular phrase in a call on the ship’s public address system, and knew that I *had heard that precise form of words before at some point in my life*.  Yet I also know, with utter certainty, that I hadn’t ever heard it before. The same was so with some of the Naval slang I later heard on board.  I think we do inherit some memories from our parents.

Anyway, this is a cumbersome way of saying that Ms Grant had imagined Tel Aviv in the last days of British Palestine in a way which I found utterly arresting and believable. She had also (in a way I’ve only ever seen matched by John le Carre in his better books, and now by Alan Judd – see above) caught the language and the attitude to life of the British military classes, what they knew, what they didn’t, what they thought of certain types of people and certain ways of thinking. How she did it, I don’t know. 

Some of her dialogue in ‘They had it so good’ is by contrast , unbelievably clunky. There’s a conversation between Oxford undergraduates that makes me wince, so stilted is it.

But by no means all of it is like this.  One passage, in which she describes a child witnessing and slowly understanding the disastrous failure of her parents’ genteel dress-for-dinner holiday hotel, thanks to the British middle class’s cultural revolution in taste,  is so bitterly realistic that it sounds is if it comes from personal experience, though it surely cannot.

She was also writing about Oxford in the years when Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar there – an Oxford I personally remember as a fascinated townie rather than as a university insider. And she has some of it pretty right.

What is in a way most striking about the book is that the central characters assume that taking (and in one case manufacturing) illegal drugs is perfectly normal. They continue to assume this from their student years until their maturity. There is precious little evidence of a stern authoritarian war on drugs in these people’s lives, and their attitude to the subject is such that you’d expect them to be amazed if anyone came between them and their pleasure.

I think this true of modern Britain, and is a large part of what I have been arguing here for years.

Theorising Without Data

Sherlock Holmes always said that it was a capital error to speculate about events when you lacked the information. But sometimes the data are just elusive. Should I then speculate anyway, like all the people who are blaming easy access to guns for the Aurora killing, when Americans have had easy access to guns for centuries, but this sort of killing is comparatively new? Or should I just ask ‘Why don’t we have any data on this yet ?’ And if I do, will I be told off for even suggesting it might be important to have such? Probably, if I know my pro-drug contributors as well as I think I do.  Here goes anyway.

I have only just learned ( for instance) from my friend and colleague Mary Ellen Synon (who has written about this subject elsewhere on Right Minds) , that the Oklahoma City mass murderer, Timothy McVeigh, was a heavy user of drugs – methamphetamine and cannabis.

This was revealed by Michael Fortier,  one of McVeigh’s accomplices. He was himself a drug user, and introduced McVeigh to his vices.  

I had expected to find evidence of this kind , as my theory - that a large number of such killings are undertaken by people who have been unhinged by legal or illegal drugs – would suggest that McVeigh was likely to have such a thing in his past. Current use isn’t always the problem. Past use can have unhinged the person for good.  But it is only thanks to Mary Ellen’s diligent digging that I have discovered this about McVeigh.

Liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic are always anxious to rush off in their favourite direction – ‘gun control’, when there is a horrible mass murder . You can see why they do this. They think all rural Americans are homicidal hillbilly gun nuts who need to be controlled, and miss no opportunity to call for this. Rural Americans, in return, regard urban liberals as effeminate milksops who have no idea what America is for, and laugh at their concerns.

Since researching the facts of the matter for a controversial chapter in my much-disliked and widely-unbought book ‘A Brief History of Crime’ I have been stuck with the awkward knowledge that, if you don’t like guns (and as it happens I dislike them a lot, being myself a suburban milksop and poltroon who has seen the results of gunfire on the human frame), universal gun control is a completely useless way of keeping them out of the hands of bad people.

Judged purely on reason and facts, the rural hillbillies and the National Rifle Association are in the right, and the degree-draped New York liberals are clueless, and have never really thought about the matter because they are so sure that they possess the high ground. The hillbillies may not have thought about it  either, but it doesn’t make them any less correct. The right to bear arms is a guarantee of liberty, as recognised in our own Bill of Rights in 1689,  and guns don’t fire themselves.  People fire them. What’s more, this country’s gun laws, before 1820, made Texas look soppy. And pre-1920 Britain was not raked with lawless gunfire. Far from it.

But back to McVeigh for a moment. When I wrote an article about his execution some years ago, I read a thumping great biography of him, and I cannot recall there being any mention of drugs. If there was, it was in passing and not stressed or linked to his behaviour. Likewise, Anders Breivik’s willingly-given details of his use of drugs were given a passing mention in his swirling ‘manifesto’. And while all kinds of other loopy psychobabble/ psycho-political theories about how a silly fat loner became a mass murderer have been done to death, I know of nobody apart from me who has ever explored this factor.

Nobody is interested. The connection (despite the many extraordinary coincidences, in cases of mass shooting and the use of drugs by the shooter, from Columbine onwards) is just not made by the media.  Why is this? Partly it’s because of the gun control hobby horse, which satisfies the immediate demand for analysis, and which makes media executives happy. Is it also partly because so many media people are taking legal or illegal drugs themselves, and are unwilling to wonder if these things may have dangers? I don’t know.

But so far (and this has happened in several of the recent US shootings) there is *no hard information at all* on this subject.  It is not that we know that Holmes didn’t take any kind of drugs. It is not that we know he did. We don’t know if he did or he didn’t, because the media present haven’t pressed the question, and because the authorities haven’t, apparently thought it worthwhile to look into it. 

And to this day most people don’t know that McVeigh and Breivik were messing with their minds by swallowing or otherwise ingesting powerful substances which could have affected their minds. It just hasn’t been treated as important. That doesn’t mean it isn’t. We often look in the wrong place for our explanations, as medical science attests down the ages. Leech, anyone? Pre-frontal lobotomy?

One curious thing has been reported about James Holmes.  A car in the family’s San Diego driveway, believed to belong to his parents,  bore a sticker with the words ‘To Write Love on her Arms’. This is the name of a Florida-based charity said to work on ‘issues of depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide’.  Holmes was also a student of ‘neuroscience’ , a branch of knowledge often linked with the advocacy of drugs for alleged conditions such as ‘ADHD’ ‘ADD’ and ‘Clinical Depression’. But that’s all I know. I want to know more.  So should you. So should my media colleagues, and the police, and those who are interested in preventing any more of these ghastly events. It might be important. And it is important to know if it is, or if it isn’t. We won’t get there by not asking. So, can someone in Colorado please ask? And keep asking?

What matters most... the right of the Rock Gods to make a racket - or YOUR right to a quiet life?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

If a man burst into your house and started painting the walls, you’d throw him out and call the police. You wouldn’t care if he said: ‘But I really like this colour. So should you.’

If a stranger bustled into your kitchen and cooked a meal for you, then ordered you to eat it, you’d think he was mad, even  if he said: ‘But I really like this sort of food. So should you.’

The same would go for anyone who made you watch his choice of TV programme, or compelled you to read the books he liked.

Why is it, then, that some individuals are allowed to force their taste in noise not just on their neighbours, but on thousands of people? Lovers of rock music may think that everyone shares their liking for screeching electric guitar chords, shouted lyrics and a perpetual factory thump. They are mistaken. Millions actively loathe this form of entertainment.

But these days they have to listen to it. It throbs from passing cars. It pervades cinemas.  It is the chosen background of TV advertising and is almost universal in shops. I might add that the USA sometimes uses it as a form of torture, sorry, persuasion, and I can quite see why.

Increasingly, it also howls and roars from city parks. Thanks to a change in the law a few years ago, parks have ceased to be islands of peace and have instead become the frequent location for so-called concerts, often sponsored by local authorities who need all the money they can get to service the huge debts they have run up in 30 years of spendthrift excess.

Those living nearby must, on several nights of the year, endure someone else’s bad taste. You may have planned a peaceful evening or an early night. But you can’t have one, thanks to the monstrous selfishness of the rock cult.

Because of this problem, the authorities have been slowly fumbling towards an attempt to limit the invasion of noise into millions of private night-times.

So it was that last weekend, in London’s Hyde Park, Bruce Springsteen and Sir Paul McCartney, those omnipotent demigods of rock, were – amazingly – compelled to shut up. No doubt there were sighs of joy in thousands of homes nearby.

But the petulant, inconsiderate cult of rock didn’t get it. The audience booed. Members of Springsteen’s band moaned that Britain was a ‘police state’ because the freedom to enjoy peace was – for once – elevated above the freedom to make a loud noise.

London’s populist mayor, Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, a supposed conservative, sucked up to the guitar cult. He brayed: ‘If they’d have called me, my answer would have been to jam in the name of the Lord.’

Who then speaks for those who want a quiet life?


Tories worshipping at The Master's feet

Prepare to be shocked. Recently that grand insider’s magazine The Economist said as follows, not expecting people like us to read it: ‘The politicians now at the summit of the Conservative Party have expressed an ardour for Tony Blair .  .  . that might shock anyone overhearing it.’

What do these Tory potentates say about one of the worst Prime Ministers we have ever had? They call him ‘The Master’, ‘the great man’, even ‘our real leader’.

Chancellor George Osborne is ‘the biggest fan of all’. I have warned before about the Tory Party and I hope you’ll listen in future.

But perhaps this adulation is one of the things encouraging Mr Blair to clamber out of his grave, like a mummy in a horror film.

And perhaps it has something to do with the behaviour of the Civil Service in refusing to give key information to the Chilcot Inquiry into Mr Blair’s war on Iraq.

This means the inquiry, which Mr Blair fears will condemn him for misleading Parliament and people, is stalled.

Would senior officials dare act like this if they weren’t confident their political bosses agreed with them? Remember, those political bosses, Mr Slippery and his colleagues, regard Mr Blair as their real leader and a great man.


The BBC, biased and revelling in slaughter

Are Western special forces already operating in Syria? We now know such troops played a much greater role in Libya than was ever admitted at the time.

And the violent but ineffectual buffoons of the Free Syrian Army, who mainly shoot at the sky and yell ‘Allahu Akbar!’, have suddenly begun to do real damage to the Syrian authorities.

Could this be why the BBC, which has cast aside all impartiality over the Syrian crisis, behaved so repellently when a terrorist bomb killed several leading Syrians on Wednesday?

There was an exultant tone in its coverage of these killings, summed up by the phrase ‘a stunning development’ to describe the murders on Radio 4’s The World Tonight. The tone of voice used was not coldly neutral, but excited.

I thought we were against Islamist terror. Not so long ago we were engaged in a war against it. I also thought we were against assassination as a weapon of war. I also thought the BBC had admitted it got carried away over the Arab Spring. It’s doing it again now in Damascus, but there’s still time to grow up and calm down.

The same goes for Foreign Secretary William Hague, who seems weirdly anxious to abandon the Christians of Syria to some horrible Islamic regime, probably preceded by some real massacres.

You read it here first. ‘The main purpose of the Crown Prosecution Service,’ I wrote on July 7, ‘is to save money by pretending that crime and disorder are not as bad as they really are.’
And, lo, its boss, Keir Starmer, last week openly called for the cost of a trial to be taken into account when charging an offender. Believe me, it already is.

I don't recall being asked in the 1997 Election if I wanted the country to be more crowded. I don’t recall anyone saying they wanted it to be more crowded.
I don’t recall any political party saying they planned for it to be more crowded. Yet, as this week’s census returns show, that is what we got. Why?

 

Mr Slippery says he wants to stay under the Brussels thumb, because Britain outside the EU would be like a Greater Switzerland.
What on earth would be wrong with that?

In the Eighties, the unions were over-mighty subjects. Now, supermarkets have taken that role.
Thanks to their excessive power, Britain’s dairy farmers are being forced out of business by absurdly low milk prices. Who will curb the superstore barons?

 

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

Beating the Drum for War, while opposing the gallows – the BBC’s confused attitude to death

Famously, the Jewish athlete Harold Abrahams says in the film ‘Chariots of Fire’ that you can seldom put your finger on a direct expression of anti-Semitism, or Judophobia, as I nowadays term it  because, since Hitler gave anti-Semitism a really bad name, nobody will admit to being an anti-Semite (who? me? The very idea?).  And that’s Ju-do-pho-bia by the way, nice and simple, easy to say, not Judaeophobia or any other tangled mouthful.  I made it up myself, to put on the shelf alongside Homophobia and Islamophobia. I did so partly because so many irrational Israel-haters reject the name of anti-Semite (because they think it means ‘Nazi’ - and they read the Guardian so they can’t be Nazis). But also yes, ever so slightly to annoy the inventors of those terms, who have achieved a lot by wrongly classifying political or moral opinions as pathologies.

 

The paradox is that  the strangely persistent hostility towards Jews in so many parts of the world often does seem to require some sort of medical or at least scientific explanation.  See Julius Streicher’s ‘Der Stuermer’, or some of the ‘Blood Libel’ and ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ garbage which still circulates in many Arab countries.

 

Abrahams said  ‘You catch it on the edge of a remark’.  It is a very clever summary. If you were able to play it back, and write it down, and pin it., cold and dead, in a display case, it would be hard to see exactly what was wrong with it. But as it flies by the ear and the eye, it’s clear that something is up.  And this is often true of bias in broadcasting or journalism. I’ll come back to that, and to the question of Syria, in a moment.

 

With me, you know where you are. I’m biased, strongly, in favour of some things and against others. My bias is (in my view) rational and supported by facts and logic. It is also clearly stated and very much unconcealed.  But it’s a bias. Bias is something I know how to do.  You’d no more go to me for an impartial report than you’d put mustard in a cream cake, or anchovies on your cornflakes.

 

And that is at least partly (there are other reasons) why I’m not financed by a poll tax, or so-called licence fee, collected on pain of imprisonment from the population.

 

But the BBC is. And its complete inability to remain impartial, while sighing that it really, really is,  is exasperating largely because it is based on such a tragic lack of self-knowledge.  You can hardly ever get them to listen. A couple of Christmases ago, I had a series of brief impromptu conversations crammed into one day with the outgoing Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson. On the same day, we met on a train, in the foyer of some lecture hall and finally at the sort of liberal elite party, in a London club, too,  which Mike Barnes (or is that mikebarnes?) thinks I attend all the time. If only you knew, Mike.

 

It became quite funny, and I had to persuade him I wasn’t actively stalking him. The good thing was that our exchange had, by the end, become a conversation, and I think I managed to get through to him some of what I have long said.

 

He insisted that his presenters and commentators were all impartial in action, whatever their private views. I was sure he was wrong. To explain why,  I said ‘ I’m sure that the BBC does not employ any presenter who could subject Clive Stafford Smith (the celebrated anti-death penalty campaigner) to an aggressive, hostile interview.’

 

Mr Thompson scratched his chin and seemed to concede that yes, I had got him there.

 

Which allows me to digress for a moment and mention BBC Radio 4’s ‘Midweek’ programme, which this week featured Mr Stafford Smith , who is  currently plugging a book called ‘Injustice’. Good luck to him. ‘Midweek’ has never yet allowed me to plug any of my books around the table with the jolly, comfortable Libby Purves, but who knows? Maybe next time. If this does happen, I do not expect to be described as Peter Hitchens ‘The great columnist and author’. I’ll be content with name, rank and number.  But Clive (whom I first met in an execution chamber in Georgia , USA, and for whom I have some admiration despite disagreeing with his blanket rejection of the death penalty ) was introduced by Libby on Wednesday as, yes, ‘The great defence lawyer and campaigner’. Great?

 

Well, no bias there, I suppose. And nor was there any bias in the largely admiring interview which followed. (The programme will be available on BBC i-player for a few days yet, so you can see if I’m right). But there was something ,either present or lacking.  If I’d been there I would have challenged Clive’s homely reminiscences about ‘Nicky’ Ingram, a nasty and particularly cruel murderer whose guilt was never in serious doubt, yet whose cause Clive championed, and whose execution in the electric chair we both watched, from different parts of the room. But then, I know what Ingram did, and how he told his victim that he liked to torture people before tying him and his wife to a tree and then shooting them both in the head. She survived, which is how we know for certain he was guilty. If Ms Purves knew any of this, she showed no sign of it, or of revulsion at hearing this person referred in friendly terms, as ‘Nicky’.  

 

But isn’t it strange that the BBC, crammed as it with people who regard me as a monster for favouring capital punishment for the guilty, has become a roaring propaganda machine for liberal intervention in Arab countries, which will lead – has already led – to many innocents dying?

 

Even the BBC has now admitted it got ‘carried away’ over the ‘Arab Spring’, an event viewed here on this weblog with what seems to me to have been prescient doubt. And a few brave reporters are now bringing back news of just what a mess our exultant support of a rabble of fanatical Islamists and gangsters (who later showed their gratitude by wrecking a British war cemetery, devoting special attention to desecrating the graves of Jewish soldiers) has led to in poor Libya.

 

But do they learn? They do not. Now we are cranking up for intervention in Syria, too, somehow steering round the UN which is prevented by Russia and China from endorsing this.  And anyone watching or listening to BBC outlets on Wednesday must surely have been struck by the coverage of the terrorist murder of several leading Syrian government figures in Damascus that morning. I think I am right in saying that the BBC generally disapproves of terrorist murder, and it puts on a long face to report it ( as it should). But on this occasion I sensed no moral disapproval at all. Indeed, I noticed an exultant tone, and something similar in the responses of politicians quoted, who more or less stated that this sort of thing would keep on happening until the Assad ‘regime’ ‘stepped down’. How do they know, by the way? Does this tell us anything about the relations of ‘The West’ with the Syrian Islamist rebels who we are misguidedly supporting,  and who some Sunni Arab states are arming? This came a few days after the BBC had excitedly carried unconfirmed reports of a ‘massacre’ in Syria which as far as I know has not been shown to have taken place. It was a battle between rebels and government in which some people died, a wholly different thing.

 

That word ‘regime’ is also interesting. What makes one government a regime and another a government? It can’t be democratic legitimacy, or they would be all the time talking about the Chinese regime, and we never do. Syria, like dozens of countries, traces its political legitimacy back to the day when it ceased to be a colony (in this case, of France). Its recognition, by the UN and most nations,  was not given on condition it was in future governed by Liberal Democrats.  It was the recognised inheritor of the French Empire, itself the inheritor by conquest of the Ottoman Empire. That’s as good as it gets in those parts. It was, as is now being quietly forgotten, our welcome ally in the first Gulf War of 1991. I think you get called a regime if the new globalism has set its heart on destabilising you. Increasingly, I worry that if this country ever again got a sovereign independent government,  there’d be a nasty outbreak of violent disorder from some quarter or other,  and the government’s reasonable efforts to control it would be distorted by the global networks…you know the rest.

 

 

But what really disturbed me was the way that BBC Radio 4’s generally thoughtful (if liberal) 10 pm news show ‘The World Tonight’ billed the murder of much of the Syrian leadership as a ‘stunning development’.  Well, I suppose you could say this phrase is capable of being a neutral statement, just about ft for use while recording the violet deaths, at the hands of terrorists, of senior officials of a sovereign state.  But had I been editor of that programme I would have ruled that its use was capable of being misinterpreted as an expression of partiality, and cut it out. And, as I point out above, I am an expert in being partial. You catch it on the edge of a remark.

 

 

 

 

 

Going South – Britain joins the Third World

 

The last election condemned me to the role of wryly amused spectator., probably for good.  People said to me ‘What shall we do?’, I told them ‘Don’t vote Tory’. They replied ‘When we said “What shall we do?”, we didn’t mean that’ . And so we are where we are.

 

And where is that? Are we in fact – as my critics sometimes tell me – a prosperous and civilised country, about which I complain too much?

 

Or is there anything really wrong? My view is that we are living in a fool’s paradise, based entirely upon the past. Funnily enough, this gets me condemned as a nostalgist, which is a jolly paradox. We continue to function here as if the American cartoon view of Britain – bowler-hatted bankers,  bobbies on bicycles, two by two, rosy-cheeked children and everyone living in a Cotswold village surrounded by fog, and going to bed chastely in tweed pyjamas – was true.

 

Now, if this were so, wouldn’t we be an advanced, harmonious and efficient country? I think we would. But – and this can be tested by checking facts – we are not.  Which is why I am so grateful for the latest work of Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, those two illusion-free economics commentators who can justly claim to have predicted the current bust in their May 2007 book ‘Fantasy Island’.  Their new book is called ‘Going South’ and has just been published in paperback by Palgrave Macmillan.

 

Let us begin with their first major point. The economic revival plan is not working.

 

‘Never has there been a monetary and fiscal stimulus like it..’ they write on page 58 ’ ..And never has stimulus been so ineffective.  Since the start of the crisis, the United Kingdom has borrowed more in seven years than in all its previous history. It has impoverished savers by pegging the bank rate well below the level of inflation, and indulged in the sort of money creation policies usually associated with Germany in 1923, Latin American banana republics in the 1970s, and more latterly, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe’.

 

Hoping for export-led growth? Forget it. ‘The United Kingdom(p.62) accounts for just 3 per cent of goods exported globally, down from 4.4 per cent at the turn of the millennium, and is a net importer of industrial products, food and energy.

 

There is then a savage summary of our general state which concludes with the words ‘ Most work is in low-skill jobs with large dollops of public spending used to create white-collar jobs for graduates that would, in previous eras, have been held down by school-leavers’.

 

They also point out (page 71) that the ‘expansion’ of the five years before the collapse was false. ‘It was growth borrowed from the future … mortgage debt was £1.2 trillion (I think that is £1,200,000,000,000,000)with overdrafts and the money owed on credit cards worth a further £200 million. The government was in hock to the tune of around £1 trillion, while even the most optimistic estimate of unfunded public  liabilities put the figure at £1.5 trillion. That made close to £4 trillion ..’

 

This state of affairs, which makes Wilkins Micawber (Note to Oxford undergraduates - if you don’t know who he is, you should. Look it up)  look like an astute and cautious financial manager, needs explaining.

 

We have, in my own memory, been repeatedly told that this country is living beyond its means, that we live on our wits in the midst of a hostile world, that we must export or die, that our education and our industry lag behind our competitors. The authors analyse mercilessly the failure of Britain as an economy since before the First World War and its almost uninterrupted tendency to seek the easy way out of any problems, combined with a grandiose belief that it is still somehow top nation.

 

And they produce (p.107) an absolutely searing quotation, from, of all places a book called ‘To England with Love’ by David Frost and Antony Jay, published in 1967.

 

‘They argued that British elections, far from representing the sophisticated measurement of public opinion in a modern democracy, were better seen as a “tribal ritual of self-denial and purification” in which the ‘joke-king’ of anthropological study is deposed and a new once chosen,. They said “It enables the English to pretend that their own faults are, in fact, the faults of the ritual figure”.

 

I have never seen a better description of the irrational frenzy directed at Gordon Brown in 2010, mainly among Tory floaters who had made Mr Brown Chancellor in the first place by their stupid votes in 1997, and were even then still a bit fooled by Anthony Blair.

 

This also fuels our periodic desire for a fresh new leader with ‘charisma’, who of course swiftly fails us, because he or she has no real solution to offer ( apart from blood, toil, tears and sweat, which are not offered in the present day, wouldn’t be accepted as a programme if they were offered, and which might possibly result in a long-term improvement, and possibly might not).

 

Our amazing ability to kid ourselves that various superficial and unproductive activities will make up for the annihilation of our industrial base, and the trashing of our schools, is the theme of the book. They also pinpoint our willingness to pretend that the problems that beset us don’t matter any more. Or that the problems are actually advantages.

 

For example (p.194) :’ London, we were told, was now one of three or four “world cities” . On closer inspection , however, this exciting new status had been achieved simply by deciding that what were once problems were now advantages. The dirt, noise, the crowds, the over-reliance on financial services, impassable roads and pavements and the ludicrous cost of housing are now evidence of its “vibrant” , “diverse”,  “exuberant”, “exciting”, “truly global” identity.

 

‘Nothing better sums up the post-1985 dynamic. Negatives are now positives, yesterday’s concerns are old hat, free-falling to third world status is actually a glorious ascent’.

 

I’d also like to quote some figures which show in frightening hardness and clarity how hopeless is the situation after all these decades of charisma.

 

This is to be found on p.210 . Britain had a deficit in trade in goods of £98.46 billion in 2010. The biggest single deficit is on ‘finished manufactured goods’ £59.8 billion. ‘In not one of the categories of finished goods does the United Kingdom achieve a surplus’.

 

So, we’re told, we can manage on services. Well, we have surplus on services o £58.77 billion, plus other invisibles taking us up to £81.81 billion . This still falls a long way short  of the £98.46 billion needed to pay our manufacturing import bills.

 

The authors jeer at those who claim that these figures are just accounting, and have no major significance.

 

‘The balance of payments, you may hear, is one of yesterday’s worries, along with “latchkey children” , sex before marriage and the decline in hat wearing. The “trade gap” belongs with the generation gap in the lumber-room of recent history.’

 

They snort :’ We could not agree less. The current account is perhaps the most acute index of a nation’s economic prowess, measuring as it does the extent to which a  country relies, or does not rely, on other people’s money to fund its standard of living.’

 

And to worry you unduly, I will finish these quotations at page 242, where they point out that the personal debt crisis is only in abeyance because lenders are scared to pursue their money, lest they trigger a general collapse in house prices which destroys all hope of getting their money back. One in eight mortgages is only kept going because the lenders have ‘extended and pretended’ rather than foreclosing as they certainly would in the USA.

 

I part company with the authors on some of their views. They are too kind to the man-made global warming lobby. They appear to accept social explanations for the so-called  ‘riots’ of last summer . I think our descent into full Third World Status may be more cataclysmic than they do. Read it yourself to see what you think.

 

 

But think they must be applauded for their unflinching clarity of vision about the true state of affairs, and the direction in which we are headed. It reminds me  - in one important way – of the state of the old USSR in 1990, on the eve of its collapse.

 

Of course the USSR was very different in many ways from 2012 Britain. But it had these similarities. It had sustained itself for years on a myth of greatness, rooted on World War Two, which was not truly justified. It had committed itself to enormous social provision which was already failing badly (people feared the Soviet hospitals with reason) before the collapse. But, as nobody had the nerve to reform it or challenge the social ills that it assuaged, it continued to creak along. It nurtured a large, comfortable middle class largely separated from the crises in crime, housing and education. The value of its currency bore no real link to reality.

 

And the thing that snapped was the currency. As the old Soviet rouble shrivelled and vanished away like a perished balloon, so did the way of life that it had supported. Some people did very well out what followed. Most actually did not. Some came out about even. But in many cases life after the change was actually grimmer than it had been in the Soviet era ( and for some, especially the old, I suspect it may still be so). It is from those who were dumped on the slushy roadside by the new era that Vladimir Putin gets his support. He picked them up and made sure they were looked after, as Yeltsin had failed to do – and those who can’t grasp this will never begin to understand the base of Putin’s power.  Mind you, Putin has oil, and we shall soon have none, and be compelled to buy it from him.

 

An alarming era is beginning, of power shortages, of unaffordable imports, of higher prices and stationary wages, of a vast welfare system which simply cannot function any more because inflation has wiped out the value of the money used to pay for it. I cannot see how the reckoning can be put off much longer.

 

The other thing I remember from Moscow is that catastrophes are not the stuff of fantasy or disaster movies. They can and do actually happen in real life. People survive them, chastened and gaunt, it is true, but they survive them. The idea that they are unimaginable in our safe island is itself a fantasy. Could we have done anything about it? My guess is that, yes, if we hadn’t embarked on our cultural revolution, and our various crack-brained experiments with fatherless families, foreign rule,  huge numbers of welfare-dependent households, millions of public-sector sinecures,  penal, confiscatory taxation and content-free education, we might well be a lot more curable than we are. Can we do  anything about it now? Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Enemy Territory, or ‘Between the Crisis and the catastrophe..’

I’ve almost finished ‘Going South’, by the Mail on Sunday’s own Dan Atkinson and The Guardian’s Larry Elliott, and hope to review it here soon. Its main argument is that this country’s application to the join the Third World will very soon be accepted.

And that thought was rather on my mind when I travelled on Sunday to the lovely old Sussex town of Lewes, cradled in the ‘hump-backed-whale-backed downs’ behind Newhaven, which used to be my favourite gateway to France in the days before the Channel tunnel.  I hadn’t been there for years, but had fond memories of it as a very English, modest place – of the sort you appreciate much more when you’ve been abroad a bit, and realise for the first time just how beautiful much of England is.

This is especially so in the current weather. How they moan about it, but in truth it’s not much different from the wet and blustery summers of my childhood (1959 was a rare, blazing exception).  English summer skies are often dark, and the rain doesn’t hurt all that much once you square your shoulders and face it. It has also made the countryside quite wonderfully green, in a way I haven’t seen for years.

I always have the country round Lewes in mind, and especially a certain old-fashioned hotel in Lewes, when  I read  Josephine Tey’s tremendous mystery novel ‘Brat Farrar’. I re-read it every few years,  even though I shall never again have the disturbing thrill of suddenly realising the appalling truth at the heart of the story, which only first-time readers can have. I thought of Brat Farrar as I walked up above the town, following the path among the wildflowers through high chalk downland (with the sea just visible in the distance) that leads down to Glyndebourne (where a horrible windmill, alas, almost but not quite spoils a lovely view).

Coming back to somewhere once known, but not seen for years is , as always, a revelation. (George Orwell’s ‘Coming Up For Air’ is the best description of this that I know).  I am much more observant than I was in my thirties, and pay more attention. But it is clear that Lewes is now a very nice place for people who work in London, or used to live in London, to live a metropolitan life surrounded by lovely countryside and with all the tasteful pleasures of a handsome County Town.  What has this to do with the Third World?

A little. I was there for the Lewes Speakers’ festival ,for a debate (my opponent was Dr Axel Klein) on the need for laws against drugs, chaired by Norman Baker, the original and independent local MP who ( alas for Parliament) has been swallowed up into ministerial office and so can’t be quite so original or independent  at the moment. 

A colleague, who lives in the town, had warned me that she had once been told off in the street there for carrying a copy of the  ‘Daily Mail’, and that I should not expect to be wholly among friends. And of course as I strolled down its steep streets I noticed these days there are no butcher’s shops, but quite a few places selling croissants. I doubt if anyone much reads the inscriptions in the town or on the hefty monument on the hillside above) to the Protestant martyrs burned to death there in the reign of Bloody Mary, for we don’t mention that any more, do we?

I also found myself one of a tiny but cheerful congregation for Prayer Book Evensong at a rather handsome church. This description is intended to give an impression, rather than to be a Booth or Rowntree-style piece of social investigation, so please don’t take it too seriously.

And the thought formed in my mind that such places (I live in one myself, but am and always have been very conscious of my reasons for doing so) help to keep alive an illusion. By setting a distance between ourselves and the big cities, we of the educated elite can continue to live peaceful, orderly, prosperous lives largely untainted by the surliness, squalor and petty disorder which are always round the corner in the Metropolis and the remains of our big industrial cities. Plus,  there is usually a branch of Waitrose.

And I think this is one reason why our governing elite is so unconcerned about our descent into the Third World. They are very happy with the more relaxed morals,  the abandonment of any attempt to bring up children with rules, or compel them to undergo a serious education. They’re pleased by the disappearance of dour Protestant Sundays, by the longer licensing hours and (let’s whisper this) the collapse of any attempt to enforce the drug laws.

And if this is having bad effects, they can, in a little paradise such as Lewes, keep them along way ff. they can, in short, enjoy all the benefits of a third World life, without paying the price.

Of course this won’t last. There’s a serpent in every Eden, and, I’ve no doubt, a dark side even to smiling, prosperous Lewes. One mother at the event I addressed complained about how drug dealers hung around outside her son’s school every day, and authority did nothing about it (no surprise to me).

In his matchless autobiography ‘I, Claud’,  Claud Cockburn repeatedly quotes a diplomat whose response to imminent decline or disaster was to say happily  ‘In between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well have a glass of champagne’, which in a way sums up the attitude of the British liberal middle class, drinking chilled New World Sauvignon Blanc as England crumbles all around them. I’m also reminded, irrelevantly,  of the famous exchange between a German and an Austrian officer at the end of the First World War. The Prussian snaps ‘The situation is serious, but not hopeless’. His Viennese comrade smiles and replies ‘No, it is hopeless, but it is not serious’.

Otherwise it was a perfectly reasonable debate, in yet another handsome redundant church -  though my opponents, as usual, didn’t listen to what I was  saying, or couldn’t square it with their prejudices,  and persisted in claiming that drug possession was still punished by law.  By no means everyone there was an opponent. I was pleased to find I had several doughty supporters.

But they certainly weren’t the majority.  One gentleman said he was a lawyer and one of his clients had last week been imprisoned for simple drug possession. I said I didn’t believe him, and asked for the name, the date and the case, but he didn’t respond, nor did he approach me afterwards with the details.  Perhaps he’d like to come back to me here, as such an event is so extraordinarily rare, and has been for so long,  that it deserves to be recorded.

People had difficulty with the following ideas. 1.that all crime is caused by law, and that to say ‘enforcing this law causes problems’ is to dodge the question of why we have laws against certain things in the first place. 2. That people who deliberately break known laws are not ‘criminalised’ by the law, but ‘criminalise’ themselves by consciously and deliberately breaking the law, and must take responsibility for that.

Who spreads this stupidity and distortion of language? I did complain, after one such contribution, that people these days are taught what to think rather than how to think. The incoherent, nonsensical response of the person to whom I said this only confirmed my point. She had not thought about it at all, and so could not cope with an opinion which she had been taught to despise, but could not actually challenge with facts or reason. We see this here a lot.  It may seem unkind to point it out, but I always think it just possible that the person involved may, thanks to coming up against hard opposition for the first time in his or her life, begin to think.

One final(?) exchange about Arthur Harris. All kinds of stuff is advanced here to try to justify his policy ( and it was his, for he embraced it, pursued it with knowledgeable enthusiasm and persisted in it in defiance of the orders of his superiors) . It was a policy of deliberately killing German civilians.

Are those who advance such stuff all secret Bolsheviks, gripped by the Marxist-Leninist view that the ends justify the means? Are they unfamiliar with the Christian moral system which contradicts this view, and which is concerned with the true intention of the person?

Actually, the answer is probably yes. Their Leninism is secret from them. They do not realise the filthy pit into which they have fallen, lured there by the cult of Churchill and ‘we won the war’. This is the point I was making when I said that we had been corrupted, as a nation, by our readiness to excuse the deliberate killing of innocents. One reader claimed he did not understand what I meant. I would, for instance, mention to him the British abortion laws, which also license the mass-killing of innocents; I would mention the ‘peace’ with the IRA which involved a lawless surrender to criminal blackmail; I would mention our increasing unwillingness to punish or deter murder and murderous violence. We are a different, and less Christian people, separated by a great gulf from the people we were in 1939. Nor was the action,  as one writer suggests, ‘desperate’. That excuse won’t fight.  Most of Harris’s killing was done after Stalingrad, the point at which Germany’s defeat became certain.

I reproduce here this brief exchange, from an older thread, because I believe it well illustrates the problem that I have. Harris’s defenders simply cannot see the moral point that I am making. It is this. I believe the deliberate killing of innocents is always wrong, absolutely. They have accepted a moral system which says that it is sometimes justified. Of course this idea is attractive. Wrong is always attractive, and popular. That’s generally how you can recognise it. ‘Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat’.

Look at this. Here are two typical samples of pro-Harris sentiment, and beneath is my reply. 

A person calling hiding behind the name  ‘Democratus’ (I presume it’s a he, from the Latin) , wrote :
‘Mr Hitchens obviously knows nothing about WW2. He says we committed war crimes by defending ourselves against the Fascist Germany. (I specifically didn’t say that, as it happens, but never mind, PH).  I wonder if Hitchens has ever heard of the Blitz or the V2 rockets fired at London? (Yes, he has, and the V1s too,  PH). They attacked us first and we had to fight. Mr Hitchens who didn’t have to fight the war and so has no valid view on it has no right to say that the brave men who fought against fascism in the name of democracy are war criminals.  I can’t believe that in a so called 'free society', people like Hitchens are allowed to express such nonsense as this.’

Following that call for actual censorship as part of a ‘free society’, A Mr James E. Shaw posted as follows, more conventionally  : ‘Regarding your point about 'the indefensible destruction of the city of Darmstadt on 11th September 1944 (it was not, in any significant way a military target).
It is worth pointing out that there was a chemical factory of note in the city, and that there were significant railway communications as well.’

I replied ( so exasperated that I lurched into CAPITALS) :

‘In response to James E. Shaw's attempt to justify the carnage of Darmstadt, I will quote from Max Hastings (p.394 Pan paperback edition) Hastings himself quotes from the US Bombing Survey 'Darmstadt produced less than two-tenths of one per cent of Reich total production, and only an infinitesimal amount of total war production. Consequently it had a low priority on labour and materials. Nor was the city important as a transportation centre, because it had no port and was bypassed by the principal rail arteries'.

In this raid, 10,550 people were killed and 49,000 bombed out of their homes, a bald, dry phrase which I would ask readers to imagine in reality, happening to themselves, in all its loss and desolation.
Let me also give human shape to these statistics from Hasting's account : 'Two pregnant women collapsed as they fled through the streets and gave premature birth. Their bodies and those of their infants were found incinerated where they lay.' ...'For scores of horribly burned casualties, there was nothing to be done to ease their dying. Nurses soaked their sheets in salad oil to calm the pain. Most ended their sufferings by morning'.

'...The body of a girl lay on a pavement with one naked leg broken off beside her "looking like some obscene joint of cold meat". Loose hands and legs, the head of a man buried in rubble to the chin with his eyes open and empty, lay in Ludwigstrasse. Bodies were already piled in the Palaisgarten'
At least 2,129 of the dead, I might add, were children.

As I said, the action is indefensible. As for the 'effectiveness' of the raid on industrial production in the city, if you still seriously think the question is of any importance in the scales of good and evil, I refer those interested to p.421 of Hastings.

Will you Harris apologists never, ever LISTEN!?’

It seems not.  And by the way, people are still misrepresenting Speer’s views on the matter – they should all read Hastings’s book, which deals with this. But *even if the bombing had been militarily justifiable* it would have been wrong. The fact that it wasn’t militarily justifiable makes the question even clearer, but it isn’t actually the point.

Who’d  be the one to tell anyone, drug apologists or bombing apologists, things they don’t want to hear? Why ever do I do it when it causes so much trouble? Because it’s the truth, that’s why. And anyone who possesses any part of the truth is, or ought to be,  full of a burning desire to share it.

We'll get a House of Toadies - however this fake fight ends

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

We'll get a House of Toadies - however this fake fight ends

The only thing most MPs would fight for these days is a good table in a fashionable restaurant. These bland careerists have neither passions nor beliefs.

So please do not be fooled by last week’s amateur dramatics at the Palace of Westminster.

The rage is faked. I have twice predicted it. Once, on September 25 last year, when I prophesied a ‘stage-managed split’ between the Coalition parties.

Then last March, when I wrote: ‘Both parties are worried that their collaboration has lost them voters.

So watch out for a completely made-up row between them, probably over Lords reform, followed by a Lib Dem “walkout” from the Coalition. Nick Clegg will then go off to be a Euro Commissioner, a post that falls vacant in 2014.

Vince Cable will probably take over his party.’
This may now be happening a little faster than planned, mainly because the Government has no purpose except to stay in office and so has very little to do.

Some sort of diversion is also needed because its economic policy has collapsed into an insoluble combination of borrowing, bankruptcy and unemployment.

The only point of postponing the vote on Lords Reform is to avoid splitting too soon before the next Election. As for Mr Slippery’s carefully publicised ‘row’ with the supposed backbench rebel MP Jesse Norman, think about it.

Mr Norman’s crime was to tell the truth, on the record. He told fellow Tories in an email that their rebellion would be welcomed by the Prime Minister.

And so it was. After all, compare the shrugging, smiley feebleness of the Tory machine on this occasion with its ferocious, menacing repression of rebel MPs on the EU Referendum issue last October.

Proper conservatives would be working to bring back the hereditary peers who did so much good before the Blairites evicted them.

A House of Lords that is appointed, or one that is ‘elected’ via our corrupt and intolerant party machines, will be just another chamber of backstairs-crawlers.

Alas, some such House of Toadies will emerge from the Lib-Lab Coalition that is now virtually certain to take over in 2015.

PC... two deadly serious letters

I have always loathed the expression ‘Political Correctness Gone Mad’. PC is not a joke, or an accident, or the work of  irrational people.

It is a chilly, deadly-serious project to turn this country into somewhere else, by scaring conservative patriots into a defeated silence.

Every so often, it reveals its true face.
Here is an example. In a Fostering Handbook (The Good Practice Guide) published in 2010 by Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council, I found the following words: ‘Because the UK is institutionally racist, all white people are implicated unless they actively oppose racism.’

There it is. That’s what they think. We are all guilty until proven innocent. The entire country is infused by a form of wickedness.

So they, the Equality and Diversity Commissars, must have full powers to stamp it out.
Similarly frightening thoughts were found in the Macpherson Report into the Stephen Lawrence murder.

But I have never before seen the totalitarian brutality of PC thinking expressed so clearly in an official document. And note that it is about fostering children.

When I asked Sandwell Council to confirm it was theirs, they went through several hours of foot-dragging, pointlessly demanding a copy though I had given them its full title and the relevant page number.

Eventually they said that it had been withdrawn more than a year ago. They have yet to explain why.

What concerns me is that, while the document may have been withdrawn, the thinking behind it persists in thousands of government and local authority offices throughout our country.

Henry IV versus Wimbledon? It's no contest

Why does sport take priority over everything on TV?
For the first time in what seems like decades, the BBC has spent some money on making an exciting new series of Shakespeare plays.

Yet on Saturday night, Henry IV, Part 1 was postponed on  BBC 2 – and almost cancelled – because of Wimbledon.

The BBC has four TV channels, mostly showing rubbish. Why couldn’t the tennis have been shown on one of the other three?
Exciting viewing: Jeremy Irons as Henry IV in the new Shakespeare series

Fussing about tap water, while drugs poison our world

Several terrible events this week underline our complacent attitude towards mind-bending drugs, both legal and illegal.

Peter Reeve, who shot dead PC Ian Dibell in Clacton and who later killed himself, had recently been taking ‘antidepressant’ medication.

This is the case with a remarkable number of murder-suicides, and surely cries out for proper investigation.

Then there is Eva Rausing, whose pitiable descent into misery and death could not be prevented by her billions.

If she had been severely punished in an austere prison, instead of indulgently let off when she was caught with heroin and cocaine in 2008, might she now be alive?

I am convinced it would be far kinder to drug users to treat them as criminals, rather than pretend they are sick.

Finally Hannah Bonser was jailed for 22 years for murdering Casey Kearney, a stranger, in a park.

Bonser was originally unhinged by cannabis, a drug absurdly described as ‘soft’ by people who ought to know better, and to which the police and courts disgracefully turn a blind eye.

She was also prescribed ‘antipsychotic’ drugs, and who knows what effect they may have had?

And all this in a country where people fuss about drinking tap water as they think it might be too risky, and chemists are nervous about selling painkillers.

     *********************************************************
After the barrage of letters attacking me last week, I need to repeat and redouble my criticism of Sir Arthur Harris and the morally indefensible deliberate killing of German civilians during the 1939-45 war.

I urge anyone who still thinks the bombing was right to read Sir Max Hastings’s book Bomber Command, and especially the chapter on what happened when we bombed Darmstadt, a town with no significant military targets in it.

Many people wrote  to me about this, and a gratifying number were prepared to consider the careful arguments and indisputable facts I sent to them to back up my case.
To those who weren’t, I make this point.

Our national willingness to excuse the killing of innocents has corrupted this whole country ever since. It is one of the reasons for our terrifying moral decline.
    **********************************************************
I would pay more for milk to save our dairy farmers from the greed of the supermarkets. Wouldn’t you?

    **********************************************************
Since the BBC couldn’t confirm the truth of claims of  a massacre in Syria on Friday morning, why did they lead their bulletins with the story?

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

How Grand Can you Get? – The Economist is not as Smart as it thinks it is

Long years ago, when I published my first book (‘The Abolition of Britain’) I was still an innocent young thing, who believed that interesting books would be fairly and generously reviewed by major magazines and newspapers.

Of course this was a silly delusion, like the one I had previously suffered (and been brutally disabused of) that publishers published books because they were worth publishing, and were not influenced by petty prejudices or political bias. Oh, how I laugh to remember it now. I also thought in those days that publishers made sure that books were promoted and put in bookshops, and that bookshops wanted to sell books, whatever they were about, as it was good for business. I had so much to learn.

But in this dewy springtime of my innocence, I ensured that a review copy of my book was despatched to that great institution of serious British journalism, ‘The Economist’. Nothing whatever happened. It was not considered interesting enough. But a year later, when a strange document called the Parekh Report was published, the ‘Economist’ did finally mention my book. It chided the authors of the Parekh Report (so PC and multicultural that even the ‘Economist’ couldn’t stomach it), for giving credence to my arguments – against PC and multiculturalism – in ‘The Abolition of Britain’. Thus did I get my only ever mention. They’ve since, as far as I know, completely ignored all my subsequent books.

Some people take ‘the Economist’ very seriously. I seem to recall that the famous book Flat Earth News’ views its reporting of mass immigration as the measure of impartiality – when of course the ‘Economist’ is aligned with the sort of open-borders ‘free-movement-of-people’ liberalism which despises any attempt to maintain proper national frontiers. It is amazing how the beliefs that business is conservative and that the market is conservative persist against all evidence.

Anyway, to the point. The ‘Economist’ has finally mentioned me again. It is here

It asserts ‘When Britain last tinkered with the House of Lords, opponents foresaw a terrible future. Peter Hitchens, writing in the Daily Mail, worried that removing hereditary peers and replacing them with members appointed by the government was “the road to the British Reich”.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. I have, gleefully, to point out that this august organ has made a beautiful ‘clock striking thirteen’ error here, by saying that I wrote this in the Daily Mail, when I have never, as it happens, written a word for that fine newspaper.

But I think they are referring to an article I wrote in October 1998, in a newspaper whose name I am no longer prepared to utter, so completely has it altered since the days when I wrote for it.

The headline does indeed ask, rather than say ‘Is this the road to the British Reich?’. But that’s a headline. I don’t think I wrote it, though it is just possible that I did. A rather good cartoon by my old friend Graham Allen shows an apprehensive and toothy Anthony Blair, in the driver’s seat of an out-of-control bulldozer which has just sliced through the Palace of Westminster and is about to demolish Windsor Castle.

For much of my point was that getting rid of the hereditaries threatened the monarchy (as it does). But my other argument was that the Lords were, and as far as I know still are, the guardians of Section Two of the 1911 Parliament Act.

This means that the House of Commons cannot vote to extend its life beyond five years , unless the Lords agree.

I said that with a hereditary House of Lords, completely free to ignore the executive, we had a strong guarantee against any such thing happening. The Commons might well be (in my view is ) completely under Downing Street’s thumb. But the old Lords were not. Could we say the same of an appointed House (which then seemed to be what we were going to get)? And can we say the same of an ‘elected House’, that is, one selected by the centralised party machines? It still seems to me to be a good point, though there are now so many other threats to our liberties that it must join the queue for attention.

But the point was clear – that the Lords, among other things, were a defence against an over-mighty executive cancelling elections. Yes, I know this seems unlikely, but constitutions are supposed to take precautions against unlikely things.

So the Economist’s teenage jeer that ‘More than a decade after that reform took place, the shires are still free of brownshirts’, is cheap, childish and silly. You might have expected better. So might I, once. But I have been disillusioned about the ‘Economist’ for many years.

By the way, I have also found the old article from the same period  that another reader quoted , on war and bombing. I was right in thinking it was about the Kosovo war, and the persons who quoted from it seems to have been quite careful to leave out its main message, that it was better not to start wars at all if possible. It certainly wasn’t a defence of deliberately bombing civilians – much more a warning that, even if you fought carefully, innocents would die. Of course, if you deliberately bomb innocents, they will die in much greater numbers,  QED.

Making Shameful Conquest of Itself – Shakespeare, the BBC, Bombs and the Lords

I’ll take this opportunity to answer some points and return to one or two subjects which are still being debated here.  The first is the House of Lords – not the fake row about the guillotine, but the actual debate on the second chamber.  Paul Noonan wrote : ‘You clearly haven't been listening to the debates in Parliament, when many Tory backbenchers, (from Graham Brady, Conor Burns and Philip Davies, to Rees-Mogg, Rifkind and Peter Lilley, from David Davis to Angie Bray) have outlined exactly the sort of principled opposition to an elected chamber that you say there hasn't been a "peep of".’

He’s responding to my writing on Wednesday that ‘The destruction of the real House of Lords (and the fatal undermining of the foundations of the monarchy)  was achieved by Anthony Blair when William Hague was leader of the Tory Party. For a moment, it looked as if Mr Hague was going to fight this constitutional vandalism on principle, but then he had the rug pulled out from under him by the then Lord Cranborne. The weird hybrid chamber which has resulted is unsustainable, and almost impossible to defend. And it’s noticeable that there hasn’t been a peep of principled opposition to an elected (i.e. wholly party-controlled) ‘Senate’ from the Tory Party, merely moans that it’s not a priority and they have other things to do (what are they?).’

The key word here is ‘principled’. There has been (as he notes) some *pragmatic* opposition to the Bill, much along the lines of the campaign in Australia against the abolition of the monarchy a few years ago, under the cunning slogan ‘not *this* republic. This enabled republicans to vote against what was, even on their terms, a not-very attractive new constitution, without ceasing to regard themselves as republicans.

Now, all the people Mr Noonan names were elected on The Tory manifesto of 2010, which said :“We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current House of Lords, recognising that an efficient and effective second chamber should play an important role in our democracy and requires both legitimacy and public confidence”.

And here are some samples of what these heroes said:

Conor Burns said  ‘many of us are in favour of reform: we are in favour of introducing a mechanism for peers to retire; we are in favour of a limit on their numbers; and we are in favour of strengthening the independent House of Lords Appointments Commission. In short, we are in favour of some of the excellent ideas contained in his right hon. Friend Lord Steel’s draft Bill.’

He added :’ I want to see a *fully appointed* second House, and I will go into the Lobby with the aim of trying to preserve that.’

Sir Malcolm Rifkind said: ’ By all means, *let us get rid of the hereditaries*. That can be done extremely easily, by a very small Bill that would hardly be opposed by anyone.’
Graham Brady said : ’…unlike many of my hon. Friends,  *I would support an elected upper House*.

The idea that a mainly hereditary House was superior in every way (which it was, because it was entirely outside the power of the whips and had the right sort of powers for a revising chamber , that is delay and obstruction, but a veto only over major constitutional change) is now considered an absurdity by the so-called Conservative Party.  As with every piece of ground this party gives up as it retreats before the social, cultural, sexual and ultimately political revolutionaries of the 1960s left, it has no understanding of, or liking for, the things it is supposed to defend. So once it has given them up, usually by running away from a fight, it never occurs to it to recapture the ground lost. It becomes, bit by bit, the image of its opponents, until it is actually part of the revolution itself.

An appointed House is in the end indefensible. On what principle is it chosen? Either you worship at the altar of 'democracy' or you defend the force of tradition and inheritance.
But an appointed House? What principle does that stand for? The principle of the liberal elite picking its own friends, that's what. You can go on, till dusk falls and the bats come out,  about contriving an 'impartial' body to appoint your new peers, but who will appoint it? Impartiality, as the BBC has shown, tends to mean an impartial adherence to the consensus, to conventional wisdom and to a quiet life.

Here's a conservative principle, that tradition, inheritance and nobility are things which are good in themselves, coupled with a sensible scepticism about that upstart idea called ‘democracy’ – which in Parliament means that the members are chosen, controlled, rewarded and punished by a centrally-directed party machine subject to the executive.  It is precisely because of this last fact that the idea that the recent revolt was a genuine defiance of Downing Street’s wishes is so absurd. So far as I can see, Mr Jesse Norman is in trouble not for voting against the whips, but for openly proclaiming in an e-mail that a vote against restricting debate on the Bill (and so effectively throttling it)  would be welcomed by the Prime Minister.

I have no doubt that Mr Norman was quite right in saying that. Mr Cameron wants a split with the Lib Dems, and Mr Clegg wants a split with him. But both need to be able to pretend that Mr Cameron’s hand was forced by his feisty, rufty-tufty ‘right-wing’ backbenchers  (a group of people who have distinguished themselves by their poltroonery and weakness ever since 2010, so much so that they make the average Pekingese look fierce and independent)  But it is one thing to mutter it behind your hand. It is quite another to put it in an e-mail, and give the game away. After all, Mr Cameron had told another Tory MP, Andrew Griffiths, that a rebellion on this issue would not be ‘career-threatening’  .Contrast this with his treatment of rebels on the EU referendum last October , discussed here



Darmstadt and After

One of the good things about debates here is that they compel me (and some contributors) to widen our knowledge through further and deeper reading. I cannot keep up with all the recommendations passed to me on the antidepressant subject, though will try to do so soon. That is partly because I’m engrossed in
‘Going South’, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson’s powerful riposte to the grandiose complacency of our political classes, and many economic commentators, about the true position of this country. I’ll be writing more about it when I’ve finished it.

But I’ve been diverted by needing to read (as I should have done long ago) Max Hastings’s excellent ‘Bomber Command’. I’ve never been a great admirer of Sir Max as a journalist or editor (though I respect all war correspondents who venture directly an deliberately into combat zones). I think he has often been too ready, as a writer and an editor, to accept conventional wisdom – though of late he’s also been very brave in admitting that he has in the past been mistaken.

But his military histories are simply unequalled. He has found an extraordinarily clear and authoritative voice. He has done superb research. And his great respect for courage does not blind him to folly or wrongdoing by the courageous.

‘Bomber Command’ is in many ways a more effective polemic against Arthur Harris’s campaign than A.C. Grayling’s ‘Among the Dead Cities’. This is because it is not written as a polemic, but as an engaged and intelligent history of this episode. It is very well written  (as Hemingway used to say ‘It reads easy, because it was writ hard’) and no reader here would be disappointed by it.

The claims of the Harris camp, for the military value of area bombing, are thoroughly debunked. The terrible losses of brave aircrew are heartbreakingly described. One officer’s words, those of Flight Lieutenant Denis Hornsey of 76 Squadron, deserve to be read and remembered by all thoughtful people. He wrote in 1943:’If you live on the brink of death yourself, it is as if those who have gone have merely caught an earlier train to the same destination, and whatever that destination is, you will be sharing it soon, since you will almost certainly be catching the next one’. I won’t tell you what happened to Denis Hornsey in the end. You’ll have to read the book.

They knew, you see, that they were almost certain to die, and not just die, but die horribly in the dark and the cold, and only a few hours from the comfort of homes which in many cases they had left that morning and to which they would never return.

Harris’s own obdurate resistance to more effective types of bombing is recorded (a concentrated campaign against German fuel installations might actually have shortened the war in Europe. Harris’s supporters alwyas claim he shortened the war, but he didn’t, not least because he always objected to the use of ‘his’ bombers for such action as the raids on the synthetic fuel plants) .

Sir Max also deserves much credit for the chapter in which he describes the indefensible destruction of the city of Darmstadt on 11th September 1944 (it was not, in any significant way a military target) , and what it involved for those living there. As I know well, and as I have had confirmed in many exchanges with readers in the past few weeks, there is a dogged, almost furious resistance in this country to recognising what we actually did in Germany. I think this is because many people fear and suspect that it was wrong, and prefer their comforting illusions. So they will not open the door that leads to truth. Sir Max’s book is a door that leads to truth. Try this small sample : ‘the first terrible discoveries were made: cellars crammed with suffocated bodies – worse still, with amorphous heaps of melted and charred humanity. There were  whole families whose remains could be removed in a laundry basket. Some bodies had shrunk to a quarter of life-size. …There were blue corpses and purple corpses, black heaps of flesh and protruding bones. Kramer saw a man carrying a sack containing the heads of his entire family…’

The Pedant’s Revolt

I’d like to qualify (slightly) my praise for the new BBC Shakespeare series, having at last found the time to watch the opening play, Richard II. This is a marvellous work, crammed and stuffed with profound thought, wonderfully expressed. And I suppose any director must be allowed to play with it a bit.  But I had been alarmed by the idea (recorded in various interviews and previews)  that the actor playing Richard II had modelled much of his address and behaviour on…Michael Jackson.  I have to say this flouncing, rather effeminate figure didn’t seem to me to be feasible. Richard, remember, behaved with courage and resolve when faced by the Peasants’ Revolt and was a fearsome and devious tyrant when it suited him. This Richard seemed to be a sort of camp martyr.  I also thought the King’s death by crossbow, mimicking the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, was plain silly and in conflict with the text. Who’d use a crossbow to murder someone in a dungeon?

Can anyone tell me why ‘Hereford’ (Bolingbroke was duke of Hereford) was pronounced throughout as ‘Hurford’? Is there some convention about this?  And why was John of Gaunt’s dying speech cut, to leave out both ‘This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, feared by their breed and famous by their birth, renowned for their deeds as far from home, -as is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son’ and also ..’that England, which was wont to conquer others, hath made a shameful conquest of itself’.

For me, this is one of the most powerful passages anywhere in Shakespeare, which in other times many people learned by heart . The BBC couldn’t have been so short of time that they couldn’t include it all. So why cut it at all, and why particularly cut those words? 

By the way, my general criticisms of TV are not at all reduced by accepting that Shakespeare can be very effectively produced on TV. I also much appreciated the TV version of 'Tinker, Tailor'. But it has to be accepted that the enormous majority of TV is neither Shakespeare nor Alec Guinness.





 

And I try, and I try, but I can’t get no Satisfaction…

Welcome once again to the Peter Hitchens remedial school for people who don’t know how to argue. Your homework has been marked. First, let us consider ‘Curtis’, who writes ‘You are entitled to your view on depression and antidepressants. But when all is said and done, you are not a doctor. Don’t you think it is best to leave medical matters to doctors? I don’t suppose that they are all in the pay of the drug companies.’

No, I don’t.  In this case, apart from anything else, I am by no means convinced that this is a medical matter. These drugs are not like antibiotics, or painkillers, or even chemotherapy, where there are varying degrees of knowledge of cause and effect. They are guesswork in an area of which doctors know virtually nothing. And no, they aren’t all ‘in the pay of the drug companies’, but any honest doctor will admit that many are influenced by the perks and benefits which the drug companies give to those who prescribe their pills. And many more are influenced by the need to get the patient out of the surgery quickly, with some form of apparent reassurance. How will you know if you are on the receiving end of either of these factors? You won’t.

Doctors, as it happens, are mostly no more qualified to make judgements on how chemicals will affect an individual’s brain than are the Ayatollah Khamenei,  or David Beckham.  Why?  Because there simply is no reliable objective knowledge on this matter. We know that these things change moods. We don’t know how or why they do it, or what the long-term effects may be.  In many cases, it may be a placebo effect. The real effect, perhaos dismisssed as a 'side-effect', initially disguised by the placebo effect, may well be the more important effect. As I have laboriously pointed out, we trust doctors (I trust them less than some people do, and about as much as most doctors do, as i explain in an earlier post) because  they are supposed to have studied anatomy, physics, biology, chemistry and biochemistry. They are supposed to be able to identify diseases, fractures and other injuries. They are then supposed either to treat them themselves or – and this is one of the most important responsibilities they have -  to know enough to admit that their knowledge is insufficient and refer the patient to a specialist.

Now, as I have demonstrated here, and as my links show, the level of objective scientific knowledge about the operation of antidepressants is pitifully small. And these are not just aspirins, but highly potent drugs which are in some cases officially accompanied by grave warnings about possible side-effects.  It also shows that the usual logic of medicine – that it is developed to cure a disease, is shown to do so and is then prescribed for it – has not been followed in the case of antidepressants. Rather the contrary. The pills were often developed for other purposes, were found to affect the moods of patients (knowing that they do, and knowing *how* they do are two wholly different things, in case you hadn’t noticed).

I would add that, as I constantly reiterate, the true objective medical study of the brain is restricted to the discipline of neurology, whose practitioners will all readily admit that they have very limited knowledge of how the brain works, or of how drugs operate upon it. 

Then  here comes ‘Elaine’ who says in a contradictory post ‘I once read that the way that Prozac works is that it keeps whatever serotonin there is in the brain circulating for a longer period of time.’

**Well, she may have once read that. And it may well be the case that this happens in the brains of people who take this drug. But is that why it has the effect that it does? And what effect does it have?  The makers are no doubt anxious to emphasise its mood-altering properties, though yet again I cannot see how these can be measured objectively. But are the things they call ‘side-effects’ in fact its main effects? How would we judge?

‘Elaine’ continues:’ I've wished that I could speak to a neurosurgeon or psychiatrist at greater length because I have wondered how some of the other psychiatric drugs work.’

**Well, a neurosurgeon would, I suspect, admit that he knew very little. Psychiatrists might also be rather sceptical, because the growth of the antidepressant industry has rather sidelined psychiatry as it was once practised. I don’t have much time for Freudianism myself, but at least it stuck to telling people that their problems were all caused by an unconfessed lust for their mothers, or an obsession with potty training,  etc etc, rather than giving them powerful pills.

Elaine then gets into really contentious territory, thus ‘ But there is no question that they do. Consider how much more likely it is that someone with schizophrenia or bipolar can function normally nowadays. 50 years ago someone with schizophrenia had very little chance of living outside of an institution. They haven't found any other cure, yet. Drugs are pretty much the only way that such things are treated, so these drugs must be doing something to stabilize the brain chemistry.’

**There is no question that antidepressants and (in this case antipsychotics) do *something* . But what is it? And is what it does treatment of the supposed (and rather ill-defined) complaint, or is it a numbing, or dulling of the senses. And what about the ‘side-effects ‘? I ask again *Are these in fact the principal effects?*. Can anyone else explain to Elaine what is wrong with the logic of  her statement ‘the fact that these chemicals are pretty much the only way that such things are treated, so these drugs must be doing something to stabilize the brain chemistry.’ Let me try, in the meantime. Surely we have to ask a) how they operate b) what they do? C) whether the unwanted side-effects are too high a price to pay for the benefits they bring? d) how – or if - we know that the theory of serotonin imbalance is true. The fact that something is the *only* treatment being used doesn’t mean that it is the *right* treatment, or that no other treatment might be better.

Then, she perceptively asks : ‘But the other thing that I wonder is how much of it has to do with chemicals and how much has to do with other more physical aspects within the brain. I once watched a program that said that the brains of identical twins had been autopsied after their death. One of them had schizophrenia, the other didn't. They found actual physical damage to the brain of the schizophrenic.’

**Yes, there is a connection between the physical brain and mental disturbance. But what is it?  Our knowledge and understanding are very limited.  It is possible to link certain areas of the brain to certain functions. Physical injury to the brain is often followed by mental illness of varying kinds.  And PET scans can show physical brain alterations under certain conditions. One is the expansion of one part of the brain in (for example) London taxi-drivers who are required in their work to develop a very large number of exact memories. I would be grateful for information on physical evidence of schizophrenia, about which I am ignorant (though I do know that it is not generally ‘diagnosed’ on the basis of physical evidence). But I am quite well-informed about claims that sufferers from ‘ADHD’ have physically different brains from those who do not. So far as I know, these studies invariably involve scans of persons who have taken the drugs prescribed for this phantasmal complaint. The brain alterations are almost certainly the consequence of the drugs, not of the ‘ADHD’.

She asks : ‘Also, why does electro shock treatment work ? (specifically to this argument it seems to work best on severely depressed people, which says to me that depression as a physical illness does exist)’.

**This is a large assertion. In what way does it work ‘well’? Where is the objective, measurable evidence that it ‘works’ at all? How would you tell?  Itis this sort of amazing asserton, impossible to exaine or disprove by objective study, which worries me so much about this feild of medicine. This extraordinary and disturbing procedure has been described to me by doctors as the medical equivalent of bashing the TV when it goes on the blink. And I would add that for many years the hideous mutilation known as pre-frontal lobotomy was also said to ‘work’ in a similar way. I think we all know in what way *that* ‘worked'.

‘Elaine’ argues ‘If the seizures induced in the treatment are improving the depression, then it would seem like there is some physical aspect to the illness. 

**This is the same backwards logic as that applied to ‘antidepressant’ medicines. The application of electrical current to the brain *appears* to make people better, though an objective measure is elusive . Therefore depression must in some way have a physical presence in the brain.’ This does not seem to me to be proper science.

As to her request ‘Is there a neurosurgeon in the house? I have lots of questions’, I would endorse the plea.

By the way, as a footnote, Peter Reeve, the man believed to have shot dead Pc Ian Dibell in Clacton earlier this week, and who later killed himself,  is persuasively said to have been taking ‘antidepressant’ medication. According to several newspaper reports today, Mr Reeve worked as a volunteer handyman at Clacton Gun Club. The club owner, Andy Riva, said: "He had a troubled past, he suffered from depression. You could tell from his mood swings if he was taking his medication.’ I found this fact because I was looking for it.