Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 310

A tarnished 'expert'

War on Drugs latest. Some of you may recall how a serious and thoughtful GP, Dr Hans-Christian Raabe, pictured right, was last year dumped from the Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). Dr Raabe took an unfashionable position – that drug-taking was wrong and needed to be discouraged.

Officially, he was got rid of because of some views he once expressed about homosexuality, views very similar to those once also expressed by the Home Office, which sacked him. But this week we learned a bit more about the sort of people the Government is happy to have on the ACMD.

Meet ACMD member Sarah Graham, 43, who has revealed how – as a BBC executive – she was introduced to cocaine at the Groucho Club and ended up spending £600 a week on the illegal drug.

No doubt she’s very sympathetic to the stern prosecution of people who break the drug possession laws.

War... it's this year's must-have accessory

I am still getting messages from ordinary people inside Syria, appalled at the inaccurate picture of events there being peddled by Western media. But the heedless rush to war continues.

The truth obviously doesn’t matter much once war becomes fashionable.

Hillary Clinton, the American Secretary of State, has been caught out using her respected office to make alarmist claims that Russia is supplying Syria with new helicopter gunships. She gets away with it because it is modish to believe in interfering in Syria.

It’s so modish that the feared Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, has spotted the trend. Now that Syria is officially the world’s worst tyranny, she has swung the world of hemlines, heels and lip gloss behind the cause of war.

Ms Wintour has icily disowned an embarrassing pro-Syrian article that her magazine ran last year, in which the attractive Asma Assad, wife of the Syrian president, pictured right, was billed as a ‘rose in the desert’ and described as ‘the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies’.

She isn’t a magnetic rose any more. She is the wife of a brutal dictator. How fickle fashion is.
This sort of drivel almost makes me yearn for the good old days when all we got were hysterical lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

MailOnline: UN suspends mission in Syria over 'escalating violence' as Assad's troops kill 12 civilians in shell attack on Damascus suburb

So which pub did Dave leave his integrity in?

This has been Mr Slippery’s worst week yet, and I think we should all be very pleased about that, as it weakens his hold. His whole period in office has been a dangerous fraud, and is now becoming a grave threat to British liberty.

Mr Cameron’s already reaching for the favourite tools of New Labour – surveillance and increased police powers over all of us, while horrible criminals roam the streets wearing pointless tags.

And I am increasingly convinced that the Leveson Inquiry into the press, which he launched, will come down in favour of regulation which will menace press freedom. That freedom is one of the few protections we have against our incompetent, spendthrift and oppressive State.

Let’s begin with the revelation that Mr Cameron drove away from a pub without realising that he had left his daughter behind. I’m not sure this is all that common, actually.

I suspect it is easier to do if you are one of those problem families burdened with two cars, a grace-and-favour country house, a live-in nanny and a personal protection officer.

It’s interesting that he got into more trouble for this than he did for leaving his integrity behind, when he broke his cast-iron pledge of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

I don't know which pub he left his integrity in. Perhaps the landlord still has it and could give me a call, though as it wasn’t very big in the first place it was probably swept up and thrown away with the crisp packets.

But that’s the modern media for you, largely governed by people who have the political understanding of a marmoset – and yes, I am thinking particularly about Mrs Rebekah Brooks who, in her years of authority at The Sun, managed to be a cheerleader for Anthony Blair, Gordon Brown and Mr Slippery, without missing a breath.

What was the price for this? I’m not sure. But the Tory leader’s first article for The Sun – after its miraculous change of mind – contained a strange pledge to fight the war in Afghanistan more vigorously.

So each time I watch military coffins come back from that futile war, the horrible thought crosses my mind that those soldiers would not have died if it hadn’t been for Mr Slippery’s desire for office at all costs.

Disgust is not a strong enough word, really.

MailOnline: A chillax too far: 'Distraught' Dave and Sam Cameron left daughter Nancy, 8, behind in pub for 15 minutes after driving back to Chequers from lunchtime drinks

Sweet and Sour Charity

Many years ago, in a terrifying third world city, I and a colleague were looking for a safe place to stay. We didn’t want much, just a compound in which to hide from the local gang militias, have access to clean water, reliably electricity and a good phone link.

It chanced that we heard that such a place existed, owned by a charity. We went round, introduced ourselves and said that, if they would put us up, we would arrange for our office in London to donate to them what we would normally have paid for a good standard hotel.

We were in need, though not desperate. We wouldn’t have been much trouble, and there was space. Other journalists had, so far as we knew, stayed there recently. But the local representative of the charity turned us down flat. Maybe he didn’t like our paper, or me. That was his choice. But what astonished me most of all was that a charity would so breezily reject several hundred pounds, possibly more than a thousand if we stayed any length of time, in return for services that would have cost a tiny fraction of that.

I was told the charity didn’t need our money. They were already on the government payroll, and did not really rely on individual donations any more.

Since then, I have never given so much as a bent penny to the charity involved. I have also known what most people don’t know, that many major British charities are in fact semi-nationalised organisations. It is seared on my memory and so I often forget that other people don’t know this.

So I am particularly grateful to Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs, who has produced a fascinating pamphlet ‘Sock Puppets: How the Government Lobbies Itself and Why’ which can be found by going here

Its basic points are these. That many (but please note, by no means all ) British charities (some very major ones) get millions of pounds from central and local government; that the rules which used to ban them from engaging in political lobbying have been greatly relaxed, so that almost anything short of direct party political propaganda will probably be passed by the Charity Commission; and that in effect, British government money, ostensibly spent on good causes, often ends up being used to lobby the government to do things it wants to do anyway.

As Mr Snowdon rightly points out, these tend to be minority causes, not great popular movements. These need no lobbies to get themselves son to the political agenda.

Even so, it occurs to me as remarkable that increased spending on foreign aid, which is dubious in itself and also widely unloved, is a successful cause, whereas nobody much is defending the armed forces from cuts, and much of the treatment of men badly injured in wars is met through genuine charitable donations.

I quite like some of the organisations he picks on (such as those which campaign for better public transport), but I did laugh at his brief history of the ‘Child Poverty Action Group’ which wrote in 1965 to the then premier, Harold Wilson about ‘at least half a million children in this country’ who were ‘in homes where there is hardship due to poverty’.

Billions of pounds of welfare spending later, the same CPAG now speaks of 3.8 million children living in poverty. All that time, and all that money, and ‘child poverty’ has increased sevenfold and more. Or perhaps something else has happened?

I’ll leave you some other figures from Mr Snowdon (he provides references) . The ‘voluntary’ sector employs more than 600,000 people. Between 1997 and 2005, the income of Britain’s charities almost doubled, from £19.8 billion to £39.7 billion, with the biggest growth coming in grants and contracts from government departments (state funding rose by 38% in the first years f this century, while private donations rose by 7%).

27,000 charities depend on the state for more than three quarters of their income, more than a third of the sector’s total income - £12.8 billion in 2007-8) came from the state.

By the way, you will be pleased to know that most British charities remain small organisations which take no cash from the state. The problem is confined to the big organisations. Yet even among the big organisations some – for example the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the Donkey Sanctuary – are wholly independent of the state (so why, I ask, does the RNLI irritatingly use metric measurements for wave-heights in its advertisements? Feet, please).

My advice on charities is to check before giving. Do they take government cash? If so, how much? It will be in their accounts, though not always as obvious as it ought to be. And do they engage in propaganda? In which case, is it propaganda you don’t mind helping to support?

But in general, be aware of the fact that many very important lobbies are in fact funded by the government, so that it can lobby itself to do things it wants to do, but which you may not want done. I am not sure ’charity’ is the right name for such organisations. Mr Snowdon has done us a valuable service.

Back and Forth

Time for a little general conversation, on popular music, happiness versus pleasure and various other matters raised by correspondents. My favourite comment comes from a James E. Shaw, who writes ‘The fact that you dislike pop music and no doubt regard yourself as civilized because you enjoy classical music makes you no more an enlightened or civilized human being than it made Adolf Eichmann.’

Well, that’s telling me, isn’t it? But, apart from telling me that Mr Shaw is not very good at arguing (note that he actually attacks me for a claim I have not made, but which he nonetheless kindly makes on my behalf so that he can go on to link me with a mass murderer), what do we learn?

This isn’t really a question of self-regard. As I’ve said before, I may indeed be one of the nastiest people to walk the planet, wicked, selfish, ugly, you name it. But the question at issue is ‘Am I right?’, and I might in fact *be* right while also being ugly, cruel, etc etc. It is simple ad hominem crudity to imagine that my personal niceness or nastiness has any bearing on the quality of my arguments, or whether my facts are correct.

I am not quite sure what Mr Shaw is driving at with his reference to Eichmann.  I do wonder if the German National Socialists would have seen the uses of pop music to their cause had it existed in their era.  True, they didn’t like modern pictorial or plastic art, and disliked Jazz. But they did have some things in common with the sexual revolution, and the cultural one. One thinks of the more or less pornographic publication ‘Der Stuermer’ ,  which as well as being full of Judophobic ravings, slanders and lies was spiced with pornography so vile that respectable people objected to it being displayed (as many National Socialist publications were) in glass cases on public streets and squares, where their children might see it. One also thinks of the personally irregular and libertine private lives of many of the National Socialist elite, notably Josef Goebbels, and the encouragement of sexual ‘freedom’ among the SS. Homosexuality, though officially disapproved of by the laws of the Third Reich, was also far from unknown among active and senior National Socialists. And of course the National Socialists despised Christianity, and sought to bring up German children to despise it too.

I mention these things to rebut, once again,  the crude . defamatory and frankly bird-brained suggestion that conservatives, by being ‘right wing’ (whatever that means) are in some way connected with, or philosophically linked to the German National Socialists.

I have always seen this smear as the left’s nervous, defensive riposte to the perfectly valid criticism that the left have always been too forgiving of, and secretly sympathetic to, the excesses of Communism. I think Freud would have called the left’s attempt to slander conservatives  ‘projection’, as there is in fact far more in common, philosophically and in many other ways, between social democracy and communism than there is between National Socialism, Mussolini Fascism and conservatism. The clue is partly in the name of the NSDAP,  in some important ways modelled on the Austrian Social Democrats, whose all-embracing mass organisation Hitler much admired, even if he didn’t like most of their policies(See Kershaw’s biography for details of this) ; one should also note that Mussolini began his political life as a socialist.  Both The fascists and the NSDAP were *mass* parties, designed to take advantage of widespread suffrage and the manipulation of mobs - see the previous posting on democracy. Hitler also made a lot of use of plebiscites, the ultimate democratic instrument.  Stalin’s Bolsheviks had their origins in the Russian Social Democratic Party, as the full name of the Bolshevik Party shows. The same is very much true of Europe’s other major Communist Parties, especially that in Germany, where the Communist party originated from a split in the Social Democrats. Social Democracy is slower than Bolshevism, but it becomes more intolerant the more powerful it gets, as we see in modern Europe.  

Conservatism, by contrast, has largely been swept aside by mass politics, with its crudities, hero-worship and marketing techniques, many of them pioneered by Dr Goebbels and his accomplice, the genius of propaganda films, Leni Riefenstahl.

One of the problems with great music ( I think particularly of J.S. Bach) is that its power to lift the human heart can be abused, precisely because it is independent of literature and the human voice, and speaks directly to us without moderation. Therefore if the propagandist cunningly couples it to his message (especially in company with filmed images), it may reinforce that message.   Bach wrote every note to the glory of God, and had no reason to expect that it would ever serve any other purpose. But other idealists, other utopians, can of course gain solace from its power. When I was a revolutionary socialist, I was particularly in love with Beethoven’s Third, Fifth and Seventh symphonies (the second movements, in each case, seemed the most sublime). I still am, but I understand them quite differently now. Because it bypasses words, such music can serve any purpose that matches the emotions it evokes. In any case, Beethoven was a political radical, and I may even have understood him better as a Trotskyist student than I do now as a reactionary columnist. Bach, because so much of his work is linked to choral works of Christian majesty, is harder to recruit to non-Christian causes.

Nor, obviously, is it impossible for someone to appreciate great music and to be a savage barbarian in other aspects of his life. Lenin loved Beethoven, and refused to listen to music lest it diverted him from his Utopian goal. National Socialist Germany retained a great deal of musical talent, and Hitler was, of course, obsessed with the works of Richard Wagner. Wagner , interestingly, was a sexual revolutionary and a radical.

As I might have expected, various wiseacres demand to know if there is anything I enjoy, and why I am so miserable etc etc.  ‘Let’s have a smile, eh, Peter?’ they drivel, like aunts at a knees-up trying to ‘cheer up’ a small boy who would rather be reading a book. As it happens, I have been very fortunate in my private life, and have many personal pleasures (which I don’t propose to discuss ere, as they are nobody’s business but my own).  But that does not stop me fearing for the future of my country, or being angry or distressed about aspects of British life, manners and morals.

In fact, I would regard myself as irresponsible and complacent if I allowed my own enviable personal circumstances to close my ears to the many very bad things going on around me. I might add that, because I am prepared to criticise where others are complacent, I receive many private communications from people who take the trouble to inform me in detail about how they are compelled to live their lives. Many of them are so wretched and sad, and I am so powerless to help them, that the least I can do is to campaign against the wrongs which have been done ( and are being done0 to them.

My reference to ‘getting down with the kids’ was surely obviously a mockery of the pathetic attempts of the old to ape and engage with popular culture, which are invariably misplaced. As someone who never gets down with the kids, and has no wish to, I do understand that Paul McCartney is even older than me.  I don’t think anybody really answered the central point, that the Jubilee has reduced the Queen to the winner of a national Best-Loved Granny contest, drained of all political and moral significance, shoe popularity cannot pass ( as her lost majesty ought to have done) to her heirs and successors. Which is why they will not survive long. There’s no genuine solid support for monarchy. Also, I don’t go in much for flag waving, and nor I think do most British people. Millions may wave a flag one day, and discard it the next week.

On the matter of pop music lyrics, I was always told that , and it was widely believed at the time of its release that  ‘O bla di , o bla da’ (in which I believe you can hear the words ‘Life goes on, Bra!’ , if you listen carefully) was intended as a satire on such suburban sentiments.  I don’t doubt that there have been one or two songs which contain regrets about the effects of drugs. But I doubt if any of them has had one thousandth of the effect on popular culture of ‘A Day in the Life’ and of the general endorsement of drugs (mainly by using them, but also by signing aout tem)  by the Rock Aristocracy.   And it was pop music in general that was the subject of my complaint ( as I pointed out in in ‘the Abolition of Britain’, which lots of people think they have read,  but they generally haven’t, Manfred Mann sang in the 1960s ( ‘Dooh Wah Diddy’ ) of marriage as the object of love (‘I’m hers, she’s mine wedding bells are gonna chime’). But by the 1990s, ‘The Beautiful South’ did quite well with a song called ’Don’t marry her, **** me’. Then we have the blatant ‘Let’s spend the night together’ , and the subtle sneers at family in ‘She’s leaving home’ plus the dismissal of faith and the mockery of quiet lives in ‘Eleanor Rigby’ (‘no-one was saved’).

‘Anthony’, an American who lives in London, misses the point. He says he was cheering a ‘shared love of liberty’. Well, what has the British monarchy to do with that, as it happens? During Elizabeth’s reign liberty has been greatly reduced in Britain. Only last week I wrote about the scandalous plan for a national police force under the control of government. The Equality and Diversity agenda, the European Union and many other aspects of this reign have led to a much diminished area in which British people are fee to speak, especially if they are publicly employed.

As for the sentimental British ‘alliance’ with the USA, I am sorry to say that I regard this as completely bogus. Our two countries have been bitter commercial and diplomatic rivals for a century, and the rivalry has now ended in British subservience (notably in our recent forced surrender to Irish terrorism, under US pressure) ,made no more tolerable to me by being patronised about our Great Little Queen.  Nor do I ‘admit’ that the past was not a ‘golden age’. The word ‘admit’ suggests that I am under some sort of pressure to do so, and really would prefer to maintain the past had been a ‘golden age’. This is the opposite of the truth.  I state, over and over and over and over again , that I have never believed in any kind of ‘golden age’ and that I am comparing what is possible with what exists. The Britain of today could be a lot better than it is, if we hadn’t got rid of so many of the good aspects of the past. That has nothing to with a golden age.

And I am sneered at for saying that my non-allegiance to popular music is dangerous. These people have probably never had the experience of being howled at by a liberal mob. I have. I think there is a dangerous intolerance loose in this country, and that sooner or later people like me will face growing pressure to keep quiet. The fact that it does not necessarily take the shape of prosecution or persecution will not mean it is not there, or that is not dangerous.  I think popular music is a powerful expression of modern cultural conformity, and an open unwillingness to like or endorse it often gets me bitter denunciations. Complacency is easy when you’re happy with the spirit of the age. Otherwise, not.

I am grateful to ‘John of Dorset’ for pointing out that it is quite legitimate to see a connection between beauty and goodness. If you therefore believe in an absolute objective good, as I do, certain forms of music, as well as of architecture or graphic art, are good and virtuous and truthful. Others are not.

I know I take a great risk by saying this, of activating Mr ‘Bunker’ and the other members of the League of the Militant Godless, but taste in music and art is, like most important matters, a religious question at bottom.

Some of you may have missed an enjoyable  posting on a moribund thread (Agony Aunts..) from a person who entertainingly styles himself or herself ‘Thinking, not ranting’, and who seems to think that I am female, or to know nothing about the French language .

It runs ’ Two questions for La Hitchens: 1. On the Radio 4 debate he made a ludicrous statement comparing 1961 crime figures with now. Ludicrous because it did not include any evaluation of there being more crimes now, more people, more reporting, etc. Q1 - did he at any stage try to get these figures evaluated by a statistician? 2. A quick Google will provide statistical evidence that the suicide rate in prison is 15x the national one. Q2: Is this evidence that: a. Prison may be a difficult place for some people; b. Prison may house may vulnerable people, some of whom may need specialist or medical treatment appropriate to their conditions; c. Both of the above; d. None of the above; e. Prisoners nowadays are soft and deserve to die.’

Where do I begin? What does he mean ‘evaluated by a statistician’? Does he think there is some neutral place where one can go, where statistics can be weighed and measured and pronounced unquestionably sound?  (presumably it’s somewhere near the Institute of Right Science’, which rules on which scientific theories are respectable and which are untenable). The figures I quoted (as I recall) were taken from the British government’s own official compilations, before many of the statistical series were altered, so making comparison over time much harder, and they began to rely on an opinion poll, rather than on actual figures, as their chief source of information about the level of crime. I’m still amazed by the rage provoked by the suggestion that crime figures might actually be manipulated for political reasons. I gather there was a sort of Twitter storm about this.  I mean, the very idea that a government might manipulate statistics to suit its own ends. . Such a  thing could never happen, could it?

As for suicide in prison, I don’t think I’ve ever expressed an opinion about it. But if I have, it certainly isn’t encompassed in the silly simplifications provided above.

A small mention of something I may return to. I see Christopher Snowdon (my opponent in a recent drugs debate) has done some excellent work on the growing interdependence between government and charities. For all that we clashed quite bitterly over drugs, I think Mr Snowdon should be complimented on this.

Dr Lefever has also written interestingly about ‘antidepressants’, elsewhere on the Right Minds site.

Be Careful What You Wish For

I had meant, in my previous post, to deal with Syria, but became too engaged in dealing with correspondents. I will say one thing. A scoffing contributor splutters that it is surely absurd that anyone in Syria would contact *me* of all people, about problems with the coverage of the present crisis.

Well, I can say that some of my correspondents did in fact contact more ‘mainstream’ media outlets about what they saw as severe bias, and were either ignored or rebuffed. They came to me because they had read online what I had written, and thought (rightly) that I would be more sympathetic.

The bias of the media towards a crude good versus bad interpretation of Syria is not the result of a particular political view or direct interest. Far from it. Most of those involved would have trouble finding Syria on a map, and know nothing of its history.

But, as I explained in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, media outlets are terribly conformist, and tend to follow a line, and all stories which do not fit that line are ignored are discarded, or buried in obscure corners.

The ‘Arab Spring’ is a terribly simple and easy formula for newsdesks and presenters, though the problem is increasingly to define the rebels. Where the rebels were of a type we disapproved of (in Iraq, after the Anglo-American invasion), they were ‘insurgents’. Had they been approved of, they would have been the ‘resistance’. Likewise, in Syria, ‘our side’ must not be called ‘rebels’ or ‘revolutionaries’. They are called ‘activists’, a word so meaningless that if demands analysis. What is it supposed to suggest? Some sort of protestor in a good cause, perhaps in the poorer part of Chicago or Glasgow, raising important issues with the authorities?

It certainly does not bring to mind the idea of a rather well-organised and (I believe) quite well-armed faction, equipped by foreign powers and dominated by Islamist fanatics of the type we have for the past ten years been taught to fear and loathe.

This mindset is also capable of believing almost anything about the wickedness of the regime . Now, it is a nasty regime, and I make no doubt about that. But we have a difficulty with all such post-colonial regimes, because they draw their legitimacy from us. Even more than in Libya, where the King we left behind was overthrown by Gadaffi and his fellow-officers, and we later recognised that regime, Syria is a direct inheritor of the defunct French Empire. The only previous legitimate authority there was the Ottoman Empire( complainers about the legitimacy of Israel have a similar problem) . If we are going to classify this hitherto recognised state as a ‘regime’ worthy of overthrow, what is the consistent basis on which we decide which states are acceptable and which are not?

For years western diplomacy and media ignored the wrongs of the Assads ( I used to have a virtual monopoly, among British journalists of even knowing about the 1982 massacre in that city, because in those days the media only cared about Arab deaths if they had been caused by Israel. Arabs killed by other Arabs were of no interest, apparently). It is much the same as the current blank ignorance about the Caucasus and Central Asia, where Hillary Clinton consorts with all kinds of dubious figures and nobody cares, or thinks it odd in the light of her burning conscience about Syria. The day will come when we learn a lot more about this crucial, oil-and-gas-filled region (I have already taken the trouble to go there and find out).

Now, as in the Houla massacre, the Assad government is guilty even if the evidence against it is confused on any terms. Take the initial reporting of the Houla massacre ( I have no doubt, by the way, that there was such a massacre, though as far as I know it remains to be properly established who was massacred by whom). We were , at the beginning, shown horrible pictures of murdered children, plainly killed at close quarters. At the same time, we were told that the Syrian army had caused the massacre with shellfire. So anxious were those involved to blame Damascus directly that nobody seemed to see the rather obvious difficulty, that shell fire would not have, could not have, caused the sorts of injuries in the photographs. Whatever had taken place, the reports of it lacked basic professional scepticism.

A UN spokesman’s unwillingness to attribute responsibility to anyone at that stage was mentioned, but over-ridden, or bypassed in reports Only later was a new culprit, an Alawite militia, named (more credibly) as being responsible. It may well have been the fault of Assad, but that *had not been established* . A rush to judgement is always unwise. For some reason the British government is anxious to take the Saudi and Turkish side (the militant Salafi and Sunni side) in this complex conflict. Its enthusiasm should surely be open to question. William Hague, the foreign Secretary, did at least mention the possibility that the ‘activists’ may have been responsible for bad things in the Commons yesterday, but he is still an enthusiast for a process which is headed rapidly towards intervention, and which accords Damascus absolutely no right to defend itself from attack.

That is, in effect, a cancellation of Syria’s national sovereignty. What forces do we have, able to replace Syrian national sovereignty with a stable and peaceful government of that territory, a complicated and dangerously unstable balance of forces? Our supposedly benevolent interventions have already displaced untold numbers of Christians in Iraq, and caused who-knows-what terrors and miseries in ‘liberated’ Libya. Why are we so sure we will do any better this time?

Pop goes the Monarchy: The Queen listened to Paul McCartney - and I heard the end of the Royal Family

Speaking as a convinced and unshakeable monarchist, I'm really glad the Jubilee is over. It was awful.

The worst moment of all was the Buckingham Palace concert, where the poor Queen pledged allegiance to the vile new culture of talentless celebrity. Any institution that has to suck up to Grace Jones and Paul McCartney to get down with the kids has plainly lost the will to live.

It is a measure of how bad things have got that Her Majesty has to pretend to like the cacophonous, semi-literate, musically trite rubbish that seems to have invaded almost every space in this country. I bet she loathes it, really.
The Queen had to suck up to Grace Jones and Paul McCartney as part of the Jubilee concert

The Queen had to suck up to Grace Jones and Paul McCartney as part of the Jubilee concert

Actually, though it is almost dangerous to say so, there are still quite a few people who actively dislike pop music, not just because of its ugly intrusiveness but also because of the sort of people who make it, and because of the message it ceaselessly spreads through millions of loudspeakers and millions of headphones clamped to millions of heads.

Its songs are the hymns and anthems of the modern religion of The Self. Self-pity. Self-indulgence. Drugs. Loveless sex. They are the exact opposite of the Queen's pledge, made on her 21st birthday in 1947, that 'My whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service'.

I really do wonder how all the complacent commentators, who have praised the Monarch for trying to live up to this pledge, can square this with their equally gushing praise for the concert.

The Britain celebrated last week was one which laughs at ideas such as duty and service, and which has jeered at the Queen for most of her reign precisely because she stands for these things – which it regards as stuffy and outmoded.

Only by treating her as a harmless, meaningless old granny, to be simultaneously indulged and ignored, can the Beatles generation bring themselves to clap along to a funky electric version of God Save The Queen. It's them she needs to be saved from.

As for the strange sopping procession of boats down the Thames, I have yet to work out what it was supposed to mean. The first message of it, to me, was to remind me that the Useless Tories and New Labour's closet republicans had combined, in the usual mixture of spite on one side and feebleness on the other, to get rid of the Royal Yacht.

The second was that we no longer have a Navy, so a Fleet Review at Spithead would have been an embarrassing display of national decline.

Twenty-odd years hence, give or take a decade, when Buckingham Palace is a museum and the Windsors are pensioned exiles, some people will say: 'Who would have thought it, amid all that enthusiasm in 2012, that the British Monarchy had so little time left to run?'

Well, I would.

The truth seeps out of Syria

I have been contacted by a group of Western women who live in Syria and who believe that most of what the world is being told about that country is false.

As far as I can discover, they are not stooges of what they agree to be a rather nasty government in Damascus, but exactly what they say they are: normal human beings caught up in a political tornado. For obvious reasons, I have promised to protect their identities.

I urge you to read what follows, because it is important, because our emotional interventions in other countries never do any good, and because it is vital that people resist attempts to drag us into Syria, too, by feeding us one-sided atrocity propaganda.

This sort of propaganda has a price. I hope you have noticed the continuing tally of deaths of selfless British soldiers in Afghanistan, in a cause long ago abandoned.

And I hope you have also noticed that Libya, 'rescued' by us a few months ago, is now a failed state whose main international airport was recently taken over by gangsters, and where unjustly arrested prisoners are starved and tortured in secret dungeons.

One of my informants from Syria writes of the 'activists' we hear so much about: 'These protesters are not peaceful, flower-carrying people wanting freedom. No, they are weapon-toting killers who snipe, who ambush, who fire upon the army with the sole purpose of inciting riot and mayhem.'

She blames Salafis, ultra-puritan Muslims influenced by Saudi teachings, who loathe and threaten Syria's minorities of Alawites and Christians. She says many of the 'activists' are foreigners, a view shared by all my informants. Many of the 'activists' are armed.

Armed intervention is in fact well under way, uncondemned by the UN, which readily attacks the Syrian government for defending itself. Another writes: 'I have seen reports of opposition rallies which showed pictures of pro-government rallies, and reports purporting to be from the north Syrian countryside, where it has been an incredibly wet year, which appear to have been taken in some desert. The news being accepted as truth by BBC World News is so biased these days that I no longer believe what they say about anything any more, after more than 60 years of crediting them with the truth.'

She says she has spoken to a man who took part in a march at Hama last summer. He 'was worried for his safety, but was given a red rose to carry and assured the whole thing would be calm and orderly, and seeing many other men from the mosque joining in with their small sons, he agreed. They walked for a very few minutes, the unarmed police watching them from the wayside, then a man next to him pulled out a gun and shot the nearest policeman dead.'

A riot followed, reported by foreign TV stations as a police attack on peaceful marchers.

I expect to have more to say on this in weeks to come.


The Liberal Democrat Vince Cable is being called a 'traitor' to the Coalition because he has been having phone conversations with the Labour leader, Ed Miliband. Well, I'm not sure you can 'betray' a grubby, unprincipled, power-seeking pact such as the Coalition.

But if a Lib Dem talking to Labour is bad, how much worse is Mr Slippery's regular contact with Anthony Blair, including a visit to Chequers?

The truth is that all the parties are now really one anti-British politically correct monster, and the only thing that voters can influence (if that) is the arrangement of their faces in the group photographs.

I repeat my prediction here that the Coalition will break up next year, that Nicholas Clegg will go off to be a Euro-Commissioner, while Vince takes over the leadership of his party. The Tories will then run a minority government, pretending to be 'tough' but not getting any of their Bills through. Then, after the 2015 Election, Vince will go into Coalition with Ed.

Oh, and the EU referendum? If it happens, it will be rigged. If there's  still a majority  for leaving, it  will be ignored.

What is so Good about Democracy? What’s wrong with ‘Libertarianism’? And who has the right to review what?

Again and again, in articles and discussion programmes,  I hear the phrase ‘democratically-elected’ used as if it is a synonym for ‘automatically good’. Thus, whatever one might say about the Queen, a President would be ‘democratically-elected’. And so he would in some way be more legitimate than any other head of state.

Why do people believe this? What reason do they have to believe it? Has it proved to be reliable in human history?

Contrary to the beliefs of most, neither of the two great free civilisations in the world have any principled attachment to being mass (let alone universal) suffrage democracies. The original U.S. Constitution says very little indeed about voting, which was left to the individual states. The founding fathers of the USA would have been appalled by the idea of it. Thatis one reason why they built their capital (whose long prospects and wide avenues were I think designed to make it easy to put down revolution with grapeshot) in the remote swamps on the Potomac to avoid the dangers (which they much feared ) of mob rule.

In many parts of the early USA, the principle of ‘no representation without taxation” which is after all the corollary of “no taxation without representation”) meant only 70% of adult males qualified for the vote.  This proportion grew during the mid-19th century , largely because political parties wanted to expand the market for their lies and promises. Secret ballots did not come to the USA till the late 19th century.  As for the USA’s slave and freed slave population, largely black-skinned, we all know how recently they were allowed the vote in reality.

The US Senate was specifically designed to be protected from ‘the fury of democracy’, hence the fact that Senators have much longer terms in office than members of the House of Representatives. Until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, which faced strong and honourable opposition from several leading figures, U.S. Senators were not in any case elected by popular vote, but chosen by their state’s legislatures.

The USA of course has a third (wholly unelected) chamber of government, the Supreme Court, which is in many ways more powerful than either the House, the Senate or the Presidency. Many of the most radical changes in American life, notably the legalising of abortion, have been brought about by this body. I suspect that left-wingers would be alarmed at any suggestion that it should be democratically elected.

Britain’s reformers, likewise, were far from keen on the rule of the masses. Cromwell loathed (and executed ) the Levellers. The great factions of the 18th and early 19th centuries were not remotely democratic.  The freedom and order of this country were largely the result of an adversarial parliament (in both Houses), Jury trial, the Bill of Rights, Magna Carta and the Habeas Corpus Act (see my ‘Abolition of Liberty’ for details of this, unless you feel unable to ready my books, in which case, take my word for it).

Mass suffrage democracy, when it actually came about, was, to begin with anyway, an advantage for the Tory Party which – in the days before the dismantling of marriage – could rely on the women’s vote as being solidly socially conservative. This paradox has now come to an end, but it has always made me laugh.

Have we benefited from mass suffrage? In one very important way, we have suffered terribly from it. In what must be one of his most prophetic statements, Winston Churchill warned the House of Commons on 13th May 1901 that ‘the wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings’ .

His prediction was borne out with great speed. Surely any thoughtful person must be struck with a cold feeling round the heart when he reads Aldous Huxley’s 1947 preface to ‘Brave New World’ and comes across this passage:  ‘But meanwhile we are in the first phase of what is perhaps the penultimate revolution. Its next phase may be atomic warfare, in which case we do not have to bother with prophecies about the future. But it is conceivable that we may have enough sense, if not to stop fighting altogether, at least to behave as rationally as did our eighteenth-century ancestors. The unimaginable horrors of the Thirty Years War actually taught men a lesson, and for more than a hundred years the politicians and generals of Europe consciously resisted the temptation to use their military resources to the limits of destructiveness or (in the majority of conflicts) to go on fighting until the enemy was totally annihilated. They were aggressors, of course, greedy for profit and glory; but they were also conservatives, determined at all costs to keep their world intact, as a going concern. For the last thirty years there have been no conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left. The last conservative statesman was the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne; and when he wrote a letter to the Times, suggesting that the First World War should be concluded with a compromise, as most of the wars of the eighteenth century had been, the editor of that once conservative journal refused to print it. The nationalistic radicals had their way, with the consequences that we all know --Bolshevism, Fascism, inflation, depression, Hitler, the Second World War, the ruin of Europe and all but universal famine.’

The ‘nationalistic radicals’ were of course democrats, including Churchill himself.  They had made a popular, democratic case for war to stimulate recruitment and to permit the high taxation and general ruin and regimentation which the war involved. But they could not in the end control the 'democratic' patriotic monster they had created, and dared not end the war, even once it was clear that it would be a disaster to continue it.

Nuclear weapons, by promising a repeat of the 30 Years War with knobs on, restrained the warmongering populist tendency for a while. But when the Cold war ended they were quick to find new battlefields, as they strove to impose ‘democracy’ on the planet with fire and the sword. It is public opinion and 'democracy' which are being swayed, by 'democratic' TV reports into supporting the next war, an intervention in Syria.

Huxley’s statement (in 1947) that ‘for the last 30 years there have been no conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left’  is even more prophetic than Churchill’s. How else could Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan be regarded as conservatives? Theyb got away with it only because real conservatives had died out.

Personally, as I examine the record of ‘democratically-elected’ rulers across the world,  my Cromwellian head begins to be ruled by my Royalist heart, and I start to see the point of giving the headship of the state to the Lord’s Anointed, provided it can be combined with the rule of law, an adversarial parliament, the Bill of Rights, Magna Carta, Jury Trial and Habeas Corpus (in short, the 1689 settlement rightly known as the Glorious Revolution).  

As for ‘democracy’, how is it morally reliable or creditable to grant the ultimate power to political parties? It is these that, in any democracy, actually control access to the legislature. They are controlled by the executive, bought by rich interests, impermeable to the public will. Don’t believe me? Try to become an MP and see what happens. Even primary elections, on the face of it a good idea, can now easily be purchased by millions (see the recent triumph of Mitt Romney, beloved by no-one but also outspent by nobody).

The trite conclusion, now a cliche,  is that democracy is the worst of all systems, except for the others. The implied suggestion is that we must have this disreputable fraud, or subject ourselves to Hitler, Mussolini, the Chinese Communist Party , Stalin or Ceausescu. But I don’t think that is really the choice at all.

I tend to think that the systems of government of Britain and the USA, before universal suffrage, were far better at delivering ordered liberty , peace and prosperity (the ultimate aims of any government) than their modern successors.

 

*****

 

Next, a word on why I always put ‘libertarian’ in inverted commas.  Most thinking humans, in our post-Christian world , yearn for a universal touchstone of goodness which will somehow substitute for the Christian faith. For some it is the market, for some it is ‘liberty’, for others it is equality.  It is easily demonstrable that the market sometimes, even often, lays waste valuable things, destroys customs and taboos, tosses aside human feelings. It is obvious to the slowest thinker that ( as Karl Marx pointed out) the freedom of all is impossible, as it will lead to conflicts between groups who wish to be free to do something which tramples on the freedom of another.  ‘No man fights freedom’, wrote the sage of Trier,  ’He fights at most the freedom of others’. Well,  exactly. The trouble with these ideas is that they simply lack the universal power over all humanity  of the Sermon on the Mount and the Commandments, and that they are based on a desire for power, rather than on Christianity’s preference for love, and its central suspicion of power and the mob, as so graphically set out in the story of the Passion. And sometimes I think a little light mockery is the best way to make people think. After all, one day they may realise that it is possible they are mistaken.

 

****

And finally a few thoughts on why someone who chooses to call my books ‘drivel’ (yet now admits he hasn’t even read one of them, because he found it too hard) can reasonably be asked if he has any work of his own which we can see, to see if he is qualified to say so. I didn’t stop him saying so, or censor or disallow his post. I allow all kinds of people to post the most astonishing rubbish about me here.  I just questioned his qualification.

Actually, had he made a TV programme, exhibited a painting or produced a play, or done any creative thing involving the public giving of himself, he would be qualified to have a view.  I tend to think, having written and presented four TV programmes and written five books (four published, one to come out in the autumn) that I have risked myself in the public square and can therefore pronounce on other people’s works. As it happens, I seldom write bad reviews of books (I make exceptions where their authors are self-serving political figures, who are not primarily authors).  If I am sent a book which I think is really bad, I generally decline to write a review at all.  My criticisms of films are essentially dissents from universal praise, and I believe that they are informed and thoughtful and that some readers have found them helpful.

 

What is the purpose of criticisms of such things, by the way? It varies. In the case of Philip Pullman’s children’s books, I wished to warn parents that the stories are propaganda. In the case of the recent film ‘The King’s Speech’, I wished to ensure that the film’s severe deviation from historical truth was placed on record, because of a fear that it would  (as historical fiction on film often does) become the accepted version of a historical incident. I thought the mangling of ‘Tinker Tailor’ in the Gary Oldman film (and the comparable mangling of ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ in a recent TV version) illuminated our cultural decline and the working methods of the cultural revolution.

I like to think that I can tell the truth in plain English, even where it will get me disliked. But I think I would hesitate to come to a writer’s weblog, cloddishly and blatantly misrepresent his views, and - when patiently invited to discover what those views actually are - to dismiss his books as ‘drivel’  to his face, not having made any serious effort to read or understand those books. If I have done anything comparable here, I regret it. But I don’t think I have.

Loss and Gain, Past and Present, and who talked of a Golden Age?

Back at my desk (I wasn’t that far away – funny that when I go on assignment readers always assume I’m on holiday, whereas when I go on holiday they assume I’m on assignment) I thought it was time for some conversation with readers. But before I forget, those who were interested in my reflections on Philip Larkin can find my review of the new Collected Poems in the American conservative magazine ‘National Review’ here.

I’d like to address some readers who told me that the early 1950s in Britain were not some sort of ‘Golden Age’. Well, let the record show that I have never said that they were. Not only that. I have repeatedly said that I have no such view. The past is in any case gone and irrecoverable. Even if we wished to return to it, we could not. We study it carefully, so as to understand our own times better, and also to avoid choosing – as our parents and grandparents did – the wrong future.

We also have the tedious allegation that people have always complained that the past was better than the present. Well a) that is not what I am saying and b) I don’t believe this is true of all times and c) what if, on some occasions, they are right to mourn the loss of good things in the past?  Does that mean that their complaints are invalidated because others have mistakenly done so at other times? This is not serious debate. And grown-up people should steer clear of it.

So a belief in a ‘Golden Age’, and a desire to return to such an age, are not the argument. The argument is about whether we have lost anything valuable, and if so, whether we could then by thought and care have preserved it, and whether we might now or in the future, by thought and care, restore or recover it.  And I would be pleased, if, *just for once*, one of these braying, repetitive and thoughtless critics actually responded rationally to the reply I shall now give.

I was born in 1951 and so of course did not directly experience the Coronation. I was in my pram at the time. Careful readers will have noted that I was referring not to my own experience but to the film of the Coronation which has just been reissued as a DVD. Like so many such films (I believe there’s a positive treasury of evocative footage of the era on the British Council website) it shows glimpses of a Britain now as vanished as the lost city of Atlantis. These glimpses are brief (they weren’t the purpose of the film) but they are very evocative for me as, when I did grow conscious of my surroundings, the people, cityscape and countryside of my youth were rather similar. The sight of that Britain preserved on colour film awakes many memories.

This particular Britain did not die in one night, but vanished slowly and in part. It survived in many ways until the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Traces of it could be found in a few remote corners much later than that.  I tend to think its death was marked by a series of apparently unconnected events – Winston Churchill’s funeral, the final disappearance of steam railway locomotives, the abolition of the old coinage, the burning off of the old town gas in great braziers in the streets at around the same time, and the feeling of despond and darkness that came after the Yom Kippur War and Ted Heath’s Three Day Week. Not coincidentally, the country was taking the Brussels yoke at the same time, ceding its sovereignty to what would become the EU.

What was different? Well, my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’ mentions many of these things, really a matter of the ways in which people thought and behaved, rather than measurable in material possessions and material living standards.

Even a book wasn’t really long enough to explain all the things which had changed, nor the how, nor the why, though I do recommend it to anyone who is interested.  It is not the book my enemies have claimed it to be. So my article, with only a little space, sought to summarise them thus :  “In 1953, criminals were afraid of the police, school pupils were under the thumb of teachers, couples stayed married till they died, we made the most of the things we used, hardly anyone lived off the State, our Parliament and courts made and maintained our laws, poor people were thin rather than fat, and the strongest drug around was aspirin. What is more, we loved our country and respected its traditions, laws  and institutions.

Every educated person would have known the words that open the Coronation film, John of Gaunt’s dying speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II which ends  ‘. . . this earth, this realm, this England’. “

I said nothing here about wife-beating, chilblains, smoking, homosexuality,  hygiene, food quality or the death penalty – though most of these subjects are in fact tackled insome detail in ‘the Abolition of Britain’, which I do wish my critics would actually read, rather than thinking that they have read it when they haven’t (I can always tell).

Yet one contributor rages at me   : ‘ The good old days? The police, teachers, parents, husbands, etc used to beat people up on a regular basis. Innocents hanged, I see there is still no mention of Sam Hallam. Sexual abuse in the home tolerated, "It's nothing to do with us!" Homosexuals imprisoned. Single parents, and their children, they had an older word for love child then, ostracised and made to feel ashamed. Backstreet abortions. People having to lie in court in order to get a divorce. Kids who failed the 11-plus condemned to be industry fodder.’

Let’s take this piece by piece. ‘The ‘good old days’ is his phrase, not mine.  I never use it. Criminals now terrorise whole areas of our cities, unrestrained by any fear of the police. I am on record as saying that the police should be free to thump badly-behaved people within reasonable limits, because it would be simply silly to deny that this ever happened, or to deny that their authority rested to some extent on their freedom to do so. Anyone is welcome to argue about whether this is a good thing, but not by snorting away in a superior fashion about what a bad person I am for accepting this rather obvious truth. They should bear in mind that it is a choice. You can either have the police licensed to thump low-lifes, or you can have the low-lifes in charge. No utopia is available, in which the police are soppy and the bad people are well-behaved.

Teachers have ceded control of classrooms to children who refuse to listen or maintain order.  Those who wish to learn are abandoned. To some extent, this is the result of the abolition of teachers’ freedom to inflict corporal punishment. There are, of course, several other reasons, but these are also connected with or national moral decline. Once again there is a choice here. Which do you want? Disorder, or the cane?

Violence and sexual abuse against children in the home, usually inflicted by step-parents is horribly common in the present day. The fate of children taken ‘into care’ is often appalling.  I don’t know whether this abuse could be said to be  ‘tolerated’ but it certainly happens under the modern dispensation. Whether it would be possible to quantify such abuse under the old regime and under the new, I do not know - but I am by no means sure that the ‘enlightened’ society of today would come out any better. The same is true of men beating women.

Of course wife-beating was a problem in the past. But now that we have all but abolished marriage, is such violence at an end? I rather think not. On the contrary, as Anthony Daniels has argued, in a society where fidelity is far from being the norm, jealous men are much readier to use violence to enforce it than they used to be. Given that children are so much better off in stable marriages, and that the outcome for women in this case is not that different (and may well be better for married women than unmarried ones – I await reliable facts) there isn’t even much of a dilemma.

I don’t know what the case of Sam Hallam has to do with this. There will never be a perfect world. Justice systems will always make mistakes. My own view is that they make more nowadays than they used to. The jury system has been unacceptably weakened, both by majority verdicts and by the abandoning of any qualification for jury service (this is explained at length in ‘The Abolition of Liberty’). It has also been weakened by fake conservative Home Secretaries such as Michael Howard, who abolished the right to silence, and by the post-Macpherson frenzy, when the double jeopardy rule was abandoned.  The presumption of innocence, once quite strong in theory and practice, has now become a very weak force in practice.

Opponents of the death penalty claim to be worried about the execution of inncoents. they aren't really. It is just a rhetorical point. Innocents die for all kinds of reasons (millions in abortions, to which the anti-execution lobby seem to have no ojection) Many innocents are murdered, far more than used to be in the days ogf the death penalty, sometimes by convicted murderers who have been released. Convicted killers go free after a few years in non-punitive prisons. Innocents are also shot by armed police. Homicide and homicidal violence (which would have resulted in hundreds of deaths a year if we still had the hospitals of 1964) have increased enormously, as has the carrying of lethal weapons by criminals.

Meanwhile, in the brave new world preferred by my critics, people are arrested and fined for expressing unfashionable opinions about homosexuality, and often face harassment at work for expressing conservative or Christian opinions, events unthinkable in 1953.  By the way, I obviously need to state here, yet again, that I fully support (and am countless times on record as supporting) the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which ensured that homosexual acts between consenting adults were no longer subject to criminal prosecution. I have to say this because my opponents either have not troubled to find out my views, or hope that others will not know my real position.

My views on the revolution in the treatment of unmarried mothers are set out fully in ‘The Abolition of Britain’, along with an interesting history of how this change came about. I am happy to discuss this with anyone who is really interested, but the author of the above caricature of recent history may not be terribly interested in the facts.

Children deprived of the opportunity of selection into high-quality free state education moulder, rot and despair in bog standard comprehensive schools far worse than any Secondary Modern.  The best guarantee of racial harmony is a strong fellow-feeling brought about by full integration of migrants. While disgusting racialist signs in windows have disappeared we have instead whole cities in which large numbers of citizens have no converse with those of different ethnic origins, and often do not even speak the same language. Is this progress? Or the exchange of one evil for another? I don’t like either of them. I want tightly-controlled immigration, an end to multiculturalism and strong efforts to ensure true integration. That is one lesson we can certainly learn from the past 60 years.

I also know that there was a serious increase in crime after (and as a result of) the huge social dislocation of the 1939-45 war. That was the reason for the making of the famous film ‘The Blue Lamp’ I know that there was delinquent behaviour before 1939. I don’t believe that the past was a paradise.

Here’s what I do think. That there is no reason to assume that our material advances, which are undoubted, came at the necessary and unavoidable cost of a huge moral decay. I cannot see why we could not have come to eat better, to be better housed, to be better-travelled than we were in 1953.  Just because the two things happened at the same time, does not mean that one was the cause of the other. But some of our current woes can certainly be traced to the dismantling of moral barriers, against selfishness and extravagance of all kinds.

Our period of moral decline has also, as I tried to point out, been a period of economically moral decline, in which we have ceased to make what we use, and have become a debtor nation, unable to supply our own needs through our own work and skills, and living on morally dubious funny money. I think our moral, social and cultural decay has something to do with it. This interesting article by Larry Elliott in Monday’s ‘Guardian’ must be sobering for believers in ‘progress’. Read it here.

In the same paper, the fascinating obituary of the brilliant aeronautical engineer, Sir James Hamilton, here contains the following passage, discomfiting to believers in educational ‘progress’:  ‘In 1973 Hamilton [who had attended a Scottish Academy (Penicuik Academy, now vanished), the north-of-the-border equivalent of a grammar school] moved to the Cabinet Office as deputy secretary, serving under prime ministers Edward Heath and Harold Wilson. From 1976 to 1983 he headed the Department of Education and Science as permanent secretary. Both during this period and later in the Margaret Thatcher years, he became seriously concerned at what he termed "extremely mediocre" education standards in science and engineering at some universities and technical colleges.’

A couple of other points. The petulant ire of tobacco smokers against attempts to discourage their smelly and dangerous habit sometimes leads them into hysteria, and so into laughable category errors. Banning smoking from pubs really isn’t the equivalent of Stalin’s 1937 purge, or even remotely comparable with anything the KGB ever did. The freedom to damage your own health, and to bereave and profoundly distress your close family in a long-drawn-out and painful way, is also not comparable to the freedoms of speech, thought and assembly, which are precious national possessions.

Another misunderstanding comes from someone who suspects that the centralised NCA may be re effective against cannabis than our decentralised police forces. It is not a lack of manpower or organisation that is behind the British state’s failure to interdict drug possession. It is a deliberate lack of will. There is absolutely no reason to suppose, in any case, that nationalised law enforcement would be any more efficient or effective than non-nationalised law-enforcement.

I am wary of comparisons between this country and Asian countries which have ferocious laws against drug smuggling. I know little of these societies or their laws, suspect that drug abuse is widespread in them, and think the death penalty should be reserved for heinous murder and possibly treason, and then only in countries with the presumption of innocence, proper (unanimous verdict) jury trial and a free press. I am also very much against the detention of prisoners, whether convicted or unconvicted,  in squalid, ill-supervised and overcrowded conditions.

Maybe later in the week I might discuss the claims of ‘Republicanism’ versus ‘Monarchy’ , and of course of that strange form of delusion known as ‘democracy’, under which people repeatedly vote for their own cynical subjugation by organised gangs of habitual fraudsters, and pretend they can choose their government.

Their dream is a 'British FBI' - the reality may be our own KGB

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

From time to time the British media completely miss a story of huge significance. This is one of those times.

We are about to get a national police force under direct government control. They like to call it 'Britain’s FBI’. But Britain is not the USA and does not need an FBI.

For the sort of crime that concerns most people is small and local –  burglary, gangs of menacing youths in the street, shoplifting and vandalism. This does not need some posturing agency, just a few thousand plods on foot patrol with the freedom to use their own initiative.

Anyway, aren’t the grandiose, puffed-up MI5, and the equally self-important anti-terror squad of the Metropolitan Police, quite enough  to deal with the supposed terror menace? Neither of them saw the last major terrorist episode coming, nor were they any use after it happened, but who knows? Maybe they’ll do better next time.

Even so, the Government is already hiring top management for a sinister and worrying body to be known as the National Crime Agency. This is unconstitutional, as Parliament has only just begun to debate it. Interestingly, the Bill to create the agency began life in the House of Lords, a favourite route for laws the Government wants to keep quiet about.

The project is arrogant and anti-British. The NCA’s director-general will have the power to order Chief Constables about. He will answer directly to the Home Secretary.

It is, in short, the very thing that, since the days of Sir Robert Peel, Parliament has striven to prevent –  a national police force under the direct control of the government. In Peel’s time, MPs understood that such a force, if it fell into the wrong hands, would be a terrible engine of oppression. That is why police forces in this country have always been local (by the way, an equally worrying scheme to centralise all Scottish forces under the Justice Minister is well advanced).

An earlier failed attempt to do the same thing, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), flopped because it lacked the crucial power over Chief Constables. SOCA will disappear into the NCA, along with some other shadowy bodies. The NCA’s own officers will be civil servants, subject to government orders – quite unlike police officers who take an oath to uphold the law and can refuse what they believe to be unlawful instructions.

This is how Big Brother states are born. You are watching it happen.

I hope the Speaker takes the Home Secretary to task for hiring NCA staff without parliamentary authority. And I hope that peers and MPs, as their forebears would have done, chuck out the whole slimy thing.

It is not Britain’s FBI. It could be Britain’s KGB.

Fake tears for Syria

Why do William Hague and the BBC want to help Saudi Arabia set up a fanatical Islamist state in Syria? Have we learned nothing from the failed hopes of Egypt and Libya? Don’t we realise that the ‘activists’ we support are just as capable of conducting massacres as the pro-Assad militias?

It is our diplomatic intervention, and that of the USA, that has unleashed sectarian civil war in this complex country. Those who want to stampede you into supporting British interference in Syria know that ‘weapons of mass destruction’ won’t work any more. So they seek to bamboozle you with fake humanitarian concern. Do not be fooled.

Days when we were happy and glorious

Sixty glorious years, my foot. I feel for the poor Queen, who deserves nothing so much as to put her feet up for a bit, having to go through all this performance.

What is there to celebrate? Get hold of the heartbreaking film of the 1953 Coronation, and try to imagine what the next one will look like.

The ceremony itself is so Christian  (and Protestant at that) and so British, that if it happened these days it would immediately be subject to 10,000 complaints to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.

In 1953, criminals were afraid of the police, school pupils were under the thumb of teachers, couples stayed married till they died, we made the most of the things we used, hardly anyone lived off the State, our Parliament and courts made and maintained our laws, poor people were thin rather than fat, and the strongest drug around was aspirin.

What is more, we loved our country and respected its traditions, laws  and institutions.

Every educated person would have known the words that open the Coronation film, John of Gaunt’s dying speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II which ends  ‘. . . this earth, this realm, this England’.

Of course it’s not the Queen’s fault that  it has all gone wrong in her long reign, though I tend to think that she has been more multicultural and politically correct than she needed to. And there would have been something wonderful about her refusing (say) to give Royal assent to Britain’s membership of the Common Market, which effectively ended 1,000 years of history, and her own role.

And listen carefully and you’ll notice that most of the current praise for the Monarchy is fake, and comes from people who hate it in their hearts but recognise that the time is not yet ripe for what they really want.

They’ll always say that of course Her Majesty is brilliant but perhaps the question can be re-opened when she  is gone. There’s a similar theme in the opinion polls, with much support for  the stupid idea of ‘skipping a generation’ to Prince William.

This is of course the view of the still seething millions of Diana fanatics, who brought the country close to mob rule when the Princess died.

They are not monarchists, just  celebrity worshippers.

* * *

War on Drugs latest: I saw this on Tuesday in a seafront park on the South Coast. A lavishly tattooed mother is supervising her brood in the sunshine. One of them, aged about 11, openly pulls from his pocket a neatly-rolled cannabis spliff, lights it with an experienced flourish, and begins to smoke it.

* * *

It is clear that the Leveson Inquiry has already made up its mind that Britain’s press needs  to be bound and gagged by regulation. What an odd country in which a free press is considered a danger, and politicians are not.

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