Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 308

The Gap in the Curtain

…is the title of a little-known John Buchan novel in which several powerful or influential Englishmen are allowed, by a sort of magic,  to glimpse a copy of ‘The Times’ of a year hence.

Well, it doesn’t actually need magic to see into the future. Just a bit of experience and an unwillingness to follow the crowd. From the man who (alone) told you that the Tories wouldn’t win the 2010 general election, here are some more examples of prophetic ability. An insistent correspondent upbraids me for not writing at length about ‘House of Lords Reform’.

I have two reasons for not rushing to do so (though no doubt I will get round to it)


The first is explained in these two column items from days, weeks, months and years gone by, which I remember, even if nobody else does:
25th September 2011:
‘But the biggest fake of all will be the stage-managed split between the two, which I predict will take place by the spring of 2014.There will be some pretext or other - probably spending cuts. The idea will be to make the Liberals look like principled Leftists and the Tories look like principled conservatives. The media will, as usual, play along.
The Liberals will then noisily leave the Coalition but quietly agree to maintain a minority Tory Government on the basis of 'confidence and supply'.
Mr Cameron will then find ministerial jobs for some of his friends. Mr Clegg may possibly go off to the European Commission - a seat falls vacant in 2014.
If he does, I suspect Vince Cable will become leader, a change worth many votes to his party. The Tories will try and fail to get a few 'Right-wing' measures through Parliament.
And at the 2015 Election, voters will be asked to choose between Liberal Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Liberal Labour candidates, pretending to disagree with each other.
The Liberal Democrats will then form a coalition with whoever gets most seats. And your wishes, hopes and fears will continue to be ignored.’

AND 4th March 2012

‘HAVE you noticed how the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are trying to pretend they hate each other? Like almost everything in public life these days, it's a fake. But 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.

Thanks to the creepy Fixed Term Parliament Act, which passed almost in silence, this walkout will not and cannot trigger a General Election. The new law means that the sort of no-confidence vote that brought down Jim Callaghan in 1979 can never happen again, a grave blow to our freedom. So Mr Cameron will be able to stay at Downing Street at the head of a minority Tory Government. The two parties will pelt each other with rhetorical mud and slime, the Tories will table all kinds of Right-wing legislation they know will never get through, and David Cameron will buy off his key rebels with ministerial jobs vacated by Liberals. This pantomime could easily end in another Lib-Con coalition, or even a Lib-Lab coalition that will be exactly the same, but with different teeth and hair. But it will work only if you, the voters, are fooled by it.’

****

My other reason is that, though House of Lords reform is immensely important, the pass has long ago been sold. 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 Tories voted ,for the most part, for the Bill and so cannot easily vote against a similar proposal when it comes up again later. It was the guillotine they opposed, a purely tactical decision. The final breach will come, I think, when Lib Dems combine with Labour ( and some Tory rebels who will probably abstain) to prevent the planned boundary changes for the House of Commons. That will be the pretext for the final split., and is organically linked ( as some Lib Dems have already made clear) to the issue of an elected Lords.  This row has come earlier than expected, because Parliament has so little to do under a government whose main function is to be in office, and which is now a purposeless, drifting hulk manned by careerists without principle or aim.

Stand By

Mr Gibson writes : ‘I stand by absolutely every point I made and feel deeply flattered that Peter Hitchens is sufficiently irked by the comments of a random and largely powerless individual such as myself (who does not have the platform of regular media invitations in which to push my viewpoints and then moan that everyone is just biased against me) to earn such a personalised ticking off in his court.’

Mr Gibson should realise that I did not select his original comments because of their powerful logic, their compelling eloquence or their illuminating and unexpected display of factual knowledge. Rather the reverse.  If he is flattered, as he says he is,  then he may be in the same position as the comedian who appeared at the old Glasgow Empire and mistook the howls of derision for laughter at his jokes.  Would it be more unkind to leave him with his misapprehension, or to tell him the truth?
                                                                     
What I am irked by is not the strength of his argument (it isn’t an argument and has no strength) . I am irked by the poor quality of his arguing technique, his unwillingness to engage with the case that I offer, the ‘unresponsiveness’ for which I so often have to upbraid hostile contributors here. Does he really think I mind a good strong well-argued challenge? On the contrary, I much prefer that to praise, and I prefer it immensely to his approach. I have yet to see a single one of my critics answer the following conundrum :’ How can it be right to prescribe powerful, objective drugs with undoubted physical, chemical and biochemical effects, for a complaint for which there is no objective physical, chemical or biochemical, or biological diagnosis?'

Further, what is the evidence that these drugs actually treat the complaint for which they are prescribed a) any better than a placebo and b) by treating the complaint rather than by numbing the senses of the patient?

Mr Gibson says with pride that he ‘stands by’ every point he made. What were these points? He appeared simply to be telling me that he, Mr Gibson, thinks I am wrong. Well and good. Perhaps I am. But usually the next step in such an argument is to explain why I am wrong. No such explanation was offered, except the fact that Herr Professor Doktor Doktor Gibson, MD,  BSc, PhD and bar (is that enough qualifications for it to be certain he is right?) thinks I am wrong, plus a wholly made-up and wrong summary of my opinions and an ad hominem reflection against me (I have put it on the mantelpiece with all the others).  I have also challenged him to justify this, but he hasn’t so much as tried to do so, let alone succeeded.

He can stand by his points until it gets dark and starts to snow, for what I care. But what I asked him to do was to back his position (and his attack on me) with specific facts ,and with logic. If he won’t do that (and I rather suspect he won’t because he can’t), I am not sure that he has anything to stand by. By the way, I wish I knew what these 'regular' media invitations are,  that he says I get. They appear to me to be rather irregular, especially compared with the regular presenter's slots which seem to go to some of my left-wing Fleet Street coevals, but perhaps he has detected a pattern invisible to me. Which reminds me of a lunch I once had with the new DG of the BBC, George Entwistle, a story for another time....

How to be Ignorant and Ill-informed

The standard response to my criticisms of the mass prescription of so-called antidepressant tablets is twofold.  One group denounces me as ‘ignorant and ill-informed’. The other asserts ‘Clinical depression is a reality because I suffered from it, and antidepressants saved/cured me’ . No doubt someone will soon be along to tell me that I have no business commenting on such matters because I am not myself scientifically qualified.

There are several immediate  retorts to this. First, I make no claim to be an expert on this subject. I certainly need to learn more about it. Any honest person must always accept this. But it is no good to denounce me in general for ‘ignorance’. Everyone is ignorant of something. The point is, what is that I am ignorant of, specifically, that undermines, weakens or destroys the argument I put forward?  

If my critics would put these specific failings of mine before us, explaining their significance and telling us where we can check their references, then we would have something to debate. If they cannot, it is just abuse, isn't it?

My principal source is one I have cited before, namely two articles by Dr Marcia Angell, published recently in the New York Review of Books. These articles take the form of a lengthy and thoughtful review of three books by expert and informed people.

These are to be found here

and  here

Added to this are many private communications from people who have been prescribed antidepressants, and some direct personal knowledge of people who were prescribed antidepressants (my initial experience of what happened to two very different people,  more than a decade ago, was what first persuaded me to look into the issue. Until then I accepted the conventional wisdom that ‘clinical depression’ was a physical ailment that could be treated with chemicals).

I would invite anyone who has no doubts on this issue also to read this news story, which details the reasons for the enormous fine, part criminal, part civil, recently imposed in the USA on one of the major drug companies - largely as a result of activities connected with the marketing of antidepressant pills.

This also contains some interesting reflections on the impartiality and venality of doctors themselves, and on the authority or otherwise of articles in medical journals (no doubt ‘peer-reviewed’) which my ‘scientific’ critics tend to treat as if they were Holy Writ.

I am of course  sympathetic to anyone who has felt so low that he or she has felt willing or at least ready to take prescribed antidepressants. After all, most of us trust doctors.  I am one of those who doesn’t always do so, having been prescribed the wrong drug many years ago by a plausible-seeming and apparently mature and experienced GP,  and having some days later ended up in some pain on a hospital trolley outside an operating theatre,  facing an extremely unpleasant but needless operation, from which I was saved –literally at the last minute – by the intervention of a specialist who (unlike anyone else in the whole process) looked at my notes properly and realised that the surgery was wholly unnecessary, and my problems were the consequence of a stupid mis-prescription.  What if he hadn’t been there?  Nowadays, I’d know to question what I was told. Then, I didn’t. Knowledge, especially this kind of scepticism, is hard-bought, though it could easily have been even harder. Or never discovered at all. Imagine that.

Today’s selected critic is Mr John Gibson, who writes :’What I can't abide, furthermore, is the dismissive and ignorant nonsense that Peter Hitchens implies here, which is that depression is not a real illness, and that all sufferers need do is go for a brisk walk to shake it off. This is suggestive of an attitude that "they should snap out of it," i.e. that sufferers are just weak people who should grow a backbone before they deserve any sympathy, let alone professional care. That belongs in the C19. There is a grown up debate to be had about mental health care, and the role of pharmaceutical giants therein, but after the MMR debacle, which exposed a brutal lack of medical knowledge, and (more importantly) a lack of any intent to gain said knowledge, I have severe doubts that Peter Hitchens is the individual to lead it.’

As it happens, exercise is, as far as I know, now a recognised treatment for what is called ‘clinical depression’. I’d be interested in any information on this, but I think the medical journals have material on it. Whether ‘clinical depression’ has an objective existence, I don’t know and can think of no way in which we could possibly find out. Perhaps one will be discovered, but until then it seems to me to be open to question by thoughtful people.  A whole range of complaints have been elevated, by the development of drugs which claim to treat them, into ‘disorders’ or ‘syndromes’ with lengthy Latinate names, the length of the name usually being in inverse proportion to the objective knowledge we possess of the complaint.

I have discussed here the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association, on which so many of these so-called ‘diagnoses’ are based. I draw the attention of my more politically-correct critics to the changing status of homosexuality, according to the APA, and to the current controversy over the latest edition of the DSM, which even people other than the Hated Peter Hitchens are questioning, such as an extension of ‘mental illness’ to cover perfectly normal human reactions, for example grief after bereavement.

This sort of problem – the inability to prove the objective existence of a complaint -  is usually solved nowadays by the medical and pharmaceutical industries repeatedly asserting that it jolly well does exist, and hoping nobody will ask how they know. The main current argument (as dealt with in the Marcia Angell articles to which I provide links) is that because the drugs appear to treat the alleged illness, and because the drugs affect serotonin levels, the alleged illness must therefore be caused by variations in the serotonin levels. It is interesting, as we examine this unusual scientific logic, if such backward reasoning is indeed scientific, to note that most ‘antidepressant’ medications were in fact developed with other ends in mind. The disease, in short, has been invented to be cured by the drug, rather than the other way round.

In answer to Mr Gibson’s sneering summary of my view as that ‘ all sufferers need do is go for a brisk walk to shake it off’, it isn’t that far from the truth, and if he’s sincerely concerned for the wellbeing of his fellow-creatures he might do well to be less dismissive of this possibility.

Most people in this country have far too little physical exercise, thanks mainly to the car and the near-abolition of manual work, and it seems to me to be more or less axiomatic that if they have more exercise they will feel better. Rudyard Kipling’s poem about the Horrible Hump, the Hump that is Black and Blue,  which readers will remember affects ‘Kiddies and grown-ups too’ plus the normal treatment for ‘Cabin Fever’ and the experience of every observant schoolteacher and parent for centuries, are evidence that human beings have long been aware that a lack of exercise doesn’t improve the human mood.

This sort of medical knowledge is easily cast aside by the conventionally wise because – alas or perhaps not alas - it  comes entirely free of charge, unadorned with peer-reviewed articles, GP prescriptions (rewarded by trips to five-star hotels). If there were big money involved in going for a brisk walk, the conventionally wise would probably take it more seriously. Charge a man for something, and he’ll think he’s getting something in return. Charge him a lot, and he’ll think he’s getting even more.

Also nobody has ever been harmed by a brisk walk, even if it didn’t do him any good either (though I’m sure it did). So ‘going for a brisk walk’ doesn’t need to be guarded by phalanxes of PR men and lawyers, the one lot to make us approve of it, the others to scare away criticism.

If there’s an epidemic of people feeling low and sad in advanced economies (and I rather think that Clinical Depression is a First World affliction) then mightn’t it be reasonable to search for a possible cause among things that characterise First World life (and First World life alone) , such as the almost total lack of exercise in daily life? Even if the serotonin theory is correct, why would so many millions of people suddenly be suffering from the same problem?  Wouldn’t any serious doctor , and every epidemiologist, be looking for reasons why there should be so many people needing this sort of intervention?

Once again, even if you accept the logic of my opponents and critics, they don’t seem to be thinking very hard about their own case.

I also think that the warnings of ‘suicidality’ now attached to some ‘antidepressants’ by the health authorities of several major countries are extraordinarily important. The retort that depressed people 'were, like *depressed* and thus more like to commit suicide, duh!' Was never very persuasive.  Think about it. If an antibiotic given to people to treat, say, TB, was associated with a high level of death from TB, it wouldn’t be much of an answer for the makers to say that ‘They, were, like tubercular, and so they were more likely to die of TB, duh!' Would it? The pills are supposed to *cure* the problem.

When Health Canada (for instance) actually says that some of these pills can engender suicidal thoughts – itself an astonishing thing to happen – then we have to wonder how on earth these things are operating on the brain. But in fact we know very little about it, as proper hard neurology (as opposed to the immodest psychobabble pseudoscience of  ‘neuroscience’ ) is in its infancy.

Mr Gibson continues : ’This is suggestive of an attitude that "they should snap out of it," i.e. that sufferers are just weak people who should grow a backbone before they deserve any sympathy, let alone professional care.

I shall in future treasure the formulation ‘this is suggestive of’. Under Mr Gibson’s hand, it appears to mean ‘Peter Hitchens doesn’t actually say this, and I have no reason to believe that he thinks it -but I am going to suggest that he has, so as to belittle and mock him and his argument, without actually engaging with it.

I have never doubted that people can feel low without any apparent reason (though I know of cases – one of a terrible bereavement and the other of a person stalked by a violent ex-boyfriend and failed by the police, who were prescribed ‘antidepressants’ for perfectly explicable feelings of misery and fear caused by objective circumstances).

Why should I be unsympathetic in the way he suggests? What connection has this with the point I am making?  My interest is in discovering the real reasons. If it can be shown by objective experimentation that all that all they need, and precisely what they need, is an SSRI pill, then I shall retreat with apologies. But can it be so shown? Rather the contrary. Research noted in the Angell articles shows that in the drug companies’ own experiments, not publicly released, placebo sugar pills were often comparable in effect to the ‘antidepressant’.

Again, as most wise doctors know, their main job is reassurance. The simple act of being told you have something wrong with you that is understood by science, and that this prescription will put it right, starts the process of healing, even of objective, physical diseases. If you visit a good doctor, you will begin to get well again before you have even reached the chemist with your prescription.

There is a lot wrong with our society – people with no work, people with no families, people with no friends, people failed by the education system, people living amid neglect, decay and disorder. I suspect that it is among these that the prescription of antidepressants is most common. Maybe the pills numb the pain, but I doubt very much if they take it away. And once again we are on the road to Huxley’s ‘Brave New World ‘ nightmare, in which the taking of Soma aids us in the smiley acceptance of a wretched slavery.

Finally, Mr Gibson says ‘There is a grown up debate to be had about mental health care, and the role of pharmaceutical giants therein, but after the MMR debacle, which exposed a brutal lack of medical knowledge, and (more importantly) a lack of any intent to gain said knowledge, I have severe doubts that Peter Hitchens is the individual to lead it.’

Well, I have no desire to ‘lead’ anything. I just want there to be a debate and a proper inquiry, an aim no honest person can oppose.  Who can be against the truth emerging? Perhaps he could cite specific examples of the ‘brutal lack of medical knowledge’ which I allegedly exposed during the MMR debate. Also the ‘lack of any intent to gain said knowledge’.  These are strong charges, made in a  self-righteous and confident tone.

I would remind him (in case he has forgotten, or has mixed me up with someone else) that I never at any stage made any determination upon the safety or otherwise of the MMR.  I never advised anyone not to allow their children to be given it.  I concentrated entirely on the high-handed treatment of those parents who quite reasonably wished to give their children separate injections, on the existence of legitimate doubts about it, and on the crude and dishonest propaganda used against them by the authorities, and indeed the lying intimidation personally against me by persons unknown.

The Hollow Crown

Just a brief note to say how good I thought the BBC’s new version of ‘Henry IV, Part I’ was, when they eventually deigned to broadcast it on Saturday night. There was obviously some sort of tussle in the control room, but it seems to me that if you have scheduled a major new drama for 9.00 p.m. on a Saturday in the middle of Wimbledon, you can’t claim you didn’t know the men’s doubles might overrun, let alone the women’s doubles. Wimbledon, as an event,  is pretty predictable. As far as I know its dates are fixed ages in advance, and tennis is famous for going on and on and on. If the BBC were really interested in culture, it would have been the tennis enthusiasts who were kept waiting, or perhaps shunted off on to one of the minor channels.

Anyway, I have long thought that TV and films are better ways of tackling Shakespeare than the stage. They can make soliloquies much more credible than they are on stage (Falstaff’s great attack on honour was beautifully done) and they can make a much better fist of courts, throne-rooms and battlefields.

It’s not just that our imaginations are spoiled by a century of cinema and TV. It is that Shakespeare’s texts are still so powerful that a cunning director can get *more* out of them than we knew was there when we read them on the page, or saw them on the stage. I still recall a terrific TV Hamlet, probably 40 or more years ago, filmed in a real castle (perhaps it was Elsinore), and there’s a Russian film version of Hamlet that is supposed to be so good that those who know the play at all can watch it with pleasure despite the language barrier.

By the way, in the old Cold War days, any English-speaking intelligent person in any Warsaw Pact country could be guaranteed, at some point in conversation, to say, meaningfully and with a pause ‘Something is rotten in the state of….Denmark’.

Kenneth Clarke, in his great ‘Civilisation’ series said that Shakespeare wrote from an entirely irreligious point of view. I’m not so sure about this. I suspect many people have wanted to believe it because Shakespeare is obviously so thoughtful and intelligent, and much of his work is philosophy turned into flesh and blood and clothed in the most glorious poetry.   I think religion, a knowledge of it and of its precepts, is simply assumed in so much that he writes (Hamlet’s suicide soliloquy, in which he complains that the Almighty has ‘fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter’ is a rare example of a direct reference, but the musing on death being a ‘bourne from which no traveller returns’ marks him out as being anything but a 21st-century materialist. It is from that unanswered question that all other questions arise).

Anyway, at a time when the country seems full of incompetence and hopelessness, it is a pleasure to see, form once, a great British institution making a serious effort to make a good fist of the works of Shakespeare, arguably the greatest Englishman who ever lived.

They sold us 'happy pills' - but all we got was suicide and misery

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

A scandal can exist for ages before anyone notices. Here is one such. Ten years from now we will look back in shame and regret at the  way the drug companies bamboozled us into swallowing  dangerous, useless ‘antidepressant’ pills.

You’d be far better off taking a brisk walk. The moment of truth must come soon, though most of Britain’s complacent, sheep-like media will be among the last to spot it.

I would have thought it was blaring, front-page, top-of- the-bulletin news that GlaxoSmithKline, one of our biggest companies, has just been fined £2 billion (yes, you heard that right, £2 billion) in the US for – among other things – bribing doctors, and encouraging the prescription of unsuitable drugs to children.

Its drug Paxil, sold here as Seroxat, was promoted as suitable for teenagers and children, even though trials had shown it was not.

Doctors were sent on free trips where they were treated to snorkelling, sailing, deep-sea fishing, balloon rides and spa treatments (and cash payments), to persuade them to prescribe these drugs, or to reward them for doing so.

A medically-qualified radio host was allegedly paid more than £150,000 to plug one GSK antidepressant for unapproved uses. GSK paid for articles approving its drugs to appear in reputable medical journals.

It is well known now among doctors that other drug companies have suppressed unwelcome test results on modern antidepressants. These results show they are largely useless for their stated purpose. In many cases they were not significantly more effective than dummy tablets in lifting the moods of patients. Thanks to Freedom of Information investigations, the truth is now out.

Even worse than this is the growing suggestion that, far from making their users happy, these pills can increase suicidal thoughts in their minds, perhaps with tragic results.

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency undertook trials which showed that teenagers and children who took Seroxat were significantly more likely to experience such thoughts.

Sara Carlin, an 18-year-old Canadian student with everything to live for, hanged herself in 2007 despite official warnings (and warnings from her mother) that the drug could lead to self-harm.

Quite why it should magically be safe for adults, I am not sure. Nor was the coroner in the 2003 inquest on Colin Whitfield, a retired headmaster, aged 56, who slit his wrists in his garden shed two weeks after starting to take Seroxat. The coroner recorded an open verdict and said the drug should be withdrawn until detailed national studies were made.

Mr Whitfield’s widow Kathryn said: ‘We have no doubt that it was the drug that caused him to do it.’

I would also remind readers of the recent statement by Dr Declan Gilsenan, Ireland’s former Assistant State Pathologist, who says he has seen ‘too many suicides’ after people had started taking antidepressants and is sure the evidence is ‘more than anecdotal’.

The defenders of this nasty, profiteering enterprise – including doctors who ought to know better – will come up with the usual bleat of ‘correlation is not causation’.

Just remember that this was the same sly song that Big Tobacco sang, when it first became obvious that cigarettes caused cancer. It is time for a proper investigation, with evidence on oath and the power of subpoena.

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Mr Slippery, who pretended to have wielded the European veto when he hadn’t, now pretends he is offering a referendum when he isn’t. The Tory leader’s struggle to avoid commitment on anything increasingly resembles that favourite entertainment at American country fairs, the greased pig contest. It takes quite a few honest citizens to catch one  well-lubricated hog.

The CPS will put anyone on trial... except crooks

The main purpose of the Crown Prosecution Service is to save money by pretending that crime and disorder are not as bad as they really are.

That is why it is almost impossible to get it to prosecute anyone, unless you have clear, high-definition film of the crime actually being committed.

Burglary? Why bother? Here’s a crime number, if you can still get insurance in your postcode. Car theft? Happens all the time. Probably your fault. Assault? How about a caution? Drugs? Well, Chuka Umunna, the Shadow Business Secretary, reckons that it isn’t news any more that he smoked dope. So why would we trouble ourselves over that?

In which case, why on earth did the CPS think  it was worth spending heaps of our money on prosecuting Cinnamon Heathcote-Drury after  a bizarre and faintly comical scuffle in Tesco, in which nobody was hurt?

Could it be because her accuser was a Muslim  who alleged she was a ‘racist’?

But now that a jury has thrown out this ludicrous case after 15 minutes of deliberation (God bless them), will anyone in the CPS be disciplined?

No real army and no real country

A country without an army isn’t a country any more. And, thanks to the Coalition, among the worst and most irresponsible and incompetent Governments in our history, we no longer have an army.

We will pretend we do. But nobody will believe us. The British Army will soon be smaller than the sad, rump defence force that Vichy France was allowed to keep by Hitler. Something very similar has happened to the Royal Navy, now a demoralised, politically corrected remnant.

Meanwhile, money is poured into overseas aid, and into the huge apparatus of bureaucrats and sinecures that  our state maintains to hide the level of  unemployment.

This Government will be remembered in ten years’ time for its bad management of the economy, its failure to reform schools, its pitiful inability to cope with crime and disorder, its stupid tinkering with the constitution and its cave-ins to Brussels.

But it will be remembered in 20 years’ time, with bitterness and remorse, as the Government that stripped our defences bare in a dangerous world.

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The latest deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan are, as usual, needless – and are Mr Slippery’s direct personal responsibility.

David Cameron has long promoted the fantasy that we must stay in that hopeless country while we train Afghans to take over from us.

But everyone in Helmand knows perfectly well that the Afghans hate us, and that as soon as we go, the Taliban will take over.

A large share of our casualties now result from Afghans, who we have trained and armed, murdering the British troops who are supposed to be their allies. This fact is itself the proof that our policy will never work.

Only one thing prevents an immediate exit from this worse-than-pointless pit of grief and loss.

It is Mr Slippery’s cowardly refusal to admit that the whole deployment was a stupid mistake, and that his braying support for it, trumpeted in the Murdoch press, was the price he paid for the backing of the Sun newspaper during his fraudulent Election campaign.

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

A Summing Up

As always, I’m grateful for all serious contributions. My main desire, over the bombing issue, is to get people to think rationally rather than emotionally. I was baffled that so many of my critics accused me of unfairly trying to place the blame on poor old Arthur Harris, as if he wasn’t a committed supporter of the policy and as if senior military officers weren’t responsible for the conduct of their campaigns. It’s almost as if they were saying ‘he was only following orders’. On the contrary, he was chosen precisely because he was the ideal man for the job Churchill and Portal had in mind. Churchill, of course, is so much more important, and had responsibilities, faults and talents so much greater than anyone else,  that it would be absurd to have suggested that his monuments should be diminished because of this one issue.

I was also baffled by the frequent assumption that because I didn’t mention Lindemann or Churchill or Portal, I didn’t know they were involved. Of course I do.


I believe there is a statue of Portal, and if so I feel much the same way about it, but Harris has always seemed to me to be the boorish, crude personification of the belief that war justifies any evil. It is in a way to his credit that he was so frank about it.  If that were so, then why did it matter who won? If it isn’t so, and it obviously isn’t, then there have to be points at which the civilised person says ‘That’s going too far’. And there will always be

In e-mail and telephone arguments with my critics, I have yet to find one who was prepared to argue rationally. If I pointed out that there was a choice over what and how we bombed, they had forgotten I had said it within 30 seconds, and returned to the insistence that ‘there was nothing else we could do’.

If they described to me the horrors of being bombed, and I said that this was exactly why I thought it wrong to inflict the same on others, they would briefly acknowledge this point, and then return to the theme of ‘you weren’t there, you couldn’t know’. When I point3ed out that people who *had* been there and *did* know also opposed the deliberate bombing of civilians, they went back to ‘We had no choice’.

Or they would do the slippery slide of saying ’there are bound to be innocent casualties in any war’, so I would say ‘but these were not accidental deaths caused by a campaign to bomb German factories and airfields. These were deliberately chosen targets’  . And then we would be back to ‘But you weren’t there’ or ‘We had no choice’. It was like swatting molehills. Flatten one, and another pops up, forever.

This is the irresistible cult of ‘We Won the War’, which I describe and criticise in my book ‘The Rage Against God’, pointing out that for millions of British people – and I was once one of them – this has replaced the Christian religion as the principal belief.

It was quite amusing, in one place, to be denounced as a ‘Born-Again Christian’ (I don’t claim to be such a thing.  Being born once was quite enough for me) and later in the same accusation to be denounced as a Trotskyist (I haven’t been one of those since 1975, and am unwelcome at their tea-parties). It was less amusing to come across a suggestion that people who didn’t approve of Harris’s bombing  tended to be Holocaust-deniers, a pusillanimous falsehood which diminishes those who advance it.

It is so sad for our country that this mass of delusions about the 1939-45 tragedy continues to clutter up our minds. Alongside it are the others – the Americans are our reliable friends, the end of our Empire was civilised, we punch above our weight in the world, the world listens to us - mirages which prevent us from seeing the scale of our decline, or recognising the very urgent need to reverse it.

On the Good Bad Books issue, I’m grateful for the response, and for the recommendations. Oddly enough, the educated middle class have for years been quite happy to own up to reading thrillers of a certain sort – le Carre,  P.D.James’s detective stories, maybe Eric Ambler in the right company.   And of course Sherlock Holmes. But not, I think, the sort of books I mentioned. By the way, I just don’t like Bernard Cornwell’s books. I may have been influenced by the fact that Sean Bean is the actor chosen to star in the TV version, and I just can’t enjoy his performances in anything.  I also seem to recall feeling there was something anachronistic about the language and the minds of the characters, and anachronism is something which I cannot stand in historical fiction.

This is so very much not the case with  (for instance )C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series. Forester was a genius, in my view, and not just because of Hornblower but because of small masterpieces such as ‘Death to the French’, ‘The Good Shepherd’, ‘The Ship’, ‘the Gun’ and ‘Brown on Resolution’. His storytelling skill is extraordinary. Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic books are better than Hornblower, but that doesn’t mean Hornblower isn’t good.

What about Bad Good Books? I think that phrase could describe a lot of the respectable, prizewinning output of modern British novelists (I name no names, but I exempt William Boyd and, to some extent, Sebastian Faulks from my view that most modern novel-writing is done for effect, and has little to say while providing poor, thin pleasure to the reader).

On the absence of Christianity from Martin’s ‘Game of Thrones’, I am sure it is very important, and I’m again grateful for some of the thoughts about the absence of any real force for good in the books. I think Mary Renault also rejected Christianity and its traditions (I’d be grateful for any information about this) but (I think it’s in ‘The King Must Die’) there’s a passage in which a captured Jew is enslaved by the Cretans and forced to take part in the (almost invariably fatal) bull-dancing which is a kind of sacrifice.  He scorns the idolatry utterly, and baffles the other captives when they ask him what sort of gods he worships, and he says he worships only one God, and  describes Him as having a face of fire. He dies very soon afterwards. I always felt that in this she recognised (perhaps without welcoming it) that  -like them or not - the great monotheist religions were a great transforming power, quite distinct from anything that had gone before.

One contributor argues that Christianity is based upon human sacrifice. Well, sort of. The crucifixion is said, in the Church of England’s 1662 Prayer Book, to be a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, satisfaction and oblation ( I think I have that formula right) for the sins of the whole world. That is to say, there is to be no more sacrificing from now on. It is done, for all time past, present and future.

Once again, I think people who live in a world where sacrifice has been seen for 2,000 years as obsolete, would be quite shocked if they were plunged back into a world where it was normal,  with temple cellars full of the offal of slaughtered cattle, and one or two of the more arcane rites demanding the occasional human sacrifice, perhaps a child,  to keep things on an even keel.

The Christian world is very different from what preceded it, from what would have happened if there had been no Christianity, and from what is to come if Christianity dies out among us.  This seems to me to be beyond argument.

Travelling in Time, plus Swords and Sorcery

I am feeling rather guilty. For the past few months, for various reasons, I haven’t felt much like reading history or Dickens. Faced with a long,  arid series of plane journeys on which I knew I would not sleep, and equipped with an e-reader, I shamefacedly uploaded some ‘good bad books’, as George Orwell once called them.

This expression is probably very unfair on the authors, involved, George R.R. Martin (‘Game of Thrones’) and Stephen King (’11.22.63’). I wish I had their imaginative sweep and their ability to keep me reading for hours on end. What’s bad about that?

Neither of them pretends to be Tolstoy, and (thank heaven) neither of them is in competition with Virginia Woolf either. But both have obviously read widely, know a great deal of history, and have an enviable skill with words.

Yet I still have a deep cultural prejudice against admitting to reading such things. I should probably get over it.

‘Game of Thrones’ (I have not seen, and do not plan to see, the TV version, which is bound to be far less spectacular and or interesting  than the books)  is clunkier than King’s book. George Martin’s American English idiom (see my previous posting) is too modern and bare to suit some of the scenes and characters in an epic which is set in a sort of Middle Ages, in a world quite like, but also very unlike, Europe and Asia.

But setting aside some moments of ‘he couldn’t possibly have said that!’, and passing lightly over Mr Martin’s rather deep and intricate interest in food, his generous use of certain four-letter words and his perhaps over-detailed descriptions of various forms of cruelty, the story so far is really rather good. The world he has invented, out of an enormous imagination is crucially, unChristian. Its various religions, which we learn about in a sideways fashion, often involve sacrifice. There’s even a semi-secret cult of assassins and suicide. The main faith has seven holy figures who seem to have something in common with the Graeco-Roman gods. But it also has no classical civilisation, equivalent to Greece and Rome, in its past.

But the merciless paganism of the pre-Islamic East, full of slaves, and dreadful deeds done under a cruel sun,  still lives among the sinister, spectacular and terrifying cities of Martin’s East. These places are a tremendous achievement of imagination (I couldn’t help thinking that he had been influenced in this by the wonderful works of Mary Renault, whose evocation of the Classical world sometimes produces a similar feeling of visiting a planet where hope and kindness have yet to be discovered).

While to the north there lies a nameless menace among the deep, deep snows, which, as far as I have got in the story, has barely begun to awake.

The supernatural – real dragons, armies of the walking dead, necromancy and shape-shifting, play a sensibly small part in the story, which I am told is broadly modelled on the Wars of the Roses, between the Houses of Lancaster and York, in the English middle ages.

In fact the most terrible monsters are human, because what Martin is very good at describing is the shocking ruthlessness of naked power politics, unrestrained by law or God.  He draws his characters cunningly, tempting the reader to misjudge them and showing them a wholly different aspect as events unfold.

I might add that he is unsparing in his description of the real cost of war, particularly to innocent people who have no power. And, as I said, I am impressed by the richness, originality and detail of Mr Martin’s imagination, which (I would guess) encompasses far more geography, genealogy, philosophy and history of his private world than he has shared with his readers).

What can it be compared with? Nothing that I know of. Tolkien is far more literary and poetic, and his work is written in an entirely different register. And ‘the Lord of the Rings’ can be read by children, which ‘Game of Thrones’ certainly cannot be and shouldn’t be. (Tolkien can also be read by adults, who, even if they first read him as children, will be surprised by how much they gain from going back to the book in later life).Above all, Tolkien seems to me to have a profound and positive moral aim, to warn against the worship of power.

Martin does this negatively. Is it intentional? I am not sure.  By showing what people do when they are fighting for power, the lies they tell, the mercy they fail to show, the surprises they arrange;   by showing that those characters we like most are often not very good at this, whereas the hateful succeed –and by describing the exercise of power and its consequences, he builds up an indictment of power as strong as any I have ever seen.

And by trying to describe a society which prays, and has a religious hierarchy, scriptures and beliefs – but is definitely not Christian – he makes the thoughtful reader wonder if this is a picture of world that was never saved, and perhaps never will be. If this is so, then I think it is a) frightening and b) instructive.

I have never seen a review of these books in a major newspaper or magazine. (I can’t actually recall how I heard about ‘Game of Thrones’ or decided to try it).  Perhaps I have missed the reviews, but I suppose the literary industry feels it is above such stuff. Maybe it is. But if so, it must fall to other people to discuss them, as they are read by many people and must influence the way in which they think.

Stephen King does not get reviewed much in the grander journals, either, though some American publications treat his work with a certain respect. He’s obviously a highly intelligent and thoughtful person, and his latest book (I have read very few of his works) is a beguiling piece of time travel.

His hero (a New England schoolteacher) is given the chance to go back in time to 1958 and undo a series of tragedies. The greatest of these is the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22nd November 1963, the reason for the title.

Does he succeed? How? I won’t spoil it for you. But for me the most interesting feature of the work was King’s elaborate attempt to recreate the wholly different America of the end of the 1950s. King ( by no means a crusty conservative) almost (but not quite) portrays this period as, yes, a Golden Age – especially of trust, but also of food that tasted better, of money that was still worth something , of an economy where people still made things, and used the things they made in modest but comfortable lives.

There’s a particularly moving and telling part of the book where he heads south along the unmodernised highways of the time, which I recommend, not least because after some rather moving descriptions of a lost but recent past, at a Dixieland petrol station he follows the sign for the ‘colored’ lavatories, and finds a pathway, flanked with poison ivy, leading to a plank over a stream.

There you have it. You have the one. You have the other too, not to mention the endless smoking, the crude medical care and the filthy, polluted air in industrial districts, and some harsh, disturbing evocations of slum life in the suburbs of big southern cities.  One American reviewer, Marian Kester Coombs in the excellent ‘American Conservative’ magazine for which I occasionally write, says King is quite wrong about swearing in pre-1963 America, which was far more taboo then that he seems to think. I suspect she is right.

Despite all this dark-side material, I get the impression that King was quite taken with the world he recreated, and was strongly tempted to stay there himself. Does his hero? You’ll have to read it to find out. A lot of people will read it. This book will have more impact on the way more people think than a whole pile of literary prizewinners. It should be taken more seriously, and more widely discussed, even if the book reviews are probably the wrong place.  I’m not sorry I read it.

‘We Won the War … or Did We?’

In my original article on the deliberate bombing of German civilians, I quoted my late father, a Commander RN who served in His and Her Majesty’s Navy for more than 30 years, took part in the Arctic Convoys and was present at the Battle of North Cape on Boxing Day 1943. He would sometimes murmur, meaningfully ‘We won the war…or did we?’

Many of my critics appear to have read the headline of the original Harris piece and reached for their pens or keyboards without further study. I think this complaint of my father’s seems to have passed them by.

I am, for instance, abruptly told that if we hadn’t won the war, I would be speaking German. This tiresome cliché betrays a grave absence of thought. If we didn’t win the war, who did? Well, above all, our principal rivals since 1812, the United States of America won it, thanks to their wise policy of staying out until they were ready, and then using others as their proxies in many theatres of war. We used to do this, when we had our wits about us, especially in the wars against Louis XIV and  against Bonaparte.

And I might say that it seems to me that we are increasingly speaking American, rather than the English of my childhood. It is an incessant process.  In the past year or two, ‘to commit oneself’ has ceased to be a reflexive verb, ‘convince’ has become a synonym for ‘persuade’ , which it is not, people have stopped being ‘bored with’ or ‘bored by’ things and become ‘bored of’ them, ‘please may I have…?’ has been driven out by ‘can I get…?’  and railway stations have become ‘train stations’.  The verb ‘might’ has disappeared, because it is too complicated. We say ‘may’ instead. What is even more interesting is that those who use these Americanisms are mostly *not aware that they are doing it* . Older readers here will no doubt point out that I, too, am guilty of several American idioms without knowing it. I’ve no doubt that they are right.

These are by no means the only signs and symbols of our defeat. The transformation of Canada from British Dominion to protectorate of the USA is one of the most striking. Something similar has happened in Australia. The replacement of the defunct Royal Navy by the USN is another.  I am sometimes accused of enjoying the Last Night of the Proms.  Actually I can’t stand it. How can any grown-up person sing ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia Rule the Waves!’ in 2012?  We barely rule the Solent. The presence in this country of many American bases (fewer than in the Cold War, but by no means gone), the unequal extradition treaty between our two countries, the displacement of this country by the USA in the Middle East and the Far East are others. The final victory of the USA over this country took place in 1940, when we went bankrupt as a result of our bungled declaration of war in Hitler. It was emphasised in the takeover of the war by the USA after the Placentia Bay meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill, and rubbed in hard at the Teheran Summit, at which Roosevelt contemptuously snubbed Churchill and sucked up to Stalin.  The abrupt cessation of American aid at the end of the 1939-45 war, followed by the very conditional giving of Marshall Aid (the conditions being the end of Imperial preference and, in effect the end of Empire) are lightly disguised but are in fact the terms imposed on a defeated foe by a conquering nation. These are hard truths, and unwelcome to most, especially to those (such as me) who rather like Americans and believe the USA is a considerable and often praiseworthy civilisation.

Then there is the silly old stuff about America’s tardiness in entering the war, compared with our noble courage, even if we went into battle against the might of the Third Reich without a proper army. How romantic. How brave. What tripe.

Oh, honestly. If you enter a war, you expose your people to years of danger, pain, squalor, despair, grief, screaming, blood, fire,  separation, bereavement , privation, loss, destruction and misery. At the end of it, if you lose, they may all be marched off into miserable slavery and your country may cease to exist entirely. Romance and bravado should have no part in such a decision. It should be grimly calculated by the hardest cynics. The risk which Neville Chamberlain took when he declared war on Germany in September 1939 was more or less insane. It appears to me, and I long for a good romp around the archives to check, to have been motivated (as was the meaningless Polish guarantee that spring) mainly by that inadequate man’s wounded vanity. It must count as one of the stupidest decisions taken by any major world leader in the history of our planet.

But that is just a preface to my main point , which is that there are many places between being the outright victor of a war and the outright loser.

Let us take some examples. Poland lost the 1939 war so completely that it was occupied, partitioned and ceased to exist as a sovereign state for the next 50 years. Italy was one of the victors of 1939 war, changed sides, was savaged in the German retaliation, then ended up as a sort of victor. Turkey took no part in the war but became one of the victorious allies at the end of it. Austria, though in fact a part of the Third Reich, was treated afterwards as a victim of Hitler’s aggression. Sweden, which was neutral but which allowed German forces to transit its territory, was treated as a sort of honorary ally at the end.  The USSR, which was an active ally of the Third Reich from Auust 1939 to July 1941, was an honoured and respected member of the victorious United Nations in 1945.

Britain’s case was more complicated yet. As I have said here before, Britain utterly lost the War it joined in September 1939 and was very lucky not to be occupied (and would have been if we had not had the Channel) .  Its main objectives,  the rescue of Poland and the halting of German dominance over Europe, were not only not reached. They were reversed and utterly mocked. And it lost its principal ally, France, in the process.  

In the second wholly different war for European and world domination, which began in the summer of 1941, Britain was the subordinate ally and the pensioner of the USA, our longstanding rival for world power,  and the supplicant , browbeaten ally of the revolting tyranny of the USSR. She had no control over the direction of the war or over the eventual distribution of the spoils. It is just as well that Winston Churchill (who also can’t be blamed for starting it at the wrong time in the wrong place with the wrong allies and over the wrong issue) portrayed the war as one of national survival. For that is what it was, by then. It had no other real purpose left.

One unobservant contributor claims that I am a supporter of Lord Halifax’s position in 1940 (seek negotiation with Hitler from a position of weakness, if possible) , rather than of Churchill’s (fight on at all costs). This sort of assertion is typical of my critics. Not only have I never said this, as it is not my opinion. I have (and I think ‘Churchill Cult’ may turn this up in the index) said specifically that Churchill was right to fight on in 1940. Once you have  voluntarily entered a war, then you must not surrender, as your victorious enemy will need to humiliate you with his terms, and will certainly do so. He would be a fool not to, as he needs to be sure that you will not return to the war later. There is an unwritten convention that those who start wars and then lose them deserve to be humiliated. Far better to go down fighting, if there was any fighting to be done. But I suspect that Churchill had a pretty good idea that there would be no invasion. In a paradoxical way, I wonder if he didn’t rather prefer the idea of a last stand to the gloomy possibility of being forced to acknowledge defeat a few months later. He didn’t know that Hitler would invade the USSR so soon.

The Nazi invasion of Britain is a pervasive fantasy. I used to fall for it myself – the absurd blacklist of people to be rounded up, which is hilariously useless and on examination has been culled from an old copy of ‘Who’s Who’, von Brauchitsch’s vainglorious scheme to strip the country of men of working age, Operation Sealion, etc.  And then there are the fictional attempts to imagine this, notably Len Deighton’s clever and disturbing thriller ‘SS-GB’ , and Kevin Brownlow’s not-very-convincing film ‘It Happened Here’. But it didn’t happen here, and I don’t think it ever would have done. Much more likely would have been a compromise peace in the winter of 1941-2 once it was clear that the USSR had been defeated, in which we would have been stripped of our Navy and a great deal of our national wealth (which happened anyway, later) and forced to deliver British Jews to be murdered (which wouldn’t have happened anyway).  

One reader asks me if I can recommend a historian who can tell him that Hitler never had any serious plan to invade this country. I would reply by asking him to find me one who thinks Hitler *did* have such a serious plan. I do not think any modern history, based upon diligent research in the German archives, supports the idea that it was ever seriously contemplated.

As to whether such an invasion might have been attempted in 1941, with the enormous forces Hitler used against the USSR, I think it could.  The greater part of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet was kept away from the south coast, largely for fear of German air power - and the  German Navy’s Channel dash in February 1942 , in which Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen successfully evaded the might of the RN and of our coastal and air defences, suggests that our ability to control the short sea crossing wasn’t as great as some claim.  We were taken wholly by surprise. Brave as the Navy Swordfish pilots were who actually went into the attack, their antique planes were no match for the German warships. (Bomber Command’s performance on this occasion was pretty slender, I might add).

The reason why there was no 1941 invasion is quite simple. Hitler didn’t want one and wasn’t interested in it.  Britain, now as then, has an exaggerated view of its importance in the Second World War ( exemplified in the boneheaded football chant ‘Two World Wars and one World Cup!, which just about sums up the modern British understanding of foreign policy and warfare). After Dunkirk, we were reliant on American money, American equipment and armaments and American support. Churchill also had to endure the most horrible bullying from Stalin, who insulted him with jeers after the PQ-17 Convoy was ordered to scatter, the worst British naval defeat of all time. Stalin must have specially enjoyed this because of Churchill’s noisy part in the British intervention in the Russian civil war after the Revolution, on the side of the Whites. He must have known how much Churchill loathed being the ally of the Soviet Union.

It is also Stalin’s bullying, I believe, which led to the bombing of German civilians. Some sort of ‘blood price’ was demanded of us, in return for the immense Soviet military losses in the actual battle against the Wehrmacht, the one which actually decided the outcome of the European War. I recommend a swift reading of page 170 of Max Hastings’s ‘Bomber Command’ (Pan Books 2010 edition) for that first-rate military historian’s pithy summary of the politics involved.

Some of my critics just don’t read what I say. I have answered two particular points very thoroughly. The ‘you weren’t there’ one is dealt with by evidence of principled opposition to the bombing*at the time* from Richard Stokes and George Bell, two considerable public figures, neither of them easily dismissed. They were there. They said what I say. Now what do you say? I also note that an opinion poll showed that victims of aerial bombing by German forces were less keen on doing the same to the Germans than were people who had never been bombed. They were there. What do you say to them?

And the ones who say ‘Harris was only doing his job’  or ‘you are so ignorant, didn’t you know the bombing was decided on by Churchill and Lindemann?’ are nitpicking and avoiding the point. Their attacks are answered by any account of Harris himself, his personal enthusiasm for his task, and the fact that we was selected by Portal for it because Portal knew it suited him. The fact that I didn’t go into the details of the Butt Report, or Frederick Lindemann’s desire to bomb civilians, or Henry Tizard’s opposition to it,  doesn’t mean I don’t know about them.

But I do think that military commanders must take some responsibility for the campaigns they lead. That is why we make them Knights and Lords afterwards, give them medals and build statues to them. Their strategy may have been decided by politicians, but they carried it out, and they could not have done so if they did not believe in it. There is masses of evidence that Harris believed very strongly in what he was doing. And, as I have asked before and ask again, if he wasn’t responsible, then why is there a statue at all? If he was, then why shouldn’t I argue that this statue should be removed from its plinth? I don’t think there is a statue of Lindemann.

Oh, and one next-to-last thing. It is repeatedly implied, and on some occasions stated as fact, that the bombing of German civilians was directly necessary to our national survival. It was not. There was no great threat to us at the time of the Harris campaign – apart from the German submarine menace. And it is universally agreed that the resources given to Bomber Command meant that fewer were given to Coastal Command, which was therefore far less effective against the U-boats.  If survival (rather than appeasing Stalin) was the issue, the men and money should have gone to Coastal Command. Or it is said to be essential to our victory. It was not. The Soviet Army would have beaten the Germans anyway .  A campaign against military and strategic targets, more or less as urged by Tizard, would have been a far more effective military use for our resources, if victory was the point.

The last thing is a quotation from a 1999 article I wrote for another newspaper, which a contributor reproduces. Alas, I no longer have the original article ( I have searched for it), or ready access to that paper’s library, but I suspect the article in question was an attack on the then policy of bombing Serbia. I cannot remember whether I had by then changed my mind about Harris (for many years I took the view of my critics, and then I looked into it and found my previous views were insupportable and indefensible, so I changed my mind) and am not at all embarrassed if the rest of the article shows me to have had a different view then.  But I am not sure that it does. Stating the fact that women and children die as a consequence of war is not an argument for deliberately killing those women and children as a matter of policy.

It is all part of the grave demoralisation caused by that awful war, and by the mass self-delusion of our heroic role that people are prepared to defend a policy which would have rightly revolted everyone in Britain in August 1939, before we were corrupted by our national weakness.. Such delusions were excusable in wartime, but not now. When I was a child, I thought as a child, I behaved as a child, I spake as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. And as we have grown up, we no longer need to cling to the propaganda myths that sustained us through the 1940s. Not only do we not need them. We need to shake free of them. It is because we still believe this insupportable stuff that we have allowed ourselves to be taken over by stealth by conquerors and infiltrators far more dangerous and insidious than any we have faced in a thousand years. Proper patriotism requires a clear-eyed view of the world. It is time that, as a nation and a people, we grew up. If we do not, then we will cease to exist.  The age of Biggles and the War Picture Library is over.

Slippery, Slippery, Slippery. After the non-veto comes the non-referendum

British politicians only ever offer national referendums (or referenda, if you prefer) when their own parties are split. Or (as in the case of the AV plebiscite) when the government itself is split. Since the cultural revolutionaries in the two main parties formed their covert alliance in the early 1960s,  this has been useful for EU matters. There is a potent cross-party alliance of Europhiles which makes it impossible for any British person to influence EU matters at general elections.

But from time to time, people notice just what an imposition EU membership is for normal human beings, and so to ease the pressure, Tweedledumb or Tweedledumber offers a referendum, or appears to do so.

Only one of these has ever been held , in 1975, and it is a matter of great pride for me to be able to say that I voted ‘No’ in it (though I was only rescue from my Europhile folly at the very last minute, by the disgraceful behaviour of a newspaper executive, who alerted me to the dishonesty of the pro-marketeers by refusing to publish a rather good story I had written, which was damaging to the pro-market cause, on polling day).

The one on the Euro? Never happened, but ensured the Bair victory in 1997. The one on Lisbon? Never happened, but got david Cameron over a wobbly period of his leadership.  I’m still amazed, by the way, that he got away with this. I thought him so transparently slippery at the time that I didn’t realise that quite large numbers of people had willed themselves into a sort of trace, and somehow believed him to be a real conservative who was keeping his passion secret.

Now, I think, the scales have dropped from almost all eyes. But it is quite amazing how quickly the prime Minister slithered from total opposition to a referendum on Friday night to ‘opening the door’ to one on Saturday night, and who knows what by the end of the week. Tis was after his phoney, utterly incredible and substance-free initiatives on ‘O’-levels and welfare reform.

All these transparent manoeuvres, obvious fakes to anyone with the slightest knowledge of real politics, are *taken seriously* by large parts of the press.  There is an argument for doing so, in that it then puts Mr Cameron on the spot. He is the one who has to offer us that shy, plump smile and say, chuckling as he does so ‘Oh, you didn’t think I really meant that, do you?’.

But people do think he means it.  Just how deep are his reserves of nerve, and how tolerant are Tory loyalists? How long before this festival of falsehood destroys any remains of trust between him and his voters? In justice, it shouldn’t be long.  But there is no justice. And as I have predicted several times here before, a very clever tricks is about to be performed, in which the Coalition will split (a planned event, suiting Tories and Lib Dems alike as they jostle for position (and try to regain lost votes) at the 2014 Euro poll and the general election the following year)  made to look like a genuine row) and the Tories will enter a minority government, noisily pursuing all kinds of patriotic, rigorous policies they’d never dare pursue if they had a majority.

All I can do these days is laugh.

How Not to Change Your Mind – We Still Won’t Face the Ghastly Truth about Bombing Germany

It is a great pity, but it is probably true, that by the time the Churchill cult of ‘The ‘Finest Hour’ and ‘plucky little Britain’ has finally faded from the national mind, it will be too late. These illusions are one of the main reasons why we have sunk not merely from the first to the second, but from the second to the third rank of nations. My distinguished colleague Dan Atkinson, together with the Guardian’s perceptive Larry Elliott, has just published a book ‘Going South – Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014’, illustrating the terrible national peril we are in.

I attack our horrible national blindness over the bombing of Germany because it is the key to this fantasy of Britain as a mighty, moral world power which saved the planet from evil in 1940. That fantasy has led us down many foolish paths, and continues to do so – our moves towards an unhinged intervention in Syria still echo the same deluded view that we can do good with bombs.

I know that by raising this question I will anger many of my readers. Why should I consciously do this? I like my readers. For the most part we share a deep concern for our nation, its merits and its morals. Partly it is because I can do no other. I know that what I say about this is the sober truth. Partly it is because my own unwilling recognition of the truth was one of the key steps along the road to serious thought.

Arguments for the Bombing 1. Germany was supremely evil

Let us examine some of the arguments ranged against me, in many cases by people who have read the headline but not the  article, and are plainly not prepared to think rationally about the subject.  One is ‘we were in confrontation with the most evil regime the world has ever known’ (Glenn Newlands). Indeed we were. But we were also , from the summer of 1941 (before the area bombing began)  *in alliance* with the second most evil (opinions vary as to which was worse, but for the sake of argument I’ll concede that it was this way round) regime the world has ever known, the slavery and murder empire of Josef Stalin.

In that case, the fact that we were fighting *beside* one evil empire *against* another evil empire robs our war of any general moral purpose. This is particularly important when you remember that, by treaty and secret agreement, we then aided Josef Stalin in imposing his blood-dabbled rule upon Bulgaria, Romania, Poland,, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and eastern Germany.  We also confirmed his annexation by invasion of eastern Poland and the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (though we pretended, to salve our consciences to refuse recognition to the Baltic annexations). We also, in a shocking episode, handed back many people who had fought on our side in the war to Stalin, knowing perfectly well that he would murder or imprison them. We knew what we were doing.

The sad truth is that we were fighting – not very competently, in my view – for our national interests, not in a moral crusade. We had been perfectly happy to maintain good relations with Hitler’s Germany from the beginning of National Socialist rule in 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939 (a period slightly longer than the war itself). We made major treaties with the Hitler government, notably the Anglo-German naval treaty. We continued these relations after it became clear that the Hitler government was intent on cruel and bloody persecution of German Jews (though the policy of extermination did not begin until after the war and may, rather horrifyingly have been a by-product of the war). The fantasy that we went to war to save the Jews, or because we didn’t like Hitler’s dictatorship is just that, a fantasy.  We never bombed the death camps or the railways leading to them, though we knew where they were,  and we were reluctant to believe the truth about them after very brave men risked their all to get the information to us. We went to war with Germany because Germany invaded Poland,  to which we had promised aid in the event of war. This, as discussed here before, was an act of amazing diplomatic incompetence and dishonesty. When it came to it, we did nothing to help Poland at all, except declare war on Germany without having the means to wage it.

And therein lies the problem. Because of our vainglorious declaration of a war we couldn’t fight in September 1939, and because of France’s equally shameful unpreparedness, mixed with bombast, we found ourselves on the losing side of a swift and humiliating conflict in May 1940.  France was beaten and occupied, and ceased at that moment, to be a great power, forever. We were beaten,  and bankrupt into the bargain, but not occupied, and also ceased at that moment to be a great power, forever. Some of us have yet to realise this.

Which leads me to…

Arguments for the Bombing 2. It was the only way we could strike at Germany

This is partly true. We certainly couldn’t fight Germany in the only way that actually wins wars, with troops and tanks on the soil of Europe.  Our tiny, ill-equipped army having been expelled from the European continent (how did we ever imagine we could confront Germany, with its huge, well-trained, and well-equipped conscript army, with this little force, which was still training with broomsticks as late as 1939 because it hadn’t enough rifles?), we simply couldn’t engage with the main body of the enemy. We like to exaggerate our importance to Germany at this stage of the war, with fantasies about a planned German invasion, an idea which never really left the drawing board. I have said it before, and will say it again. There is no evidence that Hitler ever seriously contemplated an invasion of this country, or was interested in such a thing.  He was baffled to find us fighting him,  as he couldn’t see why we would do such an odd, self-defeating thing. What did we care who ruled in Danzig or Prague? (As we proved during the Soviet empire, we didn’t care at all. From 1945 till 1989 these cities and many others lived under the most appalling secret-police terror and despotism, and we never lifted a finger to help them).

If he had wished to invade us, then he would have done so in 1941, by which time he had built up a war machine of huge size.  Does anyone seriously imagine that we could have resisted the forces which he threw instead at the USSR? But his interest was elsewhere, in the East. Had he won in the East, then I suspect we would have been forced to make peace. One shudders to think what sort of peace that might have been (and to think how very close we came to it). But if you declare war on someone, and you lose, then you are much worse off than if you had not declared war in the first place. Actually, if we (and France)  had never declared war on Hitler in 1939, and never made our worthless guarantees to Poland, we would have been much more of a restraint on (and danger to) Hitler. Has anyone stopped to imagine what might have happened if Hitler had got Danzig by threats instead of by war in the summer of 1939? It is a very interesting speculation, especially if you can read a map.

But the fact that we could not meet his army in the field did not mean that we were reduced to deliberately burning women and children to death in their homes. Bizarrely, supporters of Harris often cite the Butt report, which showed that our initial night bombing raids on Germany were wholly useless. This was because we couldn’t see what we were doing, and hardly ever hit the target.

Now, there are several possible responses to this. One of them might be to develop long-range fighters and heavily armoured bombers (as the Americans did) so as to bomb German military and industrial targets accurately by day.  A.C. Grayling’s unanswerable book on this subject ‘Among the Dead Cities’ points out that this sort of bombing would have diverted just as much strength away from the eastern front as the bombing of civilians. It also points out that it had a much more rapid and definite effect on German war capacity than killing civilians ever did.

The sad truth is that killing civilians was easier.  You set fire to a huge city, and the flames showed your bombers the way to drop more bombs on it.
And nobody saw the writhing, dying humans, or heard their screams.

Which brings me to

Arguments for the Bombing 3. You weren’t there at the time. We had to hit back. They deserved it.

I will quote Mr Newlands here again : ’You are terribly naive if you think the German population was anti-Hitler. Just watch the newsreels of his triumphant return to Berlin following the fall of France:-fanatical crowds strewing garlands of flowers before his Mercedes car and the SS Leibstandarte "Adolf Hitler" having to pick up swooning women!! The population only started to doubt Hitler when they looked at the face of defeat.’
Well, pardon me, but who is ‘naïve’ here? Mr Newlands apparently believes Dr Goebbels’s own propaganda films to be the uncomplicated truth. I prefer to look elsewhere. How do we read the minds of millions of Germans living in a secret police terror state? Does Mr Newlands know how? No doubt in such a state he would have been first into the street to stand against the Gestapo, writing angry letters to the Voelkischer Beobachter to complain about Mr Hitler’s policies. Or perhaps not.  Here is what we do know:

In the last free elections in Weimar Germany, on 5th March 1933, the National Socialists won 17,277,180 votes (43.91%). The Social Democrats,   divided from the Communist Party largely because of Stalin’s crazed policy of treating the Social Democrats as the main enemy, scored 7,516,243 votes (20.43%) and the Communists 4,848,058 (16.86%)

So the combined Social Democrat and Communist vote (about as anti-Hitler as you could get) was 12,364,301 ,  a percentage of more than 37%. Then there were the Roman Catholic Centre Party ( 4,424,905, 11.25%). I’ll leave out Hugenberg’s DNVP ( another three million, and the BVP, with just over a million) to bend over backwards and accept that perhaps these parties weren’t unsympathetic to Hitler at that time.

Note that these votes were cast *after*  Hitler had become Chancellor, and when the National Socialists had already begun to unleash the Brownshirt terror on the streets, smashing the offices and newspapers of their opponents, and physically attacking and killing individual opponents, or cramming them into lawless secret prisons.  Many had already fled abroad before the poll. Not all could.

It took a lot of courage to stand up against that, and I wonder how many of those who are happy to approve (with much swagger and machismo about ‘total war’ and ‘guts’) of civilian Germans being burned to death in their name,  would have shown the bravery against Hitler that many Germans did in those horrible times.

Even assuming that every one of those National Socialist voters truly willed the ends their leader sought, and bore direct guilt for them, rather than voting (as many modern Tory and Labour supporters do) out of naïve emotional spasms,   and so in this strange calculus deserved to be burned to death in their homes, with their children,  how could Arthur Harris’s notoriously inaccurate bomber squadrons be sure that they were only targeting the 17,277,180?

Difficult, I should have thought. How would my critics like it if (say) a government they didn’t vote for bombed Iran, and Iran then killed them or their families with retaliatory missile strikes on British cities, and then said in its defence  ‘ they asked for it!’ . And that’s an example of people in a democracy being killed on the pretext that their government is bad. In National Socialist Germany, dissent from the government led to intimidation, murder, imprisonment and death.

Anyway, it is not disputed that  a large number of those who died from our bombs were women and children, including babies. What sort of moral decay does one have to undergo to find this acceptable?

A Mr Richard Jan more or less shouts ‘ All those killed by Nazi bombing and doodlebugs in the UK not to mention the U-boats?? THAT’S OK THEN – the only way to defeat the Nazis was total war – we had the wherewithal to conduct total war and the gust to carry it out – the memorial to Sir Arthur Harris is a fitting tribute to a man who was dedicated to defeating our enemy – Mr Hitchens wants to win but without the necessary ruthlessness, rather pathetic’.

Well, I am actually far more ruthless than Mr Jan. That is why I tend to think we entered the war far too early, guided by policies which were sentimental and emotional rather than rational and cool. And for suggesting that, like the sensible USA, governed by that ruthless cynic Franklin D. Roosevelt,  we should have lingered on the edge of war waiting for the main participants (Germany and the USSR)  to tear each other’s guts out, I am accused of all kinds of rubbish from cowardice to being some sort of covert Hitler sympathiser.

Also I do not think that the German bombing of British cities was ‘OK THEN’.  I think it was a morally disgusting form of warfare.  That is why I cannot support it when we did it, either. What exactly is Mr Jan saying? He appears to be having it both ways. If bombing civilians is right, then why is he so angry about ours being bombed by the Luftwaffe. If it is wrong, then why isn’t it wrong when we do it?

I am more equivocal about submarine warfare. After all, the Royal Navy had and used its own submarines to torpedo enemy ships (and very effective they were in denying supplies to Rommel). This is very nasty but seems to me to be within the borders of legitimate warfare if it is directed at ships carrying troops or warlike supplies, or even goods necessary for the enemy’s economy. I am not so sure about the blockade (which as Harris himself pointed out killed many more Germans in 1914-18 than his bombs did in 1939-45), but that is a subject for another debate. All these things, of course, are arguments against war in general, a horrible thing to be avoided at almost all costs and only to be entered into when absolutely unavoidable for national survival.

Mr Jan also speaks of having the wherewithal to conduct total war, and the guts to carry it out. I don’t dispute the guts, either of Harris ( an undoubtedly brave man with a fine war record) or of the aircrews (as I make clear in the article). But the wherewithal? We certainly didn’t have the wherewithal for total war when we , of our own free will declared war on Germany in September 1939. Wouldn’t it perhaps have been wiser to wait until we did?

The army was tiny and ill-equipped. Much of the air force was still flying biplanes. Our bomber force was pitifully ill-equipped and had very poor tactics, a truth which led to horrible losses for no gain during the Battle of France. Our fighters turned out to be sufficient, but only just. Our navy, as my father could have told you, was obsolescent, dependent on elderly ships or ones designed by the Treasury (or by diplomats) to save money (under cuts made by…Winston Churchill) ,  to keep them cheap or to keep them within the provisions of the Washington naval treaty.

That’s why, in the following few years we would be expelled from the continent at Dunkirk, in one of our greatest national military disasters (still somehow spun as a sort of victory) , almost defeated in North Africa, almost starved to death by U-boat warfare, and utterly destroyed in the most hideous fashion in the far East at Singapore. I’ll forget Greece and Crete for now, but remind me to mention them if this bragging tone returns.

The ‘total war’ of which Mr Jan speaks did not get going until after the main forces of Germany were engaged in a death-struggle with the main forces of the USSR. Readers here will know that I am not in any way an apologist for Stalin. That I why it is necessary, though difficult,  for me to admit unequivocally that it was the Soviet armies which defeated Hitler. They would have done so if we had not bombed German civilians in their homes. They might have done so more quickly if we had instead bombed oil refineries, railway marshalling yards and chemical works.   *If The Soviet Union had been defeated by Hitler in summer 1941 then our surrender would have followed*.  I do not think this grim fact is widely enough realised, though I think it safe to say that every Jewish refugee in Britain, whose personal fate was rather intimately linked with the matter, did not breathe easy until Hitler lost at Stalingrad. It is debatable as to whether the USA would have done very much for us if we had continued to stand alone after a Soviet defeat. It is hard to see how D-day could have been mounted if Germany had faced no major foe to the east. 

We, having no army capable of getting ashore on the continent until 1944 (and then only in alliance with the USA and Canada) could not engage in ‘total war’ but in a curious form of half-war. There were several ways in which we could have fought that war. We chose, mainly because it was easier than the alternatives, to bomb civilians in their homes. There was a secret high-level debate about this, in which many brave and intelligent people argued hard against the plan. I might add, since Mr Jan mentions U-boats, that the bombing of German civilians took badly-needed resources away from Coastal Command, which has as a result much less effective against German submarines than it ought to have been.

A few figures here. As far as I can discover, German bombing of Britain killed around 60,000 civilians and badly injured 87,000 more. For comparison, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reckoned that allied bombs (mainly British) killed 305,000 German civilians and injured (I do not know how badly) 780,000.

Bomber Command lost 7,700 aircraft and 55,000 men. Much of its heaviest bombing took place after the war was plainly won ( Between January and April 1945 it dropped 181,000 tons of bombs on Germany.

Mr Durand argues that I am (once again ) ‘naïve’ for assuming that Arthur Harris had any voluntary role in the campaign. Well, if he was just an obedient automaton without any part in the matter, why put up a statue to him? As it is, and  in this and in all things to do with this subject I must urge all who are interested to obtain and read A.C. Grayling’s concise and powerful book ‘Among the Dead Cities’  ( and an earlier posting on this can be found here). Grayling shows that Lord Portal picked Harris for the job, for his attitudes and qualities. Harris was a considerable person, an individual of great personal force and decisive views, and he was wholly committed to the policy which he pursued. Harris was (as I say in the article) impatient with Churchill for not acknowledging the true purpose of the raids. Perhaps that’s why he never got a peerage. He was too keen.



Arguments for the Bombing 4. You’d have sung a different tune at the time

By the nature of things I cannot say for certain how I would have behaved in such times. I was not there. The person who is me could not have been there. But I have come to admire those who have swum against the stream at any time, and I have swum against one or two small streams in my life. So I can only hope that if a similar situation arises in my lifetime, I will behave as a just man should behave.

Some people did. My favourite (and the one who will give the noisy jingoes the most difficulty) is the splendidly named Sir Richard Rapier Stokes MC. Most readers will know that the MC is not a medal awarded to pacifist milksops ( I believe he won it twice). He was also a successful businessman and a Labour Member of Parliament, which covers all bases. It was in that role, as Labour MP for Ipswich, that he criticised the area bombing policy in Parliament. One of his few allies was the equally remarkable George Bell, Bishop of Chichester and one of the most impressive clergymen to grace the Church of England in modern times (a veteran priest of my acquaintance still remembers meeting him, and being struck by the power of his presence) .

I might insert here a small detail, for those who say that retaliation was necessary for morale.

Grayling, (on page 186 of the paperback) cites an opinion poll published in the News Chronicle of 2nd May 1941. It asked ‘Would you approve or disapprove if the RAF adopted a policy of bombing the civilian population of Germany?’ .

In heavily bombed areas , 47% disapproved of such reprisals, and 45 % approved. In areas that had as yet escaped bombing76% approved.
I would say again that those who are keenest on this form of warfare are often (though not always) those who cannot imagine what it is like, or who have not been on the receiving end of this filthy, maddening, indiscriminate thing. 

I will leave it at that for the moment. I do not think my critics are trying very hard to argue the actual facts of the matter. I said it was difficult to argue this question now, and I knew it would be. But the opening of the Bomber Command monument seemed a good time to start.  I would be grateful if my critics would assume my motives were as patriotic as theirs.

I’ll turn to the issue of the mythical EU referendum later.