Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 309

The heroes of Bomber Command deserve their memorial... unlike the butcher who led them

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

Now that we have a memorial at last to the thousands of men who flew and died in Bomber Command, can we please cart away the ugly statue of that unpleasant man Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, GCB, OBE, AFC?

I am lost in admiration for those crews. I do not know how, night after night, they left all that was dear to them, climbed into a cramped and freezing death-trap and set off into the dark. Nearly half of them would die horribly, and they knew it.

The death rate was an appalling 44 per cent – 55,573 of the very best, brightest and bravest young men in Britain, the Commonwealth and the Allied countries gone for ever, and our ill-led, sloppy and declining country has felt their loss every day since. Heaven knows it is time their sacrifice, and the equal bravery of those who survived, was marked. A medal would be nice, too.

But Harris deserves no such commemoration. No doubt he had been brave in his time,  and his honesty must be commended. But not since the futile carnage of the Somme in 1916 had any British military commander been so wasteful of young life, broken so many homes, destroyed so many futures, turned so many living, laughing human beings into corpses.

The football crowds who crudely chant his name to tease modern Germans call him ‘Bomber Harris’. His aircrews had another name for him. To them, he was ‘Butcher Harris’ because he was so ready to sacrifice their lives.

And for what? The bomber boys did what they believed was their duty and asked few questions. They had enough to worry about, not knowing if they would live until morning. They hoped that the War Cabinet and the Air Marshals knew what they were doing.

Arthur Harris had no such excuse. Nor did the architects of the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes. That, by the way, is what we did. As Harris himself said, the aim of his offensive should be unambiguously described as ‘the destruction of the German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany’.

To remove all doubt (and Harris was annoyed that Winston Churchill wouldn’t admit the truth in public), it was aimed at ‘the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale at home and on the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing’. He stated ‘these are not by-products of attempts to hit factories’.

Harris actively preferred this form of warfare to the more difficult but immensely more militarily effective targeting of oil refineries, railway marshalling yards and warlike installations which many experts believe would have been far more damaging to Hitler, and would have drawn away just as many guns and planes from the Russian front (the lame excuse for the bombing of homes).

To this day, few British people know what we actually did to Germany. We know of and are rightly angered by the Luftwaffe attack on Coventry and by the London Blitz. But these wretched events were tiny compared with the ruin we inflicted on Germany.

And if we find Coventry and the Blitz outrageous, as we should, how can that justify doing the same thing to German civilians?

The victims included women and small children and were concentrated in working-class areas where most people had never voted for Hitler, so it’s hard to say ‘they asked for it’.

It is very difficult to bear  descriptions of what happened to civilians – not just in Hamburg and Dresden but in dozens of lesser cities. Do not read them unless you have a strong stomach.

I don’t call this a ‘war crime’ because the phrase is more  or less meaningless. As those who have actually fought in wars know, all war is crime, mixed with hell. The question is whether it can possibly be justified. Nor do I (as some liars will immediately claim) in any way compare it with the crimes of the Germans against the Jews. The two are not remotely equivalent and anyone who says so is a fool and a scoundrel.

 BUT nobody has ever found a way to make two wrongs make a right. And after long thought and much study, I have come to the unhappy conclusion that the bombing policy was wrong. One day, when the last of those who risked their lives in the 1939-45 war are no longer with us, this country may begin to have a grown-up discussion about that war.

Actually, I suspect that most of the veterans are far less sentimental than my blessed generation, who never saw war face to face.

My late father had to endure the grisly, frozen horrors of the Russian convoys. He was full of scorn for the politicians who sent him there, disliked especially the alliance with Stalin’s criminal tyranny, shuddered at the recollection of those Arctic seas and would sometimes murmur meaningfully: ‘Yes, we won the war .  .  . or did we?’

Or did we? I find it hard to see what we got out of our victory. Do we rule the waves? Are we  a great power? Do we control our borders, or our destiny? Is this tatty multicultural theme park a land in any way fit for the brave men who saved it?

Here’s a puzzle. On the side of the Bomber Command monument is carved a list of the donors who made it possible. Among them is the name of a man who made his fortune from pornography, and who lacks the modesty to keep his donation a secret.

When the Lancaster crews told themselves that they were risking their lives for freedom, was that the sort of freedom they were thinking of?

Sinn Fein thrives on hate, not handshakes

When the Queen went to Dublin last year, we in Britain did not pay enough attention. It was in many ways the best thing she  ever did. In a series of brave and difficult moments, she sought true reconciliation between decent British people and decent Irish people, who should never have been enemies in the first place.

It was a true transformation. Almost all Ireland was moved and pleased. Only the fanatics of Sinn Fein nursed their ancient grudge. Hate is what keeps them warm.  They used violence because they preferred it, and they still do. You cannot reconcile with people who still hate you. That is why the Dublin visit was right, and the handshake with Martin McGuinness was wrong.

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Now it’s recognised that wasps and bees kill more people in Britain than terrorists do, can we recover  a sense of proportion about the terror threat and stop using it as a pretext for an assault on freedom?

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The BBC says it got ‘over-excited’ about the Arab Spring and boss Mark Thompson admits it was Left-wing in the Thatcher era.

Why must these confessions be limited to the past? It’s over-excited about Syria now, and institutionally Left-wing all the time.

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A Terrible Duty is Done – or a Grave Mistake is Made? The Queen and Mr McGuinness

I have had the pleasure of refusing to shake the hand of Gerry Adams, but I have never had the chance to snub his fellow Godfather, Martin McGuinness. I spent several weeks following Mr Adams around North America in the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton gave him a visa to come and make propaganda (and raise funds). We did not become friends.

The correspondent who demanded evidence of American support for the IRA cause (can anyone be so naïve as to doubt it?) surely must grasp that this act alone was decisive. In the Cold War years, the Anglo-American alliance was still too important for any US President openly to sympathise with the IRA, though Ronald Reagan had more than one frosty conversation with Margaret Thatcher on the subject, and I have always assumed that the ghastly and mistaken Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985 resulted at least partly from American pressure. Though the EU was by then also beginning to stick its oar into Anglo-Irish relations.

But the Clinton intervention was something entirely new. It was done in direct and open defiance of the wishes of the British government, and on many occasions steps were taken behind Britain’s back. Britain’s vast and supposedly well-connected Embassy on the grandest stretch of Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC was several times utterly wrong-footed, whereas Dublin’s tiny mission further down the hill was always on top of the case.

My friend Conor O’Clery, then the Washington correspondent of the Irish Times, wrote an excellent book on the affair ‘the Greening of the White House’, which is a manual in miniature of American politics as it really happens, and describes the pressures and alliances that put Bill Clinton at the side of Sinn Fein and the IRA.

At the heart of this was( and is) the enormous importance of the Irish-American vote, and of Irish-American money, in President elections. The Irish vote is important in several of the states with the biggest electoral college votes, notably New York, Massachusetts, California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, and is not unimportant in Ohio either. Nor is it some sort of hick, backwoods section of the population. Irish America is now very well-represented in business, and has lots of money to contribute to Presidential and Congressional campaigns.

Clinton’s big problem in 1992, was that Reagan Republicanism had stolen a lot of Roman Catholic working class votes from the Democrats. The issue of abortion had been very important in alienating them from the Democrats. He realised, being an astute campaigner, that he could regain many of these votes (without annoying the pro-abortion voters who were also essential to his victory)  if he pledged to advance the Irish Republican cause. And so he did. He didn’t, as far as anyone could tell, care very much about it at the time, or known very much about it. It wasn’t a big deal in Arkansas.

And he largely forgot his pledge until, after his Party suffered very bad mid-term reverses in November 1992, Irish America came to him and said , more ior elss ‘We helped you; now you help us’.

Soon after that Mr Adams was laundered from terrorist Godfather into Man of Peace. The New York Times, the Izvestia of America’s liberal ruling class,  started publishing adulatory drivel about him, and  he went about comparing himself with the (peaceful) Black Civil Rights movement.

In fact ( I think this was in Detroit) he actually appeared alongside the adored and revered Civil Rights campaigner Rosa Parks, who had somehow been persuaded to share a platform with him. I am rather proud that I asked him how he, an apologist for bloody violence, dared to so much as sit next to Rosa Parks.

He turned angrily towards me, and snapped ‘Who said that>?!’

I was happy to identify myself, and to repeat ti for the cameras, of the local TV, who had missed it the first time.

From then on, Mr Adams and I had a sort of relationship as his circus criss-crossed the USA. We only met in private and face to face once, in a Canadian TV studio green room in Toronto, and he made it very plain that he was displeased with my behaviour. It was a few months later when he came to open a Sinn Fein office in Washington DC, that he called for me to be ‘decommissioned’.

This followed what is in many ways my favourite question to him. He had said that the new Sinn Fein office would not be a mere bureau.  It would be a Sinn Fein Embassy in the American capital.

In that case, I enquired sweetly, would it be having a military attaché?

There was a short silence, followed by ‘I think it’s time you were decommissioned, Peter’.

Some people get the odd  idea that, because I’m against Sinn Fein and the IRA, I am in some way  a sympathiser of the ‘Loyalist’ murder gangs. On the contrary, I refused to shake hands with them, too, when I was introduced to them at a very strange occasion in Washington DC. I despise them. Or they think that I’m some kind of crude anti-Irish person. This is also ludicrously false.

Far too many people assume that there are only two positions in any argument – that if you loathe the Tories you must be a Labour supporter, that if you’re against the Iraq war you must be a pacifist, that if you think Britain’s conduct of World War Two was badly misjudged, you must be a Hitler sympathiser, that if you’re not an atheist you must be Elmer Gantry,  and so on.

It’s simply not true.

I have, As it happens, a great deal of sympathy for the Irish national cause. No proper British patriot could be unmoved by another people’s desire for the independence that we have (or rather, used to have). No traveller in Ireland could fail to grasp the strong bonds of patriotism , mingles with love of landscape, poetry and history, that are so similar to our own.  No reader of Irish history could fail to eb shocked and ashamed by many of the things done to Irish men and women by the English and the Scots.

But my ability to understand the patriotic feelings of others also means that I have a great deal of sympathy for the Irish unionists.  They are Irish too. And here for many years has been the problem for any thinking person. How can these two movements be reconciled on the island of Ireland?  I for one thought and still think that direct rule of the six counties of Northern Ireland from London was the best and most just solution, so that neither group could ever lord it over the other. This also suits the Republic, which has been a very successful state more or less since the end of the Civil War, but really does not need to take charge of a disgruntled, resentful Unionist minority in the North.

Sinn Fein’s version of Irish nationalism is not the only one available. There are other more thoughtful and rational traditions  - which I admit were dealt a very bad blow by Britain’s ham-handed response to the 1916 Easter Rising, and especially the executions of its leaders, which alienated so many Irish people who otherwise felt goodwill towards England. That led on to the frightfulness of the War of Independence, and the gross behaviour of the auxiliaries and the Black and Tans.

It was that horrible and destructive period for which the Queen so wonderfully sought to atone in Dublin in May last year. As I watched that visit on television, I began to wish very much that I had gone to see it in person, as it was plainly one of the great events of my lifetime. British people are still largely unaware of the enormous effect that it had on decent people of goodwill in Ireland ( I exclude from that category the fanatical supporters of Sinn Fein, who didn’t like it much) .  British people aren’t in general as interested in Ireland as they should be ( and I suppose I owe my escape from that uninterest and ignorance to Gerry Adams , who at least compelled me to learn in detail what I was arguing against).

Out of that visit grew two idea, both still very tender plants, but both of which may in time become great trees,  that all Irish people have more in common with each other than they do with anyone else, and that the barriers which separate them are now largely in the mind; and the other idea, that the four peoples of the British isles have far more in common with each other than they do with any other peoples or nations.

That is why, even though I balked at some of the things Her Majesty did in Dublin, I recognised that it was precisely *because* I balked at them that they were so valuable. They were difficult, hard to swallow, going further than most had expected she would. Well, exactly. They cost her, and Britain, something, as all decent gestures of reconciliation should.

That was a duty, that rebuilt a broken bridge between the good people of both countries. Shaking hands with Martin McGuinness was, alas, a gesture of appeasement towards an evil movement, which does not truly speak for Ireland and which should be frozen out of public discourse by the contempt of all.

Close the Coalhouse Door – Again. A Golden Age for Left-wingers

 

At the back end of the 1960s, student Marxists (and I was then one of them)  were trying to make friends with what they (or we) called ‘The Workers’. This mythical social force was, to us, an undifferentiated mass of muscular proletarians who could be persuaded to overthrow the capitalist state and put us in power.  From time to time, actual contact would be made. When it was, we found out that ‘the workers’ were in fact individual human beings, not a faceless class, and that, while they were often touched and even impressed by our concern for their well-being, they had real lives of their own to lead, and real concerns not to be solved by our stupid revolution. They often disappointed us, too by turning out to have patriotic and religious opinions that, if our theories were right, they should not have had.

Even so, there was something tremendously moving and romantic about the great heroic industries that still existed then, especially coal-mining with the act of going to work a daily exercise of courage.  The mighty bond of shared adversity held pitmen and their families together, and left outsiders feeling not merely excluded, but cheated of an emotional richness and  a solidarity they could never hope to feel in their blander, safer lives.  It’s a little like the shared adversity, and the shared warmth, of wartime. One of my most treasured memories is of the day I went down a pit for the first and only time, crawling on hands and knees through an 18-inch seam a mile underground, and relying utterly on the competence and support of the men I was with. Thanks to them, and not to me, I never felt a moment’s real fear.

But that would come some time after I had seen Alan Plater’s play ‘Close the Coalhouse Door’, which I think must have been in my last term at York University in the summer of 1973. I travelled up to Newcastle to see it (John Woodvine, one of the stars of the big TV police drama of the day,  Z-cars, headed the cast). It must have been a revival even then, as the play was first staged in 1968.  It was a summer evening after final exams were over,  and I was with some equally revolutionary companions. I remember that, after the train fare and the theatre tickets,  we had enough cash left for just one half-pint of beer each in the interval. Students were wonderfully well-off in those days, but we didn’t have credit or debit cards, or loans of any kind, and you could only spend what you had, which I’m inclined to think is a good system.

Anyway, I enjoyed Plater’s dialogue and Alex Glasgow’s memorable agitprop songs (Glasgow was a genius at pithy revolutionary rhymes – I still remember one of them called ‘We want more pay’ about the 1972 miners’ claim, almost word for word) and we came back on the train in a kind of euphoria. Perhaps the workers really were on our side.

Piffle, as it turned out, but the thing lingered in my memory as part of a mis-spent but instructive youth So when it was revived this summer in my local theatre. I went back to see it again. And I found that it is not I, but the Left, who suffer from belief in a golden age.

The play has had to be pretty powerfully re-engineered in the intervening 40 years . I wish I could see a copy of the 1973 script, to check my memory. In some ways the best scene in the new version is the opening one, where the audience are cleverly taken out of the post-Thatcher present day into a pre-Maggie Garden of Eden in which there are actual miners, living in terraced houses in pit villages, under the shadow of the winding gear.

Some of the rest of it I recalled as if it were yesterday. But was there so much football in the original? And were there any f-words, or a fight? Maybe the fight, but I very much doubt the f-words. The inclusion of the phrase ‘all fur coats and no knickers’ was pretty shocking in provincial Tyneside, less than ten years after the abolition of stage censorship.  And the proto-feminism? Was that in there 40 years ago? Left-wing revolutionaries in the early 70s weren’t, as I recall, very interested in the women’s movement. Rather the contrary, quite often.

But at the end of it there’s a curious moment where the actors speak at some length of an alternative history of the past four decades, in which there was no Thatcher, no collapse of manufacturing industry, no privatisation, and the cottage cosiness of the pre-1979 world somehow survives, along with plenty of socialist nobility.

Alas, I do not think this was the alternative. The gentler, poorer but kinder Britain that seemed so inviolable and settled  in 1973 was already finished by then. The giant social changes of the 1960s were working through the system – comprehensive education, the huge expansion of the teaching profession, the growth of social work as a profession, the liberalisation of divorce, the revolutionising of the benefits system, the breakdown of taboos on sex, bad language and pornography, the abandonment of the principle of punishment in the justice system had already come about in the Wilson years . These changes mattered, and the altered the way people lived, though it wouldn’t become clear till the early 1980s just how much this was so.

The introduction of colour TV made that medium a hundred times more powerful (and conformist) than it had been before, thanks to the ‘ETBPLG’ effect (‘Even the Bad Programmes Look Good’).

And beneath all, that slow-motion earthquake, British membership of the European Community (as it then was) was compelling changes that nobody wanted or expected, and exposing our economy to forces from which it had until then been shielded. I remember, round about 1972, hearing a  conversation between two in-the-know journalists on the fringe of the revolutionary movement in which one was saying to the other that the political classes knew that membership of the ‘Common Market’ would have a devastating effect on our way of life, but that they had thought it better to keep quiet about it, as the alternative was far worse. And then there was the 1973 Arab-Israel war, and the colossal oil shock which followed, the moment, which, for me, ended the sunny carefree atmosphere which had somehow persisted in this country since the mid-1960s.

Much of what happened under Maggie (over-rated by her admirers and her detractors in almost equal measure) would have happened anyway, by my guess.

It is all very well blaming Ted Heath or Margaret Thatcher , or Rupert Murdoch (or Arthur Scargill, for that matter). Each played their individual parts in the transformation. But far more influential than any of them was old Roy Jenkins, who remains the most influential British politician of the age, despite never having held the supreme office ( and he, as you’d never have guessed from meeting or hearing him, was the son of a miner, a strike leader imprisoned during the general Strike of 1926. Close the Coalhouse Door, indeed).

US President Threatens British Tory Leader – Nobody Knows or Cares. And some other things

Some days ago I mentioned that Alastair Campbell’s diaries contained two really interesting pieces of information. I dealt with the first, which was the awkward fact (awkward, anyway, for tribal Tories whose own leaders can’t be trusted with national independence) that Gordon Brown  and Ed Balls  (against whom tribal Tories harbour a raging, irrational hatred that drives facts and logic from their minds, and is probably explained by a deep need to forget that they once voted New Labour, and an even deeper need to hide from themselves the horrible truth about Mr Slippery) saved Sterling from Anthony Blair (who, by the way,  is  now loose once again,  re-entering British politics and musing on the eventual abolition of the Pound as if the events of the last two years had never happened).

What was the second interesting thing? It was this, that on the eve of the Iraq adventure, George W. Bush got it into his head  (mistakenly, as it happened) that the Tory party might use the Commons vote on war to destroy Anthony Blair. And, having reached this wrong conclusion, he then made a Corleone-style threat which ought to make any free-born Briton’s blood either boil, or run cold – you choose which.

Here it is, extracted from a Mail on Sunday story, the only paper that made a substantial reference to it, I think:    

‘George Bush threatened to topple former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith if he failed to back Tony Blair over the Iraq War, Alastair Campbell has claimed.

Mr Campbell, who was No  10’s director of communications at the time, said the US President made the extraordinary threat during frantic diplomatic exchanges in the final hours before war in March 2003….

‘…Mr Campbell’s account of the run-up to war, contained in the final volume of his Downing Street diaries, reveals the fears in Mr Blair’s own Cabinet that Britain was being ‘bumped’ into war by a US administration that was determined to bypass the United Nations.  

He details an exchange on March 12 in which Mr Blair told Mr Bush that he was struggling to win political support for the war and ‘there was a danger the Tories would see this as their chance to get rid of him’.

Mr Campbell wrote: ‘Bush said they would make it clear to the Tories that if they moved to get rid of TB “we will get rid of them.” ’

Mr Campbell did not explain how an American President would contrive to remove a British Opposition leader.

He also claimed that Mr Bush misnamed Mr Duncan Smith, writing: ‘He said he wouldn’t speak to “Iain Duncan Baker” himself – TB didn’t correct him – “but he’ll know my message.” ’

‘He’ll know my message’, has the ring of ‘I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse’, to me. Of course the event has its deeply comic side.  Firstly, it would be rather hard for the President to get a message to someone whose name he couldn’t even get right. One shudders to think of some innocent businessman in Tooting called Duncan Baker waking with a shudder to find a horse’s head bleeding in his bed, with a baffling message saying  ‘You leave my friend Andrew Blair alone’ stapled to its ear.

It is hard to think of two more inept politicians than George W. Bush and The Quiet Man (who once noisily heckled me during BBC ‘Question Time) .  Though IDS is actually quite likeable, and has some sterling qualities, he was the victim of circumstance,  who became leader of the Tory Party in a terrible year because everyone else was too cunning to take the impossible job. He was then more or less annihilated by a horrendous alliance of media bullies and Tory ‘modernisers’ in an episode that was painful to watch, which was one of the most significant moments in modern British politics and which is discussed in detail in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’.

I have never met President Bush the Second. But I know people who have, and I struggle to believe the claims by his defenders that deep down he was brighter and more thoughtful than he appeared. He was as bad as he looked.

But isn’t the fact that he offered to destroy a party leader in a supposedly independent (and friendly) country, to protect his friend in Downing Street rather a big story? The MoS thought so, but it is widely unknown, like many other interesting events and facts. Once again, the strange nature of what is, and what is not, news is exposed. His really happened, which is more than can be said of all the current Tory policy initiatives from 'O' levels to Welfare Reform. They will never happen.

Personally, it fits very well with my own experience of the true nature of the Anglo-American Unspecial Relationship, which I have discussed here in the past, in the light of Bill Clinton’s decision to back the provisional IRA against the British government. Un unwise official from the West Wing told me, without meaning to, that the White House regarded Britain as fundamentally no different from Serbia.

This is why I shudder at US behaviour in Syria. It is, once you have stripped away the rhetoric,  interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. And if, one day, our sovereign nation, Britain,  asserted its independence, might we, too find ourselves under attack first from international interventionist TV stations telling lies about us,  then from a rabble of ‘activists’ who had mysteriously acquired arms and whose faults would be ignored or overlooked, then from ‘NATO’ airpower and special forces, intervening to ‘protect’ these ‘activists’ from the ‘repression’ of our government, which would be referred to by everyone as a ‘regime’? A ’No Fly Zone’ over East Anglia, to protect pro-EU ‘activists’ , anyone?

In a way it has already happened in miniature in Northern Ireland. Most Americans (and many continental Europeans)  believed propaganda lies about what was happening there. The USA gave its backing to the ‘activists’ of the IRA. And we surrendered to pressure, stopped ‘killing our own people’ , as the British Army’s actions against the IRA would no doubt nowadays be described. Then we withdrew from the disputed territory (though most people haven’t yet realised that this is what has happened).  In a way we were lucky that 24-hour TV and liberal interventionism were in their infancy in the 1980s, or NATO might have bombed London in support of the IRA. We would also never have been able to retake the Falklands.

Back to this week. It is amazing that people cannot cope with the simple fact of the rule of law. If you have the rule of law, then the boundaries of taxation will be set by law. And that means that there will inevitably be ways of reducing tax that are legal.  Then there is the next point, that there is some supposed moral duty to pay tax, so strong that you should pay more than you actually have to.

Well, it does say in St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Chapter 13, fifth, sixth and seventh verses)  that you should pay tax. ’Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath but also for conscience sake. For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.’

But the chapter begins with the statement that ‘there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God’ and that ‘rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.’ I am not sure this really copes with modern secular atheist government, which uses (for instance) tax money to perform abortions and to do many other questionable works, and which has more or less wholly renounced its allegiance to any God, replacing him with the dogma of ‘Equality and Diversity’. There is a long Christian debate about non-resistance, one which the Church of England held most intensely in 1688, during the astonishing,  thrilling episode of the Declaration of Indulgence and the arrest and trial of the Seven Bishops for refusing to read it, so majestically described in Macaulay’s incomparable ‘History of England’.

Christian opponents of Hitler, from Bonhoeffer to Von Galen also implied by their actions that there was a point at which government ceased to demand the Christian’s allegiance.  I think there is a point well before dictatorship where a person of conscience can legitimately adopt a semi-detached attitude towards a modern government in a ‘democratic’ (see earlier postings) country.  I really cannot see how our current or recent government could in any serious way be described as ‘God’s ministers’.

But I am not advocating tax evasion, which would be defiance of the law.  Nor am I saying that nobody should pay any tax, as my friends on Twitter seem to think. If you think you’re paying too much tax, it is the greedy, spendthrift, incompetent government you should blame, not other people who have legally avoided paying as much as that greed, incompetent, spendthrift  government would like them to.  I am saying it is both legitimate and morally justifiable to keep as much of your own money as the law allows. And one reason for this is that you will almost certainly be able to spend your own money more morally than any government, and that you are most unlikely to spend it on immoral actions such as the Kosovo, Iraq and Afghan wars, or the intervention in Libya, or on massacring innocent babies in the womb. I cannot accept that the obligation to pay tax is unconnected with the moral quality of the state to which it is paid, or that St Paul’s words could be taken to mean anything of the kind..

Talking of the ‘Arab Spring’, I find it quite amazing that the media who raved and swooned over the original Tahrir Square events in Egypt are sliding so easily over the fact that the pessimists were absolutely right about this event, from the start. Anyone would think that the Cairo liberals have won. But they have lost, utterly.  The funky liberal secularists, who were lionised by the BBC, CNN, Sky and the rest when the whole thing started, have been predictably shoved into the gutter by the Muslim Brotherhood.  Pessimists pointed out from the start that this dispiriting organisation was the one best placed to benefit from the ‘democracy’ which was proclaimed by the various vacuous TV commentators who exulted over Tahrir Square, jabbering wildly into the microphone as the crowds surged. ‘Democracy’ in any Arab country will mean Muslim rule. That is as inevitable as mathematics.  (as Housman wrote ‘To think that two and two are four, and neither five nor three, the heart of man hath long been sore, and long is like to be’).

The liberal commentators almost all denied it. They were almost all wrong. They should almost all admit it.  What they should also admit is that their enthusiasm, which greatly influenced the attitudes of Western governments,  helped the Muslim brotherhood into power. They surely cannot claim they really wanted that.

What is worse is that many in the media, who ought to have known better, did nothing to restrain this silly naivety. Egypt has always had a small, attractive layer of Westernised intellectuals, mainly the products of the American University in Cairo, who have espoused more or less Western ideas. But they speak for nobody but themselves and are in most ways protected and indulged (provided they stay within certain limits) by the military regime. I suspect that they will face more repression from the new government, in which the military have compromised with the Brotherhood, than they did in the old days. As for the Coptic Christians, they are already emigrating – the approaching fate of almost all Christians now dwelling in the Muslim world, which happens to  be the cradle of Christianity.

Following the behaviour of the Labour front bencher Owen Smith MP on BBC Any Questions last Friday (he jeered at, caricatured and repeatedly interrupted my description of New Labour’s policies on immigration during the 1992-201 government, and you can still listen to him doing so on BBC I-player) I will provide a fresh link to my posting on the fascinating revelations of *Andrew Neather* , originally placed here on 31st October 2009 and also reachable via the Index. But you can get straight to it by clicking here

By the way, it is interesting to note that, before he became a Labour apparatchik, Owen Smith was a senior BBC production executive.

Twitter is an Electronic Left-Wing Mob

After a long broadcasting famine, I have spent much of the past ten days preparing for, travelling to and appearing on BBC discussion programmes.  (Question Time on 14th June, Daily Politics and Any Questions on 22nd June, Sunday Morning Live’ on 24th June). I promise you all this a coincidence, not a conspiracy. I wish it was a conspiracy. But it must have been a nightmare for my many detractors. In fact I know that it was, thanks to the curious thing known as Twitter.

I don’t really see the point of Twitter myself. Brevity is a discipline, but the space on a Twitter message, fewer than 30 words, isn’t enough to do anything more than a sound bite. As I prefer to follow facts and logic to their conclusion, it doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t at the moment think I shall start posting on Twitter. Apart from anything else, there’s always the risk of meeting Stephen Fry.

But I have learned how to keep an eye on what is said about me there. Imagine some of the dimmer, more abusive and in many cases anonymous attacks on me here, only briefer and in many cases with the worst four-letter words in the language included, and you have the picture. There are, it’s true, a few brave contributors who defend me, and I have been rather impressed by the thoughtful open-mindedness of Dr Evan Harris, of all people

A nice person, with the best of motives, told me after one of my appearances that I was ‘trending on Twitter’ as a result.  This is a jargon term meaning that something I’ve said has attracted a lot of attention among Twitter subscribers. I told her ‘No doubt. But not in a good way’. And so it proved, when I later got to a computer screen (I am not one of these people who is joined at the hip to the Internet. I believe man should control technology, not the other way round).

As it happened, this very subject, of Twitter,  came up for discussion on the ‘Daily Politics’. This is an interesting programme, presented by Andrew Neil, on which I appeared last Friday. Mr Neil’s great broadcasting talents are , in my view, wasted by the BBC.  His problem is a much larger version of mine. We are both, in our different ways ‘right-wing’.  And we both have some broadcasting ability, so we are allowed on. But we get quite different treatment from our leftish, liberal equivalents.  I’ve been told by a very senior BBC bureaucrat that I will never be allowed to present a programme on BBC Radio - which I feel I would do at least as well as some of the current presenters.  She didn’t feel the need to explain, and I didn’t feel the need to ask her to. And they can’t seem to bring themselves to give Mr Neil the presenter’s chair of any prime-time or flagship radio or TV programme, though (and I have many disagreements with Mr Neil) he would obviously be very good at it. So he limits himself to being the very good presenter of off-peak shows.

Anyway, there we were discussing Twitter and social media on ‘The Daily Politics’ on Friday, and I said that Twitter was ’an electronic Left-wing mob’. Among those present was Mary Ann Sieghart, a person prominent in the world of comment. I must confess to not having a soft spot for her, especially after a radio debate we once did on cannabis, during which I came very close (during the encounter and in the shared car afterwards) to actually grinding my teeth at her obdurate, irresponsible refusal to recognise the terrible dangers of this drug to the vulnerable young. I also suffered a bout of near-nausea when she once brought one of her (then very young) children to a Blair press conference during the 1997 election. But she is not always so infuriating. As she rightly points out, she opposed the Euro, and she has recently said some perfectly sensible things about schools.

A couple of days later, I was scanning the latest crop of personal abuse on Twitter, and found that Mrs Sieghart had tweeted, to the effect that I had said that Twitter was a left-wing conspiracy.

Now, readers here will know that I think (Think? I know. I’ve done it and seen it done) that individuals do secretly combine in our society to secure political and social change, and indeed other things. It’s generally called ‘lunch’ and s even more potent when it’s called ‘dinner’ or ‘kitchen supper’ .  And some things just cannot be explained by coincidence.  But to describe someone as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is not, in general meant as a compliment, and to say that someone thinks something is a conspiracy is generally to suggest that the person involved is a little obsessive, and unhinged, to be regarded as a pathological problem and in general dismissed.

I don’t believe Twitter is a left-wing conspiracy, either in the caricature sense intended by Mrs Sieghart, or in the sense that I think people combine secretly on Twitter to achieve a purpose.  Why on earth would you do that? More importantly, I haven’t said so, and in fact said something plainly quite different and demonstrably true. What’s more, I said it on a recorded TV programme, where my words can be checked.

Anyway, I contacted Mrs Sieghart via her website , and pointed out that what she had said was incorrect. She e-mailed back to say she had corrected it. I checked to see what she had done, and this is what I found: ‘ Oh! Peter Hitchens has corrected me. Apparently you're not a left-wing conspiracy but a left-wing electronic mob. Silly me.'

Well, I’ve now written to her again, pointing out that, as a journalist, she really ought to know that it’s a basic part of the craft that you quote people accurately.

I then wrote (I have left out one or two rebukes that are better left private): ’ I politely corrected you in a private communication. You then managed to 'correct' your error in front of your fans grudgingly (You say 'apparently'? What do you mean 'apparently'? Do you seriously dispute it? You can check the record through I-player, and I'm sure the daily Politics people will provide you with a recording if that's not available.  That's what I said, that Twitter is a left-wing electronic mob.  What you wrote was not what I said... You also do so without any sign of regret … let alone  contrition (at having published a misleading statement about a  another person) , nor (of course)  any apology to me, while suggesting ('silly me' is seldom used without sarcasm) that it's rather tiresome of me to object when the great Mary Ann tells untruths about me. ‘

Yes, Twitter is an electronic left-wing mob.

I’ll return later today with some other comments of pressing matters, and responses to your views.

There's nothing moral about tax - so feel free to avoid it

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

What on earth is moral about paying tax? A greedy, slovenly state forces you to hand over roughly half your money every year, by threatening to send you to prison if you don’t.

Then it shovels that money carelessly down a huge hole. The Government is bad at almost everything it does. If you sent it out to buy you a loaf of bread, it would come back a week later with stale cake, and pretend it had lost the change.

People who can afford to do so avoid the wretched ‘services’ the state arranges in return for this legalised theft. What are these? Schools that teach sexual licence but not times tables or proper reading; police who are never there when you want them; hospitals plagued with inexcusable dirt and neglect; a welfare system that punishes thrift and encourages sloth.

Meanwhile, the real essentials – the absolute vital duties of any government – are neglected or destroyed. Our borders are abandoned, our roads potholed, our Navy sunk, our Army soon to be small enough to fit into Wembley Stadium. As for criminal justice, where do I begin?

As it happens, I think I pay my taxes as fully as possible. Unlike several Left-wing commentators and broadcasters of my acquaintance, I don’t qualify for, and so don’t use, the obvious get-outs. But am I guilty if I take out an ISA (a form of tax avoidance) or set a charitable donation against tax? Certainly not. And if I were offered the chance to pay much less tax, simply and legally, I would take it.

The point was beautifully stated long ago by an American judge with the wonderful name of Learned Hand, who ruled: ‘Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the Treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes .  .  . nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.’

But it is not the same for the alleged comedian Jimmy Carr, a man whose jokes have been described by his own father as ‘cruel’, ‘dirty’ and ‘unkind’.

Mr Carr has become famous and rich because of his modish Leftism. He’s for the things I’m against. He used to be noisily against tax-avoidance, and I suspect he still would be if he hadn’t been found out doing it. For him, and people like him, there is an obligation to pay lots of tax, because they worship the modern liberal welfare state.

I recommend a minimum tax rate of 80 per cent for Leftist comedians, getting higher as they get more Left-wing.

Squalid fashion for a bankrupt nation

I’ve always thought ‘You’ll look funny when you’re 50’ was the best advice you could offer to would-be tattoo fashion victims, though, of course, many of them can’t believe they ever will be 50.

What will Joanna Southgate feel about her tattoos when she reaches that milestone? And why is it that so many young Britons are eagerly adopting styles – shaved heads for men, tattoos for men and women – once mainly associated with prison, squalor, depravity or even slavery?

There’s something slightly frightening about it, as if in some instinctive way they are preparing themselves for the future that lies just around the next corner for our bankrupt country.

Ed is only sorry immigrants lost him votes

I don’t need Edward Miliband to tell me that I’m not a bigot. I knew already.

But for daring – over many years – to oppose mass immigration into this country, I and many others were smeared in this way by Labour sympathisers.

If Mr Miliband now admits that was wrong, what is he going to do about it? Will he and his comrades, deep down, now recognise that we were right? If there are now too many foreign migrants in this country, which is the clear implication of his speech, there isn’t actually anything he can do about it.

The transformation of this country was deliberately sought by New Labour, as we know from the blurted revelations of former party speechwriter Andrew Neather. It’s happened. But Mr Miliband’s private polls tell him the policy is unpopular.

So he makes a speech claiming to have changed his mind.Has he really? I don’t think so. New Labour’s upper crust is made up of rich, snobbish London bohemians, who love the way that mass immigration has provided them with cheap servants and cheap restaurants.

They also despise the older Britain that the rest of us rather liked living in, and want to erase all trace of it.

Now they want to have it both ways – to keep the votes of the maltreated masses, while secretly despising their opinions. The Useless Tories, I might add, are exactly the same. Expect no good news from them.

A test that's sure to fail

Sorry about this, but the return of O-levels is as likely as the return of the sabre-toothed tiger. And Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, must know that.

The old GCEs were designed for a selective system, where the academically bright went to grammar schools. The equality fanatics who control the Tory Party (and the Labour Party, and the Liberal Democrats, and the civil servants in the Education Ministry, and the teachers’ unions) will not allow that.

Mr Gove is taking part in a hilarious new national game called ‘distancing ourselves from the Coalition’. As the next Election gets closer, Tories and Lib Dems will both be sucking up to their core votes, trying to get them to forget that the closeness and love of 2010 ever happened. This will mean a lot of posturing, but not much real action.

And Mr Gove and Vince Cable will both be working hard to become the leaders of their parties. They all fooled you in 2010. Do please try not to be fooled again in 2015.

Proof of the Good Friday surrender

Sinn FEIN’S Martin McGuinness is to meet Her  Majesty the Queen. Well, who’s doing who a favour, exactly?

I know the Queen has to meet all sorts in her job, but this dead-eyed fanatic must be among the least agreeable companions you could find in a long day’s journey.

If anyone doubted that the Good Friday Agreement was a humiliating surrender by a once-great country to a criminal gang, they can’t doubt it now.
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All the cheerleaders of the Arab Spring need to be asked how they feel about it now, and if by any chance they wish they had been less keen to endorse it. But, even as it falls to bits, they still support it.

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

Oh, it’s O-levels now, is it? Is Michael Gove as Rigorous as He Says He is? Or are we all dreaming (including Mr Gove?)

Is the new Tory minority government, noisily conservative and totally powerless, beginning to form before our eyes?

Close readers of this site will know that I have long predicted the break-up of the Coalition , probably next year.  The pretext for this, I am more and more convinced, will be the plan for House of Lords Reform, over which there can be no concord between the Tory party and the Liberal Democrats. The timing is set by several things .

One, it is generally accepted by experts in manipulation that voters have a political memory about 18 months long, and can seldom remember much further back than that (try it on yourself). The Liberal Democrats need to re-establish themselves as a separate, oppositional, raucously left-wing party untainted by association with Mr Slippery.

The Tories need to re-establish their image as a conservative party, rather than as the aggressively PC, pro-EU, soft-on-crime, tax-and-spend, welfarist egalitarian outfit they really are.

So, if the next election is to be in May 2015 (and the Fixed Term Parliaments Act mandates that it shall be, unless something really odd happens) , the two need to have split by somewhere round about Guy Fawkes 2013.

This is also round about the time that the next European Commission is appointed. Baroness Ashton, currently Britain’s EU Commissioner, was put in her job by Labour (and is a Labour supporter) so is most unlikely to be reappointed.  I think it very likely that Nicholas Clegg will be given the job. This will solve several problems for him. He cannot hope to hold his Sheffield seat at the next election. He faces a politically awkward choice, in autumn 2013, over where he should send his eldest child to school (he is said to have visited the Oratory, the controversial London Roman Catholic secondary where Anthony Blair sent his sons, which is a superb school but would cause some difficulties for an atheist egalitarian politician). And his party wants a different leader to take it into the 2015 election, as it is bound to suffer badly at the polls and his presence will make that damage worse.

My strong suspicion is that Vince Cable will be chosen as the party’s new leader , defeating Simon Hughes (if he chooses to try again) and Tim Farron, and that he will then lead his MPs out of the Coalition, agreeing to the arrangement called ‘confidence and supply’ which many Liberal Democrats and Tories wanted in 2010, but didn’t get because of the unexpected love affair between the Orange Book (free market libertarian) Liberal Democrats and the Cameroons, who found they had so much in common they couldn’t bear to be apart.

That’s worn off now, not because they don’t still agree on almost everything, but because of the weird pressures of the two-party system and universal suffrage, both of which elevate stupidity and ignorance to a great height. That is, the Liberal Democrats, who have actually got into office for the first time in decades,  and have obtained a government of the radical left, are far more unpopular with their (stupid) voters and supporters than are the Tories, who abandoned the last remaining filmy scraps of conservatism concealing their horrid nakedness,  to join a left-wing PC government, and so actually *did* betray their voters( at least, the ones daft enough to believe that the Tory Party is conservative, a regrettably large body of people).

The first formal step towards the new arrangement came last week, when the Liberal Democrat MPs were formally whipped to abstain in the vote on Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary.

This was the model for what was to come. The Liberal Democrats will do nothing to bring down the Tories, or to form a new informal coalition with Labour. They don’t want to trigger an election. They need mass amnesia to kick in first.

But they will be much more separate, and they will also, I believe, sacrifice their ministerial posts in the government, and the special advisor jobs given to their ambitious young apparatchiks. This will be hard to let go of, but a reasonable price to pay for regaining quite a few lost votes in marginal seats.

They will also get back, I think, the so-called ‘Short Money’, a very valuable  and much-missed subsidy from the taxpayer, given to Opposition parties in Parliament, but not to government parties.

Meanwhile the Tories will be liberated in equally useful ways. Mr Slippery will be able to silence many of his critics by appointing them to ministerial posts made vacant by departing Liberal Democrats. He will also be able to find nice jobs as Special Advisers for several young thrusters whom he seeks to advance in years to come.

And he can let Michael Gove, and others,  dream up (and go public with) all kinds of plans which will soothe dim loyalists into thinking that this is, after all a conservative government – sure in the knowledge that there is no parliamentary majority for them, and they will never happen.


It may even work, though I suspect the next election will throw up a Lib-Lab coalition in which Mr Cable , Mr Hughes and Mr Farron will be much happier than they are. As for the Tories, Mr Cameron can’t say this openly, but their day will come again once Scotland has quit the union (and if they can persuade the North of England, and Wales,  to declare independence as well, then their chances of a majority will be even greater).

On Being Nice, and on how Gordon Brown Saved the Pound

Yet again I am told to honey my words (this time on the subject of fatherless families) with sentiments which I regard as futile or worse. If I prefaced every statement I made about this subject with ‘of course most single mothers do a great job…’ , do readers seriously think that I would be any less hated, by those who hate me (and they do) for my moral and religious opinions?

As I’ve explained in my previous posting, whether single mothers do a great job or not is beside the point. The absence of the father from the home makes it likelier that the child ( especially a boy) will do worse in life, however good the job that is done.  Everyone would be better off if the children were brought up in stable, lifelong marriages. I refuse to apologise for, or qualify this factual statement with concessionary flannel . To do so would suggest that I was afraid of my critics, and that I conceded that they had moral right on their side.

On the contrary, to do so would be to give credence to the smear, that those who favour stable marriage are in fact persecutors of single mothers. This smear has been immensely effective in shutting down this debate, It won’t work for me. It’s not just that I’m not ‘sorry’ to have ‘upset’ the Emily Thornberry tendency, who think that phoney outrage is a substitute for facts and logic.

It’s also that I am proud that I still stand up for the married family, and am not ashamed to do so. So no more of this stuff about being ‘emollient’. Why should I seek to please or appease people who hate everything I stand for, and cannot distinguish between loathing my ideas and loathing me? Do my correspondents truly think that, if I make these concessions, Ms Thornberry and her Twitter friends will soften towards me? I can tell them it is not so.
Lenin, as so often, had it right…though you often have to read him backwards, as if you were being an instruction manual in what not to do, if you want to defeat revolutionaries.

 ‘Probe with a bayonet’, said that horrible man ‘If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, shove harder ’.

Revolutionaries respect only those who fight them as hard as they fight themselves. They scorn compromise and offer no mercy to those who give in to them.

Hard principle needs to be stated without compromise . If you are afraid of a crowd,  whether physical or electronic, you will never be able to lead , and you are not worthy of any responsibility. If you are ashamed or nervous of your own opinion, then people will wonder if you truly hold it.

As for Gordon Brown, the absurd distorted hate figure which the Useless Tories used with such effect to drum up their dying vote in 2010, it is most interesting to read Alastair Campbell’s latest diaries.

Mr Campbell is at last becoming interesting, as he has no need to keep secrets any more. And one of two really interesting things in his serialised memoirs (in the Guardian)  is the detail of the real row between Anthony Blair and Gordon brown.

This was always portrayed as a sort of soap opera personal rivalry, between sunny, charming Anthony and grim, dour, unhinged Gordon. But in fact there was an issue - and it was British membership of the Euro. Brown, well-advised by the (almost equally mocked and misrepresented) Ed Balls, successfully resisted great pressure from Blair and most of his ‘modernising’ Cabinet colleagues (themselves backed by those keen Tory allies of David Cameron, especially Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke) to abolish the Pound Sterling.

In short, Gordon Brown saved the Pound.

However bad our economic circumstances are now, imagine how much worse they would be if Blair, Heseltine and Clarke had got their way. And wonder how things would have been if John Major, or David Cameron, had been in office at the time, with no Balls or Brown to stand in their way.

Yet Tory voters were persuaded to hate and loathe Brown, while they were urged to vote for and admire David Cameron, a man who had by then reneged on his promise of a vote on the Lisbon Treaty( and yes, he had, and I was there when he announced it and tried to wriggle out of his commitment, and he knew what he had done, and he looked thoroughly ashamed of himself and fearful he would be found out) on his promise of a vote on the Lisbon.

It is an interesting example of people being persuaded, by propaganda, to do wholly irrational things. And it bolsters my view that, until modern neuropsychpharmacology was invented (plus steroids), and until there was widespread use of cannabis, individual madness was far less common in our world than the madness of crowds.

The Phoney Outrage of Emily Thornberry – Slime Factories on Overtime

The Slime Factories were working overtime last week, as I once again dared to voice a dissenting opinion on the issue of marriage and parenthood. We have now reached a point where it is almost impossible to pronounce or write conservative opinions about this subject without being personally abused, misrepresented and intimidated. There is a reason for this, which I shall come to in time.

The chief dispenser of slime (though an army of righteous Twitterers stood, or rather yelled and squawked, behind her) was Emily Thornberry MP, member for Islington South and Finsbury, and the Shadow Attorney General. I will also say a little about her in a moment, but first a few general remarks.

Some contributors urge me to try to soften my position on fatherless families by hedging it around with tributes to the wondrous virtues of single mothers. This misses the point. It may well be that all single mothers in general are full of all the human virtues. I do not deny it. But even so they all face a problem. They must raise their children without a father to help them, which, however saintly, diligent and devoted they are, weighs them down with a disadvantage. The standard formula of ‘most/many single mothers do a great job’ always seems to me to be irrelevant to this question, and sounds apologetic over a position which needs no apology. I am simply not, as is always alleged against me, criticising the mothers themselves, as I repeatedly make perfectly, unequivocally clear in unambiguous language. I am criticising the politicians who encourage fatherless families, because the outcomes for the children of such families are in general worse than for those of stable married households (see below).

This discussion also raises the question of different types of ‘single mother’, a misleading category if ever there was one. There are the voluntary single mothers, the ones who have been recruited by the policies of successive governments for more than 40 years, who have become mothers without ever intending or seeking to marry the father of the child.

There are those who have initiated divorces (to be distinguished from those whose husbands have initiated them), who could also be said to have volunteered for the status of single parent, though some of them will plead urgent necessity, and none of us will be able to dispute their case, or want to. In the wilderness created by the Permissive Society, there are many miseries which aren’t really our fault, even though we take the decisions.

Then, quite distinct in my view, there are the wholly involuntary single mothers, deprived of husband and father by desertion or bereavement. And there are distinctions among these, between those who were married in the first place, and those who chose to embark on parenthood without the formal public declaration of permanence which is marriage.

As I discussed in my 1999 book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, a potent and successful campaign was fought in the 1960s to erase all these distinctions and treat all women bringing up children in the absence of a father as if they were the same. I believe the purpose of that campaign was to remove the social and moral barrier (known to its culturally revolutionary critics as ‘stigma’) against those adults who chose (or were encouraged by the state) to raise children outside marriage.

One long-term consequence of it (a fact which amazes many people) is that our welfare system no longer contains a specific widow’s pension. The state of widowhood is not, in itself, recognised as one in need of aid from the state. This change, which took place under Anthony Blair, is a break with almost all concepts of charity dating back thousands of years, under which widows and orphans were the first concern of any community. Interesting, eh?

The next question is ‘does it matter’? I would say that it does. One of the best summaries of the problem is to be found in a paper published by the think tank Civitas in September 2002, entitled ‘Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family’, by Rebecca O’Neill.  It can be consulted here.

This paper was written to discuss the possible effects of the steep rise in births outside marriage, which began about ten years after the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, and after the welfare reforms of the Harold Wilson and James Callaghan governments.

I will list some of the characteristics it identifies. Lone mothers are twice as likely to live beneath the official poverty line as are two-parent families.

Lone parents have twice as much risk of experiencing persistent low income as couples with children.

They are twice as likely to have no savings, eight times as likely to live in a workless household and 12 times as likely to be receiving income support (as it then was).

I am not arguing here about whether these (or other) conditions are the simple direct *result* of being a single parent, a more complex question for another time. I am just stating them as facts.

Other selected facts: single mothers have poorer physical and mental health. Young people in lone-parent families were 30% more likely than those in two-parent families to report that their parents rarely or never knew where they were. Lone parents were significantly more likely than couples to have strained relations with their children. Between 20 and 30% of absent fathers have not seen their children in the last year. Between 20% and 40% see their children less than once a week. Children in lone-parent families are nearly three times as likely to describe themselves as unhappy as children raised by couples, have more trouble in school, worse physical health, and are at greater risk of all kinds of abuse.

Put simply, their lives in general are worse, and will be worse. A wise government would seek to discourage this form of household, for the good of the country as a whole – not by punishment or cruelty but at the very least  by *ceasing to encourage it*.  My favoured tools for achieving this are the end of subsidies for *future* single parent households (existing ones have been made a promise which must be kept until their children are grown), with a reasonable period of notice that this change is to take place, plus severe reforms of the divorce laws, making divorce considerably more difficult for couples with children than it is for those without them. I also seek moral and cultural changes, which would make parenthood outside wedlock less likely, and make marriage more difficult to begin, as well as harder to end.

By the way, as this touches on moral territory, I should mention that I am chided elsewhere for saying that my pleasures are private, when I have views on the pleasures of others. But my private pleasures are legal, and do not in any way influence me towards campaigning for changes in the law which would make illegal pleasures more common.  And, as I have many times stated, I do not attack private individuals for their private moral decisions, though I might defend myself against their immoral actions. This is not because I don’t think people do many wrong things, or because I don’t disapprove of those wrong actions. I do. But above all I must disapprove of my own wrong actions. Morals are a matter for the individual, and God.

On the other hand, I attack politicians and their media and academic allies for pursuing polices designed (or predictably bound) to distort human behaviour in immoral (and therefore in my view unhappy or dangerous) directions.

I do not in any way blame the women who have chosen to raise children on their own, because they are subsidised by the welfare state to do so. Their decision is entirely rational (and morally far preferable to the abortion of the child, a choice which is, alas, open to all).  It is also easy to see why young women, with a strong and good natural desire to become mothers of babies (a wonderful thing in itself, and easy to understand) wish to avoid entanglements with the often feckless and irresponsible young men created by our fractured families, our wrecked schools, our culture of drivel and our morally bankrupt society and state. Likewise, in a state where marriage is more easily ended than a car leasing agreement (and is very often so ended)  it is hard to condemn those who entered into such a lax agreement, later deciding to end it.

How can any reasonable person, likewise, hold a woman responsible for having been deserted or – even more absurd -  bereaved? I certainly don’t. The amazing thing is that I am accused of this by people who appear to be in possession of all their faculties.

Why do they do this? They do it because the nationalisation of childhood, and the marginalisation of strong independent families in which private life and free thought flourish, is one of the main projects of the modern radical state, just as it was one of the central policies of the Communist state in the USSR.  Weak families are a necessary consequence of the strong parental state, and its desired aim.

Many of these statist radicals are extremely hypocritical, themselves maintaining traditional two-parent households while pursuing policies which tend to eradicate such households among the poor and weak. This, along with the hypocrisy of imposing egalitarian schools on others, while avoiding it for your own young, seems to me to be the crowning hypocrisy of leftism.

Which brings me to Emily Thornberry, with whom I clashed on BBC Question Time last Thursday, 14th June 2012. At the time of writing, this programme is still available on BBC i-player.  But I have in any case transcribed the central exchange, which now follows:

The actual question was: ‘Do you agree with Community Secretary Eric Pickles that problem families have had it easy for too long?’

My answer was : ’I don’t think we’re entitled to sit here, any of us, and start saying  anybody is having it easy in the poorer parts of our country. That’s not the point. The point is whether they are being given the sort of help they really need.

‘I don’t think that compassion should necessarily be expressed by throwing money at these people. I think that Eric Pickles probably feels the same way. But because this government is in effect a fraud which makes conservative statements and does no conservative things,  nothing will come of this. But I think his general idea that what we need to do is to look at the reasons why we have so many problem families - which are fundamentally the destruction of the married family by the deliberate subsidising of fatherless families and an enormous welfare dependent class - then we might be able to do some good. But it doesn’t do any good being rude to people, except to politicians, who deserve it.

‘It doesn’t do any good being rude to people who are at the bottom end of society. Many of them are acting perfectly rationally. If you create an enormous welfare state, people will obviously go and collect the welfare which is offered to them and they will behave in the way which the welfare state persuades them to do. That is why we are in such a mess. And until we get serious welfare reform aimed at bringing back the solid family life which people used to enjoy in this country and which used to be particularly good for the upbringing of children, then these problems will persist, I just think Eric Pickles is showing off and pretending to be a conservative without actually being one, and offending people without doing any good.’

Emily Thornberry: ‘Before I came along today I was advised to do yoga deep breathing and  to make sure that I didn’t get wound up by Peter Hitchens, but I just have already and we’re only on the second question. I suppose that given that my family that I was brought up was fatherless, and I suppose the fact that my mother was on benefits and that we lived in a council estate means that we were one of the problem families that you talk about, Peter. But actually, do you know what, we had a solid family life and we did well and me and my brothers did well and my mum struggled, and how dare you say that women, that single parents that live on council estates are therefore by definition problem families? How dare you?’

Thunderous applause. Stormy applause.

PH: ’Had I said any such thing your phoney outrage would be justified. But as I didn’t, it isn’t. And you really do need to do a bit better than that.’

ET : ‘I made a note. (PH ‘Yes...’).

ET ‘You talked about problem families being fatherless and you talked about them being on benefits and that describes the family life, that describes me as a child – and we were not a problem family.’

PH: ‘It’s the subject under discussion. I didn’t say anything about your family or anything of the kind. You are just engaging in phoney outrage for political propaganda purposes, which is what your Party always does... Pathetic rubbish.’

(I should note here that Grant Shapps MP, the ‘Conservative’ Party’s representative on the panel ‘absolutely agreed’ with Emily Thornberry that ‘this is nothing to do with people who have one or two parents, who are rich or poor or anything else’.)

Greg Dyke, my old university acquaintance and former Director General of the BBC, asked what could be done about it ‘without having this sort of banter.’

PH: ’If you try and suggest what you should do about it, you get buckets of slime chucked over you by Labour politicians, and there’s an end to it. There is a simple problem, almost all serious work on the problems of problem families, a  phrase not introduced into this discussion by me, in any major country, any major advanced country, will tell you that these problems are concentrated where there are no fathers, and if you won’t do anything about that, then indeed, if you continue to pursue policies which create more and more fatherless families, you will get more of it. I’ll carry on saying it however many times people chuck buckets of slime over me for saying it, because it is important and needs to be addressed.’

I wonder if any of my critics (preferably the intelligent and coherent ones) can identify anything in my spoken, broadcast words above that justified Ms Thornberry’s outburst. If so, can they please say what it is?

I telephoned Miss Thornberry over the weekend and asked her if she would, telling her that I planned to blog about this, and giving her my e-mail and telephone details so that she could respond to this specific question. She has not yet done so.

I attempted to discover if Ms Thornberry (she is, by the way, married to a distinguished barrister, now a judge, and lives in an attractive part of the fashionable London quarter, Islington) had any coherent critique of what I had said, or indeed understood my general point. I found fairly quickly that we spoke a different moral and political language. But, while I was aware of the existence of her view and language, she was more or less unaware of mine. We were, as the old joke goes, arguing from different premises.

In fact, Emily Thornberry’s personal story is a good deal more interesting than her outburst would suggest. She did indeed grow up in a council house, in the absence of her father. But if anyone thought she was just an ordinary working-class girl made good, they were mistaken. Her mother Sallie, alas no longer with us, was a most courageous and distinguished person, and also much-loved by political allies and opponents alike. She was a teacher by profession, and an active and popular Labour councillor who became, despite the privations and difficulties of her life, Mayor of Guildford in Surrey, by no means a Labour town.  

But the family was not fatherless in the sense that it had never had a father. Nor was Sallie Thornberry unmarried. On the contrary, she was married to a distinguished and talented academic lawyer, Cedric Thornberry, who lectured at the London School of Economics, and rose to become Assistant General Secretary of the United Nations. He is still active in the international human rights industry.

I do not know or seek to know exactly how he came to leave the family home, though he did so when his daughter was seven and his sons even younger. It is perhaps significant that Emily Thornberry omits all reference to him from her entry in ‘Who’s Who’ (those in Who’s Who’ write their own entries), though she does mention her mother. Whatever happened, Emily Thornberry has unpleasant, rather shocking Dickensian memories of bailiffs, and of going off to live in a council house in pretty sharply reduced circumstances.

To give you some idea of our differing responses to this episode, she believes it is an argument for better state childcare to allow women such as her mother to go out to work. I believe it is an argument for strengthening marriage, and placing a higher value upon fidelity and constancy, and upon promises.

She also, I believe, failed her eleven-plus, went to a secondary modern, and later to a comprehensive before studying law at the University of Kent and becoming a successful barrister.

This casts an interesting light on her decision to send one of her children to a partially selective state school (a very rare category), a dozen miles from her home. I asked her how she explained the divergence between her personal educational policy, in favour of selection, and of her party’s educational policy, implacably opposed to selection. And I’m afraid she went quiet, and then attempted to make it an issue of her children’s privacy. I have not named and will not name the child or the school. It is about her, a public figure who has sought and obtained public office and seeks to take part in the government of the country, as an acknowledged member of a political party which has endorsed her, and whose endorsement she has sought and accepted. That political party is opposed to academic selection in state schools.

It’s my belief that Emily Thornberry is a decent person (anyone with a  mother like that has to be) but that she still has much to learn about principles and about civilised debate.

Lawless Libya: The story you didn't read

You may not have seen the following headline on the front page of any newspaper: ‘Terrorist killers rocket-bomb British envoy’s car’.

Nor have you read, in a prominent place, the following opening paragraph: ‘Britain’s envoy to Libya narrowly escaped death last night after Islamic militants launched a rocket-propelled grenade at his car. Two of his bodyguards were seriously injured.’

This seems strange to me. The story has all the elements that normally push news towards the front of the paper and the top of the page, and the head of the radio or TV bulletin. It involves severe violence, it is very simple, it has an important British connection, and at the centre of it is a prominent person.

The Ambassador, Sir Dominic Asquith, pictured above, is descended from one of our most famous Premiers and is a cousin of the actress Helena Bonham Carter. The attack in Benghazi came a few days after a bomb was thrown at the US mission in the same city. The Red Cross there has been attacked. And a delegation from the International Criminal Court has been more or less kidnapped, with what passes for a government in Libya bleating that it is ‘powerless to intervene’.

A few months ago, this newspaper reported the shameless desecration of a British Second World War cemetery in Libya, by people who knew exactly what they were doing and were happy to be filmed.

Here’s the problem. We ‘liberated’ Libya, and this lawless, failed state is now our responsibility. But, as we are preparing to ‘liberate’ Syria in the same way, we hide from ourselves that our interventions have made things worse than they were.

MailOnline: British ambassador to Libya escapes uninjured after his convoy is hit by rocket-propelled grenade