Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 311

They Tuck you Up, Your Mum and Dad

I am lucky enough to have got hold of a copy of the new Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, a majestic volume edited by Archie Burnett, and now published on both sides of the Atlantic (Faber and Faber in Britain , Farrar Strauss and Giroux in the USA).  It’s a huge undertaking, a tombstone of a book (the right word, when thinking about the lugubrious Larkin, the poet of cemeteries, tombs and impending death. But we’ll come to that) .But  it’s a real delight for those who want to know the history and backgrounds of the poems.

My guess is that Larkin will survive this age, and be remembered and read for a very long time to come.

I hope very much that his current fame gives way to a deeper understanding. Too many people have only heard of him because of the crude and (even to me ) excessively pessimistic opening line of ‘This Be The Verse’ – the Adrian Mitchell parody ‘They tuck you up, your Mum and Dad’ is very funny and in some ways rather better than the original, which is so relentlessly, hopelessly miserable that it richly deserves to be mocked.  And then there’s the other one about sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley and the Beatles.

These are not his best work, or anything like it.  ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is more like it, evoking so many things at once - not least, for me the exact feeling of a long slow train journey on a sunny afternoon, in the days when Edwardian England was still just visible amidst the tacky modernity of Macmillan’s Britain, of proper compartments with sliding doors and sagging, dusty seats you could sink into, windows you could open,  and pictures of obscure holiday resorts on the walls, As Larkin wrote  ‘now and then a smell of grass displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth’ .

A few carriages down, they were no doubt serving brown Windsor soup in a somnolent dining car. I used to enjoy the toasted teacakes and jam in the old dining car, on the way down from York, as i dmired the many gargantuan power stations that stand about the line there. But, as usual, I digress.

And then there’s the evocation of the enormous, high wide skies of the flat lands from Hull down to Grantham on the old North-Eastern line , ‘the river’s level drifting breadth began, where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet’ …’all afternoon, through the tall heat that slept for miles inland, a slow and stopping curve southwards we kept’. Who else would couple ‘tall’ and ‘heat’, and make it make sense? I see, as I read the phrase, the great clouds high above the black earth fields.

And then something important starts to happen. It happens all the more convincingly, all the more memorably, because you are alone in that musty old compartment , in the sealed world of the train as it trundles through the stifling day.

If you haven’t read it, find it,  and read it like a story and I think you will find it hard ever to forget it again, or to resist the powerful pictures which it forms in the mind as you do so. I never come into London on the King’s Cross line without one line or other of it coming to life in my mind.

I have said elsewhere that I think Larkin is, without meaning to be, and indeed while meaning not to be, a great religious poet.

His grasp of the importance and power of death, and his willingness to think about death even as he recoils from it in loathing and horror, make him a thousand times more interesting and illuminating than his contemporaries. ’Ambulances’ is one of the most profound meditations on death amidst life that I have ever read, and recalls the shocking words in the Church of England burial service ‘In the midst of life we are in death’.

Death is largely unmentionable in our time, even by poets and often even in Church - where funerals are often spoiled by clergymen intoning that rubbish about how the deceased is ‘only in the next room’ . Pah. A funny sort of next room, with no way through to it from this one, just a slammed, silent door with no handle or lock.

How very much I prefer Larkin’s frank, rather panicky dismay, and the grisly but utterly honest view of our mediaeval forerunners. In the superb parish church at Ewelme in Oxfordshire, with its lovely courtyard of almshouses and its ancient school, still functioning as the village primary, is the grisly carving of Alice de la Pole, once Duchess of Suffolk. Beneath a grand effigy of her as she was in life, in a shadowy chamber at which the visitor must peer from a kneeling or squatting position to see the full effect, is a very different sculpture – the duchess as she will be some time after death, a rotting, skeletal cadaver. I visited this numinous, beautiful place again the other day to check my recollection, and because it is one of the most astonishing and (happily untouristed) sights of southern England.

There are several of these cadavers and other reminders of death in English churches, some more harrowing than others. There's an extraordinarily light-hearted one in Norwich cathedral, in which, beneath a rather cheery skeleton, the inscription reads, roughly :'As Ye Are now, so once was I. As I am now, so shall Ye be'.

The cadavers were done, usually, in the lifetimes of their subjects, who would have confronted (often very skilfully done) images of themselves as corpses, a strange experience.. I strongly suspect that Larkin must have come across them on more than one of his many church visiting expeditions.

He says at one point ( in ‘Aubade’ , another unforgettable reflection on death) that religion is ‘a vast moth-eaten musical brocade, created to pretend we never die’ .

I love the idea of a vast, moth-eaten musical brocade, all faded golds, reds and blues, frayed at the edges and thin enough to let bright sunlight pass through it. And I can easily picture just such a thing hung up in the side-aisle of a little-visited, second-rank cathedral or other great church somewhere in provincial England – perhaps Beverley Minster, close to Larkin’s unbeloved Hull. And it would be hard to come up with a more succinct description of the Church of England as it was before the modernisers got to work. Once again, like all really good poetry, it lodges and settles in the memory without the slightest difficulty.

But what if the brocade, rather than being a pretence and a curtain in front of emptiness, was telling the truth?  What if the brocade was created to proclaim, rather than pretend, that we never die – and that we have come to prefer to believe that death is the end because we do not love the implications of the other idea?

What if the idea that what will survive of us is love, as Larkin suggests in ‘An Arundel Tomb’ is not an almost-instinct, almost true, but the exact truth? What if the trees are coming into leaf, not ‘like something almost being said’ but like something truly being said? Did Larkin ever wonder? I bet he did.

 

Confronting the ‘Prohibition’ Myth

Those interested in the unending drug debate may wish to go here to watch a recent debate organised by the IEA, in which I clashed with Christopher Snowdon and other ‘libertarians’ about the drug laws. One major issue of contention was the incessant pretence by drug decriminalisers that the British 1971 Misuse of drugs Act bears any resemblance whatsoever to US alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.

Why don't you want our children to have as good an education as you, Nick?

In a horrible, ignorant speech last week, the Deputy Prime Minister revealed himself as a limited, conformist slave to conventional wisdom. He  is also a wretched, skulking hypocrite, as I shall explain later. He ought to know better.

Thinking people of Left and Right have at last begun to see that comprehensive state schools have failed the country, and, above all, have failed the children of the poor.

Even veteran radical commentators such as Nick Cohen and Mary Ann Sieghart see the sense in selection by ability.

But Mr Clegg is demanding that our great universities should be ruined by the same egalitarian dogma that has wrecked secondary schooling.

Put simply, he wants the best colleges to lower their entry requirements. This will, of course, increase the number of state school pupils who get in. And it will reduce the numbers from private schools.

It is easy to sympathise with this, if you forget that it will also mean that university standards will fall, irrecoverably. It should not be possible to buy privilege in education. It is obvious that ability and merit alone should be our guide.

But that is exactly where we were heading in this country until the Left-liberal levellers got to work. Mr Clegg thinks that ‘little has changed’ in the past 50 years. Oh yes it has. It has got much worse, thanks to people like him.

In 1965, just before most grammar schools and Scottish academies were abolished, 57 per cent of places at Oxford University were taken by pupils from state grammar schools or direct grant schools (independent schools that gave large numbers of free places on merit, a fine system done away with in 1975 in another wave of vindictive Leftist spite).

What is more important, the number of state school entrants was rising rapidly, and had done ever since 1945, when the grammar schools were opened to all who could qualify.

No special concessions were made in those days. The grammar school boys and girls were there by absolute right. These brilliant people still hold high positions in every profession and activity.

But after 1965, the flow dried up, and instead of having a proper, qualified elite, we had to make do with privileged ninnies such as Mr Clegg instead.

Either they had gone to hugely expensive private schools, as he did, or they arrived at the top via the rich, well-connected socialist’s route to privilege, a semi-secret network of excellent state schools, some religious, some with tiny catchment areas where most people cannot afford to live, some with other elaborate arrangements to keep out the masses.

These schools – the Roman Catholic London Oratory that atheist Mr Clegg has visited as a prospective parent is an example – are officially comprehensive. But, in fact, they are comprehensive in the same way that 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terrace house.

What does Mr Clegg plan to do for his children? Does he plan to toss them into a bog-standard comp, where they will have to struggle to learn from demoralised supply teachers amid the shouting, the mobile phone calls and the fights?

Will he then feel his parental duty has been done if, despite the fact that they know very little, they are given privileged access to Oxbridge, but are unable to benefit from its rigour? I doubt it.

He won’t talk about it. He thinks it’s none of our business. Well, he is wrong. He has made it our business by supporting and defending a system that slams the gates of good schools in the faces of all those who are not rich.

Don’t work, Dave, just rest and play

A word of praise for our Prime Minister. The fact that he likes to relax and to spend time with his wife and children is the best thing about him.

I would far rather have a Premier who enjoys his leisure than one who lives his life in meetings, growing pale and gaunt from never seeing the sun.

True, I am much too crusty to see any point in Fruit Ninja. Give me a decent book any day, or an old film.

But a man who lingers over an extra glass of wine with his Sunday lunch is far less dangerous than a glowering sobersides who ignores his children while he stares at spreadsheets.

And remember, like all politicians, he can only do damage while he is working.

Tories should be wary about making it easier to sack people. Since they don’t do the job they claim to do, and haven’t for years, voters might get it into their heads that it is time to sack the Tory Party and replace it with something better.

I can't really see why we fuss so much about convicted prisoners being given the vote. We already elect the sort of governments that burglars and muggers dream of.

Why would the inhabitants of Wormwood Scrubs or Strangeways not vote for Kenneth Clarke, Secretary of State for Injustice?

He provides them with prisons full of legal and illegal drugs.

He gives them in-cell TV sets and snooker tables, multiple menus and relaxed regimes. The only thing they might object to is that he makes it so difficult for them to get in (15 offences necessary to qualify, in most cases) and insists on cutting all sentences by at least half.

I know who’ll get the convicts’ vote.

We are promised that five calls to the police about one problem will now guarantee that they take action. I don’t want to sound too demanding, but shouldn’t one call be enough?

During the Cold War, I did all I could to oppose those who wanted to get rid of our nuclear weapons. Only the USSR would have benefited. Now I’m baffled to find many old Left-wingers happy to spend billions on modernising the Trident system, which has no conceivable point now that the Soviet Union is dead and gone for ever.

The main threat to this country’s independence is the growing need to import energy. As Vladimir Putin has proved, natural gas is a weapon that can actually be used.

Windmills will not save us. Scrap Trident and spend the money on dozens of nuclear power stations. Soon.

Bicycling through an idyllic village in Cameron country on a perfect May day, I was musing on moving there when I saw coming towards me a gross figure in jeans, T-shirt and one of those stiff-brimmed baseball caps that invariably betoken outstanding stupidity and aggression.

A cigarette was screwed into the middle of his face. He was being towed along by a pair of slobbering weapon dogs, slightly better looking than he was. There is no escape from our nation’s moral and cultural decay. It is everywhere.

Why defeat an evil empire – and then embrace a stupid one?

The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.
Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.
Those of us who pay attention to history, politics and truth have known this for many years.
But as the EU’s ‘experts’ and ‘technocrats’ insanely destroy the economies of Greece, Spain and Italy, it must now surely be obvious to everyone.
The EU, far from being a bright future, offers nothing but bankruptcy and decline.
If the old USSR was an Evil Empire – and it was – the EU is the Stupid Empire. Obsessed with the idea that the nation state is obsolete, the EU has sought to bind its colonies tightly, while pretending they are still independent.
This is why what is essentially a modern German empire is not held together by armies, but by a sticky web of regulations and a currency that destroys prosperity wherever it is introduced (with one important exception, Germany itself, for whom the euro means cheap exports to Asia).
It is also why it has been built backwards, starting with the roof and ending with the foundations. Old-fashioned empires were at least honest.
They marched in, plundered everything they could cart away, killed or imprisoned resisters, suborned collaborators, and imposed their language on the conquered.
Other humiliating measures followed – forcing the newly-subject people to live according to the invader’s time, to pay special taxes to their new masters, to surrender control of their borders, to use the invader’s weights and measures, salute the invader’s flag and obey the invader’s laws.
Eventually, after a few years of imposed occupation money, set at a viciously rigged exchange rate, the subjugated nation’s economy would have been reduced to such a devastated and dependent state that it could be forced to accept the imperial currency.
The EU, which cannot admit to being what it really is, has to achieve the same means sideways or backwards. The colonial laws are disguised as local Acts of Parliament. The flag is slowly introduced, the borders stealthily erased, the weights and measures and the clocks gradually brought into conformity.
Resources (such as Britain’s fisheries) are bureaucratically plundered, giant taxes are  quietly levied, but collected by our own Revenue & Customs as our ‘contribution’, our banking industry is menaced.
Opponents are politically marginalised, collaborators discreetly rewarded, armed forces quietly dismantled or placed under supranational command. It is happening before our eyes and yet, while the exit is still just open, we make no move to depart.
Our grandchildren will wonder, bitterly, why we were so feeble.

Faces from a lost age of innocence

ITV’s poignant record of several real lives began 49 years ago with Seven Up! and has now reached 56 Up.Hardly anybody can watch this account of disappointed hopes, redemption and human fortitude without tears.
But what makes me saddest of all is to see the faces of the original children. You don’t see seven-year-old children with faces like that any more.
The innocence has already gone. How did we let that happen?

When a new British Prime Minister takes office, he goes immediately to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands with the Monarch. When a new French President takes office, he goes immediately to Berlin to kiss hands with the Chancellor of Germany. Why does nobody comment on this? Is it because it is too embarrassing to acknowledge the tragic truth, that France is a German vassal?

Attention: Mind the claptrap, please

Can I have your attention, all airports, airlines and railway companies – especially railway companies? Will you all please stop making endless, stupid, pointless announcements?
I know how to do up my seat belt. I know what to do when oxygen masks descend. I know my lifejacket has a whistle to attract attention. I also know that, if this plane crashes on land or water, I will die. I know where the train is going. That is why I got on it, to go there. Anyway, there was an illuminated sign on the platform and a sticker on the window, which have already told me – not to mention the station announcer.
I promise to get off when I get to my stop, and to mind the gap between the train and the platform. I know there is a selection of sweet and savoury snacks  at the buffet. I promise to report any suspicious activity. I understand that trains have to stop at red signals.
I also know that, when something goes seriously wrong or the train is taken over by menacing drunks, you will fall silent and disappear into a hidden cubby-hole.
And don’t try to make me laugh, as one train company is this week seeking to do by employing an alleged comedian to train staff in making ‘funny’ announcements. Don’t you know that ‘Are you trying to be funny?’ is one of the most menacing expressions in the English language?


From the Nanny State we move on to the Nappy State, in which the Useless Tory Elite will dispense advice on parenting, via vouchers and busybody charities. What do this Tory Elite know about raising children? Their experience consists of expensive schools, a Gap Yah and Oxbridge. They employ nannies to bring up their offspring, being too busy to do it themselves. If they want to improve parenting, they should stop the crazy subsidies that encourage the creation of fatherless families, which all true experts recognise as disastrous for children.

Commissar Suzi passes the baton

I ought to rejoice at the impending departure  of the terrifying political-correctness enthusiast Dame Suzi Leather, from the Charity Commission. Her nasty chivvying of independent schools was hypocritical (she went to one, and sent her daughter to one) and destructive.
However, the supposedly conservative Education Secretary Michael Gove has taken over her role as Commissar for Moronic Equality.
Left-wingers all over Britain are still fawning  and drooling over a speech that Mr Gove made recently in which he complained about private-school dominance of the professions, but  failed to mention that this was caused by the destruction of state grammar schools by Tory  and Labour governments.

The Man Who Wants to Gag me (but says he doesn’t) – and Other Topics

I shall be away from my desk for the next fortnight. That's two weeks, for US readers, or 1.4 decades (decimal ten-day weeks) for any Jacobin readers, and for that neatness enthusiast, Lord Howe of Aberavon, who must presumably be rather taken with ten-day weeks and ten-month years. So, after this contribution, I shall be posting only my Mail on Sunday column until Monday 5th June which I believe is Sextidi, 16ieme Prairial, the Day of the Carnation, in the year 220. Why didn’t this wheeze catch on the way litres and metres and kilograms did? I would myself have enjoyed the annual Feast of Opinion, which happens about a week before Michaelmas, during the Labour Party conference.

Please note the continuing tone of exasperated ‘why can’t you conform, you stick-in-the-mud old fool!’ tone of those who refuse to understand the desire of many people to retain customary measurements in daily life.  My side has never sought to suppress or discourage the use of metric measures where people wish to use them,  nor to stop them being taught in schools. Whereas the Metric fanatics seek actively to suppress knowledge and use of the customary system, knowing that without such totalitarian force they will never get people to prefer metric measures in daily life.

And in fact the British Weights and Measures association, which I have long supported, helped campaign for a bar selling German beer to be allowed to do so in litre and half-litre glasses, because that is what its customers preferred. This illustrates very well the difference between the two systems, and the difference between their supporters.

Before I go, I wish to publish (it is below) for a wider readership a long reply I gave to ‘Mev’ on an earlier thread (he is of course at liberty to reply at length if he wishes). I’ve revised it slightly since then.

I’d also like to mention to Mr Stephenson that the answers to his clever-silly questions about crime and prison, if he is really interested ,  which I doubt, are to be found in my book ‘A brief History of Crime’, though the argument is summarised here there are also some more recent figures on prison  which I cited in a Mail on Sunday article on 5th June 2011 ‘: '96,710 criminals sentenced last year for more serious "indictable" offences had 15 or more previous crimes against their name. They included violent muggers, burglars and drug dealers. Of those, only 36 per cent - around 34,600 offenders - were given immediate custody.' So even after 15 or more previous offences, they won't put most of them away.’

By the way, why do I doubt a genuine curiosity? Because he quotes the statistic, invariably adduced without thought or curiosity by penal liberals, that Britain ‘imprisons more people than any other European country’. First of all, this comparison is not done as a percentage of the population, but on a per-thousand basis, and the difference is not very big.  Secondly, it ignores the rather obvious fact that levels of crime and disorder are much higher here than in most of our European neighbours , thanks in my view largely to the state encouragement of fatherless families, the state sabotage of disciplined schooling, the disbanding of the old preventive police force, the deliberate enfeebling of the courts and prisons,  and the 40-year endless failed experiment in drug decriminalisation which we are undergoing.  Anyone who can quote this statistic as if it were a powerful argument has very probably chosen his side already.

One problem with crime statistics these days is that the old classic series have most been discontinued, that the old Home Office has been divided into two separate departments, and that what figures there are, are not compiled in such a way that information useful to conservatives is easily obtainable. The compilation and arrangement of statistics is as political as their publication, its timing and emphasis.

It often takes weeks to get quite simple information, and an MP known to me has run up against a blank wall in an attempt to discover the fates of persons arrested and convicted for Class ‘A’ drug offences.

Now to ‘Mev’, the would-be censor who claims he isn’t one.  (By the way, another contributor makes the excellent point that if ‘Mev’ is capable of resisting what he regards as my wicked and false siren song, and boy, does he resist it,  why does he presume that others don’t have the same mental equipment? Does he think my readers are too thick to be able to make up their own minds, or so thick that they will immediately be seduced by my dangerous arguments?)

‘Mev’ seems to want to persist in his battle, so here goes. He asked for it : I’ve interleaved my responses in his message, marking them **. 'Mev': Oh I'm 'absurd' am I, for asking perfectly reasonable and straightforward questions, which you then fail to answer, because you can't. **I am not sure what questions I have failed to answer. Perhaps he could set them out.

'Mev' : Charming. I do not wish to 'censor' anyone, thank you - please stop stating that falsehood - I believe in free speech. Is that plain enough for you?

**No, it isn’t. My experience of would-be censors is that they always declare that they favour free speech, before demanding measures to restrict it.  A mere declaration in favour of free speech doesn’t, in my experience, mean anything unless it’s backed up by a willingness to see opinions the person dislikes, published unhampered in prominent places. The whole force of the argument from ‘Mev’ is that a major Tory-supporting newspaper is doing wrong by publishing my attacks on the Tory Party, unhampered and prominently. His requirement for some sort of ‘balance’ or other disclaimer would of course, if implemented, hamper my freedom of speech. It would also tend to make it less likely that I would be published at all. Any editor constrained by such conditions would eventually become reluctant to publish the material that required them to be met. If ‘Mev’ cannot see this, then he really needs to think a bit more. If he can, then he must see that what he desires is a form of censorship.

It’s also quite amusing that I am the only journalist in the country to whom he appears to want to apply his bizarre formula for ‘balance’. And gosh, I happen to be the only journalist in the country, with a major platform, who is prepared to urge conservative people to desert the Conservative Party.

Censorship does not always take the form of a government official with a blue pencil, striking out words he does not like. Censors and suppressors very rarely recognise themselves for what they are.

'Mev':Play the ball I'm playing, not the one you wish I'd play. I don't like your Don't Vote Tory campaign because it's built on completely ridiculous logic (now proven)

**I don’t think anything is ‘proven’, except that I was absolutely right to predict that the Tories couldn’t win the 2010 election.

‘Mev ‘ … that a new 'real' (your definition) conservative movement is ready to spring into formation if the present Conservative Party fails to achieve majority governments

**I have never said anything remotely so specific. I have said that the split and collapse of the Tory party, which I believe would have followed what I sought and argued for – the humiliation of the Tories at the polls in 2010 - was the *necessary* condition for such a thing to happen, not a *sufficient* condition, and I have said this time out of mind, on innumerable occasions. No regular reader here has any excuse for being in any doubt of that. The fact that ‘Mev’ misrepresents my position so completely must be due to a wilful failure of understanding in him. He doesn’t see what I say, because he doesn’t want to. He’s not listening, because he is too angry to do so. This is the very problem this posting addresses.

'Mev':. I object to this campaign because - quite plainly: 1. the Conservative Party would not simply disappear following a defeat (even several) - it would sit there taking 20-30 percent of the vote even if your Hitchens Party did suddenly materialize. Those members, councillors and MPS who’ve put in years of effort are not going to shut up shop just to please you. Nor would its voters all just switch to you. AND 2. - even if your new movement did get off the ground (it won’t) it would simply split the anti-socialist vote even further - leading to never ending Labour Governments.

**The first part of this is speculative. Once political parties cease to be able to deliver office at a national level, they shrivel away very quickly as the essential camp-followers, gong-hunters and placemen peel away in search of something else. So would the liberals and the social democrats who make up a large part of Parliamentary and local government Toryism. It is impossible for anyone to say with certainty how the Tories would in fact have responded to a Labour victory or a Lib-Lab coalition in 2010. I think there would have been a complete collapse in finance and organisation, followed by at least one split in the Parliamentary Conservative Party. But it didn’t happen, and there won’t be a similar opportunity ( arising as it would have to do from a fourth successive general election defeat) in my lifetime, so who can say?

**As for the second claim - ‘even if your(my) new movement did get off the ground…’ is again wilful misunderstanding. I have often pointed out that the collapse of the Tories , by my theory, could – if they were replaced by a genuinely patriotic, socially conservative, anti-crime, anti-mass immigration party - have been rapidly followed by the splitting and collapse of Labour. Labour (see the Regional Government referendum in the North East in 2004, thrown into the sea in a strong Labour area, by a vote of 696,519 to 197,310 ) is deeply vulnerable to a socially conservative challenge from anyone who is not the Tory Party.

**‘Mev’ likewise completely fails to grasp my basic point that the Tory party is now so hated that it is unsaveable by anyone or anything, and will never again hold a majority in a United Kingdom Parliament, regardless of what anyone, says or does. One of the main effects of the Tory survival in 2010 was to save the Labour Party, as a socially revolutionary, anti-British, pro-immigration, pro-crime formation. I hope ‘Mev’ is pleased to have achieved this awful thing.

'Mev' again :However – even before we ever get that far (and we never will) - it's quite apparent following your bold "you go first and I'll consider joining later" Call to Arms, last month, that this movement does not and will not ever exist

**Well, on that, I can’t necessarily disagree with him, though his description of my suggestion is false. The portents are gloomy, as none knows better than I. But one has to try to do something to keep hope alive. Given his confidence that I have failed and will fail, why does he seem so anxious to have me escorted everywhere I go by special minders saying 'He's wrong! He's wrong!'

Mev :Not one person has posted on your weblog that they have taken the first steps to set up the kind of committee that your proposed - and it would take an awful lot of committee members (and time and money) for it to even get one foot off the ground. Your idea is simply dead in the water, for all to see. PROVEN. FACT. There is no new movement ready to form.

**No, that’s not a ‘proven fact’. EVEN IN CAPITALS. It may yet take place. The next general election is surprisingly distant ( three years away), though many people are so weary of the current government they think it’s been in office for far longer.  The Tory Party is already in grave difficulties, This government is in difficulties, the economy is in difficulties. How can he be so sure? He mustn’t mistake his own analysis of the possibilities for a proven fact. I don’t. That must be apparent now, even to you, even with your hands over your eyes and your fingers in your ears.

‘Mev’ : I DO object

**He may object away. IN BLOCK CAPITALS, IF HE LIKES. It’s a free country (though it won't be if he succeeds in censoring me as he wishes). But he shouldn’t imagine that, because he doesn’t like my opinions, he in some mysterious way acquires a moral right to legislate or demand special restrictions on the expression of my opinion.

'Mev': to you using your unique cuckoo like position at the heart of the middle class Sunday paper - to sway 'conservatives' away from their natural party – **Why am I a ‘cuckoo’? Why is it their ‘natural party’. What is the basis of this assertion? These people don't belong to the Tory Party, and the Tory Party doesn't own them or their votes. The Tory Party hates, despises and incessantly betrays the middle class readers of the Mail on Sunday, as I point out in detail, week by week by week. Even if it were their ‘natural party’ and many have deserted it, why should it continue to be? Whose interests does that serve? Not that of my readers.

'Mev': because 1. no pro-Conservative opponent is given the space (following page? or even sharing your pre-election page? Why not simply accept that challenge?)

**First of all, I am not the editor, and do not take such decisions. Secondly, if I were asked my opinion, I should say that the British media are a whole, of which my newspaper is a significant but by no means dominant part, and that the spread of the British media, including the overwhelmingly influential pro-Cameron BBC, includes legions of commentators who write what ‘Mev’ wants to read, and overwhelmingly counterbalance any effect I might have had. That’s why the Tories have survived for as long as they have, while trashing the hopes and desires of their ‘natural’ supporters.

** Secondly, for goodness’s sake, read the paper. It’s full of pro-Tory news stories and commentary .On election day, a full-page leading article, further forward in the paper,  urged a Tory vote. I strongly suspect that ‘Mev’ doesn’t actually read the Mail on Sunday.

‘Mev’: to argue against your proposal / position and 2. because no leftwinger of equal 'standing' is doing the same as you’re doing to Labour voters in a leftwing paper – so that is an ‘unfair’ situation, in my opinion.

**That’s his opinion. Others have other opinions. Why should I be influenced by his opinion, based as it is on a wilful misreading of my position and a great deal of evident partisan, personal hostility?

'Mev': However, I have never called for you to be banned or 'silenced' though – so please stop falsely claiming that – just to distract people, and offer your sycophantic supporters ‘something’ to work with.

**No, because he doesn’t dare come out into the open with such a call. But see above.

‘Mev’ The only person ‘silencing’ you on the question of ‘how are the committees going?’ is YOU – because you have simply refused to answer or acknowledge the question – and that is the only ‘absurd’ thing here.

**He knows perfectly well what the answer is. Nothing has yet happened. I never imagined that there would be some kind of immediate surge. I was explaining how, when the opportunity arises, it could best be done. Does he think the crisis of the Tory Party is over? He is in for some surprises, if so.

Not Listening – the Left’s Favourite Tactic in Argument

Last night (Wednesday 16th February) I took part in a debate about drugs at the Institute of Economic affairs (IEA) in London. My opponent was a Mr Christopher Snowdon. I made arguments familiar to readers here, mainly the recitation of unquestionable facts and examples, about the deliberate decision of the British governing class to cease to enforce the laws against possession of (technically) illegal drugs, above all the laws against cannabis.

As usual, I might as well not have bothered. Much of the audience, Thatcherite liberals and ‘libertarians’ who have swallowed Friedrich Hayek, followed him up with a heavy helping of J.S.Mill and for some reason think they are conservatives, and my opponent,  whose contribution deeply disappointed me, sat there while I said these things ( I was going to say ‘listened’, but I think that may be a severe and misleading exaggeration) and then they continued to advance their standard argument, that this country is subject to a wicked and severe ‘prohibition’ of drugs, which causes grave harm and must therefore be ended. And then there were the usual patsies of the ‘Medical Marijuana’ fancy, long ago revealed by its inventor as a propagandist red herring.

They insistently use the word ‘prohibition’, to assert a wholly false parallel between the American ban on the sale and manufacture of previously legal, mass-produced and mass-consumed alcohol, with Britain’s wholly different drug laws. When the falsity (on every level) of the parallel is pointed out to them, they do not in any way engage, or enter into a proper discussion of the differences.  They just do it again.

I might as well have sent a cardboard cut-out of myself, for all the impact my assembled facts had on my opponent or much of the audience (judging, as one must, by their own spoken contributions). I live in hope that one or two people there might have gained something. But most (much like my absurd critic ‘Mev’, who wants to censor me for daring to criticise the Tory Party effectively, but daren’t quite say so, and so dresses his ignoble desire up as a call for ‘fairness’) they had armoured their minds against uncomfortable fact. They were impregnable.  

Something similar is evident in the often silly comments on my post about Lord Howe’s demand for enforced, total metrication.  My critics write as if I am proposing a similarly total ban on metric measurements. Far from it. I am perfectly happy for those who wish to use the metric system to be able to continue to do so. I am perfectly happy to accept that some trades and professions find it more convenient. My problem with it is that it is not suited to daily life or to the small commerce of individuals, and that I object to being bullied into adopting it. I also have a deeper objection, that it is ugly and soulless, and its loss in our daily life would be another barrier between us and our history and culture.

It is also suggested that I am in some way unable to cope with it. On the contrary. I went to proper schools where we were taught both systems, and conversion factors between them. I have lived in a country, the USSR, where its use was supposedly universal (actually, in private markets, it was, as it always is, adapted for human use). I have also live in a country, the USA, where its use is still marginal. The question of the Mars orbiter has nothing to do with either the metric or customary systems, but with the incompetence of individuals who failed to establish which system they were dealing with. Incompetence, as I have pointed out, can also have appalling effects in a universal metric system, as in the problem of severe overdoses which I am told is increasingly common in the NHS. I am against incompetence. But the point about metric measurements, in which it is quite easy to make a major error on an order of magnitude (whereas customary measures, with their different units for different levels of measurement tend to avoid this) is that it makes incompetence harder to avoid and detect within a universally-used system.

Some bore says there are no exact facts in the article about how popular or unpopular the metric system is.  Well, I would love to be able to launch surveys of opinion on this matter. But I don’t have the resources to do so.  I do recall a supermarket official recently noting that customers at his chain’s petrol pumps had been reducing their purchases from £20 to £10 at a time.  I do believe this is the way most people buy petrol, and I think that is significant.  What’s interesting is that, as is usually the case, discussions of this subject produce a large and often passionate response. Those in favour of preserving the customary system in daily life are usually eloquent and thoughtful. Those in favour of wiping it out by law are usually jeering, dismissive and unresponsive to the case of their opponents.  I just wish the defenders of the metric system would make a bit more of an effort to see the point of view of those who wish to preserve customary measures in daily use. But their system is fundamentally totalitarian in origin and purpose, so perhaps that is why they tend that way as well.

My favourite contribution comes from Ronnie James. What did I say to justify this bizarre explosion? I have no desire to compel him to be stuck in a darkened hole with breathing apparatus on, worrying about how much air he’s got in his tank. I should have thought he’d have decided on how to measure that before he got into the hole.

As for doing a day’s physical work, what exactly does that have to do with it?  In my long ago days of shovelling pig-muck and barley , I can’t recall the form of measurement mattering very much, nor even when I was slinging crates and rolling barrels at a (sadly now-defunct) brewery, though there were 56-pound bags of something or other that had to be hefted, and they stick in the mind. All that mattered was that you carried on until the muck or the barley was all shovelled, the barrels all rolled, the crates all slung, the sacks all hefted.  At the end of eight hours of that, I could watch any rubbish on the TV without complaint, and even enjoy reading, or rather gaping at  ‘Tit Bits’  and ‘Reveille’ before falling into a dreamless sleep. Takes you back, eh? It’ll be gas lamps, ten bob notes, bus conductors and town gas, next.

I have since then treasured Ronald Reagan’s remark (explaining his choice of the acting profession)  that he had always been told that hard work never killed anyone, but he wasn’t anxious to find out if this claim was true.

Unlike him, I know several shops and market stalls which, frightened by the Metric Martyrs case, now refuse to sell goods to me in pounds ( and interestingly their supposedly metric scales are not finely enough calibrated to sell me, say, 454 grams of coffee, my revenge on them for this cowardice, so it has to be 450 or 455). He attributes to me arguments I have not made and goals I do not have. Then he attacks me for these arguments and goals. I hope he enjoyed it. But it would have been better if he had actually dealt with what I said.

Ah well, that was the point I was making at the beginning.

By the way, Parliament never decided to impose the metric system on this country. There is no authority in English or Scottish law for any such programme.  

Under Threat Again - the Last Traces of a Free Country

I feel increasingly hemmed in by the determination of so much of the broadcast and print media to use exclusively metric measurements, often to the point of absurdity . Some reports even gave the height and weight of Gareth Williams, the GCHQ employee found dead in a locked bag, in exclusively metric measurements, which must have been quite meaningless for millions of people.   Presumably this is because our Europeanised courts system now uses nothing but foreign measurements, just to demonstrate that it can.  Still, it all helps me keep my mental arithmetic supple, as does the daily effort to work out how much rain has fallen in inches  rather than millimetres or centimetres  (chosen at random by the Met Office as their metric measures) , or what the temperature will be in Fahrenheit.  I cannot visualise them any other way, because I am English and was brought up in England, rather than in the sort of Airstrip One where we now dwell as strangers and sojourners, our roots torn up, our landmarks removed, our future a grey blur.

Even supposedly conservative outlets quite often do this. Several have taken to putting the metric version first, and then putting the customary one in brackets. You know that in a few months, the bracketed version will begin to disappear, and it will be metric only before too long. I regard this as bullying, an improper use of power to tell people how to talk and think, and to make them less British (the main purpose of it).  The BBC is positively aggressive. I have tried to establish that this is a set policy,  which I don’t doubt that it is, but the BBC is protected against Freedom of Information inquiries and so I have not been able to pursue the matter beyond the bland denials I have received.  

I reckoned something must be going on when characters in the radio soap opera ‘The Archers’, supposedly of my generation, began referring some years ago to the heights of fences, hedges and gates in metres. In those days such people never really did this. Now, I rather think they do, after years of such badgering.  Of course, the BBC has itself illustrated the difficulty of a system nobody can really think in. I often refer to a moment in (I think) ‘the Living World’ on BBC Radio 4, when Lionel Kelleway, distinguished presenter of natural history programmes, announced that some cliffs (actually 600 feet high) were 2,000 metres high (6,560 feet). They would be a sight to see.

That is just silly. But I do wonder whether what I am told is the growing number of wrong prescriptions and doses in the NHS has something to do with metrication. Mix up a milligram and microgram, or simply add or subtract and extra zero, and you’re in deep trouble.

As for shopping, remove landmarks, such as the one pound jar of marmalade, and before you know where you are 454 grams (one pound) has quietly become 415, or 400, or maybe 300  – but the price is the same. It’s easy to see where that leads. We used to buy loose sweets by the quarter (four ounces) as children. Now they are sold in 100 gram bags, whereas a quarter is nearer 114 grams. How long before 100 grams becomes 80?

That’s leaving aside the sheer unpoetic ugliness of metric measures, their imposed, top-down, bossy character, their spiky, made-up polysyllabic names and their sheer inconvenience. A litre is too much to drink, but too little fuel to get you home. As far as I know, most people have never adapted to the litre of petrol, and buy it instead by the pound sterling, in the shape of ten pounds’ worth. Kilograms have the same difficulty.  They’re too big, too hard to visualise. Lots of people now buy their fruit and vegetable in markets in ‘bowls’,  judging quantity by sight rather than weight.

I’ve mentioned before how the ‘livre’ (pound) still survives in rural France, two centuries after it was abolished, and how now wine worth drinking is ever sold in litre bottles.

The human mind rejects these measurements, and, left to their own devices, human beings won’t use them. Canada, supposedly metric for years by force of law, still in reality retains most customary measures  (in French as well as English) because of next-door America, where legal enforcement of metric measures would I think be constitutionally impossible.  Poor old backward America’s continuing use of these supposedly obsolete measures, and its failure to suffer economically, scientifically or educationally as a result, always warms my heart whenever  I go there.

We are not so fortunate. Here comes that old nuisance Geoffrey Howe(lord Howe of Aberavon) one of the geniuses who got us into the Exchange Rate Mechanism which nearly ruined the country, to declare in the House of Peers:

‘British weights and measures are in a mess. We have litres for petrol and fizzy drinks but pints for beer and milk. We have metres and kilometres for athletics and the Ordnance Survey but miles per gallon for cars. We have the metric system for school but still have pounds and ounces in the market. Certainly, this muddle matters. It increases costs, confuses shoppers, leads to serious misunderstandings, causes accidents, confuses our children's education and, quite bluntly, puts us all to shame…

‘… every civilised society has recognised the need for one set-and only one set-of standard measures. By contrast, we have managed to come near to recreating Disraeli's two nations-divided between, on the one hand, a metrically literate elite and, on the other, a rudderless and bewildered majority.’

I like that ‘metrically-literate elite’. All one needs to be metrically literate is to be able to count one’s toes. I can do that, though, given his incessant Europhilia, I do begin to wonder whether Lord Howe of Aberavon is especially skilled at arithmetic. The elite in this country is blessed in that it can (unlike the sad victims of universal metric sameness) travel to the USA and feel at home amid its human, traditional, polished-in-use , and above all *British* measures (yes, yes,  I know about the American Pint.. It is in fact a pre-1820 Winchester wine pint)

Lord Howe continued: ‘How did we get into this uniquely confusing shambles? It is because we have been dithering about it for some 150 years. As long ago as 1862, a Select Committee of the House of Commons unanimously recommended the adoption of the metric system which had swept across Europe and elsewhere. In 1904, the House of Lords voted in favour of a Bill to the same effect and, remarkably in a way, in 1965 the decision was finally taken-in response to requests from the CBI and others, and after long and widespread consultation-to go metric over the following 10 years. It is important to understand that that decision had nothing to do with our relationship with our European partners. It was our own decision on our own case, taken eight years before we joined the European Community.’

Now that *is* interesting. How, when and by whom was this decision ‘finally taken’ in 1965? Lord Howe speaks as if Parliament, which in 1965 still governed this country, took a decision, and passed a Bill. Did it? When? What was the Bill called? When did it pass? When was it debated? In whose election manifesto did it feature? Was it really unconnected with our attempts to join the then Common Market, which had been begun in the early 1960s by Harold Macmillan?

Lord Howe drove his message home, with heavy thuds of his verbal mallet  ‘How did we manage to end up in this very British mess? It is because successive British Governments have lacked consistency, candour and courage in implementing and presenting a policy which was, at the outset, rightly supported by a broad majority of all those who had given the topic serious consideration. It was the first Wilson Government who launched the process in 1965, and the Heath, Wilson and Callaghan Governments who carried it on. The whole operation was handled, without significant controversy, by a broadly representative commission: the Metrication Board, which, in its final report in 1979, was able to suggest that the change was by then almost complete. In the Heath Government I had been, as Britain's first Minister for Consumer Affairs, responsible for the metrication programme. By 1979, however, I had myself become a penny-saving Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as such I readily accepted the decision to abolish the Metrication Board, which claimed to have completed the process.’

Note that he says there was ‘no *significant* controversy’ . Who defines ‘significant’? What does he want before he accepts that this is not popular? A Peasants’ Revolt? Rick-burning in the shires? A million-man march? A lot of people never liked this, didn’t want it and would reverse it if they could. They were just never asked. And, with so many other small but significant changes of this kind, they didn’t feel it was enough of an issue to rise up in revolt. The Metrication Board never represented me. I do think it’s quite funny that dear old Sir Geoffrey wound up the Board because he thought its job was done. Just goes to show how little contact he had, by then, with real life in this country.

Who Gagged Michael Gove? Why Does he Submit to This?

My left-wing Mail on Sunday colleague, Suzanne Moore, has this week given delighted praise to my old friend Michael Gove, the Education Secretary.  Oh dear. In the dear dead days before Mr Gove fell in love with Anthony Blair’s neo-conservative invasion mania, we were allies against the Abolition of Britain. When Michael went still further along the Blairite Road (the sky-blue-pink brick road, perhaps?), and joined the Cameron project, we spent two hours striding round Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens on a freezing winter’s day, while I tried to persuade him that Mr Slippery was an anti-British menace, and he tried to persuade me that Mr Slippery would lead us into a conservative future. In the end, we both gave up – though, as we both enjoy arguing and we both believe that it is possible to have profound disagreements and remain on friendly terms, and because I respect Mr Gove’s undoubted intellect and personal generosity, we still enjoy each other’s company on the rare occasions when we meet.

I think Mr Gove is the only major figure in the government (on the Tory side at least) who knows how to think properly, and who truly understands the nature of the bargain he has made between power and conscience, and who therefore has any control over its outcome.  Also, I should point out that we simply don’t agree about the cultural and moral issues which seem to me to be the decisive questions of our time.

I suspect that Oliver Letwin knows quite well what the government is up to, as does Francis Maude. Both are very intelligent, much more so than their leaders.  But I don’t think either man is really a conservative in any important way. I’d say the same of Vince Cable, in many ways an old-fashioned Labour man. So they don’t face any real conflicts of conscience.

But I had always thought that Michael Gove at least understood what was really wrong with British education.  I still think he does. But his speech, delivered at Brighton College on 10th May and available here seems to me to have been designed to please all the wrong people.  If the reaction of Suzanne Moore and some other left-wing commentators, such as Matthew Norman are anything to go by, it has done so.   Why has he done this?

I quite agree that the private schools have a disproportionate hold on the higher levels of most trades and professions. I quite agree that this is a bad thing, because it restricts these high levels to a narrow group of people whose parents have the money to pay the colossal fees now demanded by the better private schools.

While I view one or two old-established institutions, such as Winchester, as being valuable parts of the national heritage which need to be preserved, I am no special friend of the private schools in general. I think it would be wonderful if Winchester could become again what it was originally meant to be, a school to find and educate the best minds of each generation for the service of the nation, regardless of the wealth of their parents.

I have myself paid out enormous sums in fees to various such schools over the past quarter-century. I won’t go into individual details, but I will say that it has not always been justified by the results. 

Many private schools, for instance, are infested by political correctness. Geography is often a matter of Green, warmist propaganda, the teaching of history has been eviscerated, and languages are seldom taught in such a way that those who undergo the teaching know how to speak or even read the language at the end of years of study.  Instead they are taught as wearisome exercises in repetition without the solid grammar, vocabulary and constant exercises in two-way translation, mercilessly corrected, which are the only real foundation for language teaching. . Most private schools are ridiculously concerned with their performance in amassing the devalued currency of modern examination certificates. These are a gift for them. As all such schools are selective (often also getting rid of poor performers if they threaten to drag their averages down), efficient drilling of middle-class pupils will invariably produce what looks like a near-perfect record.

Far too few take up the option of the IGCSE, close to the old ‘O’ level. Almost all give far too much importance to results league tables.  

This is as worthless as an OFSTED award of ‘outstanding’ to a state school. It does not mean an absolutely good education has been provided. It means that modern targets have been successfully met, a wholly different thing.

But that does not stop parents paying for them. Unless they happen to be within range of the small minority of state schools which maintain some sort of standard, often through secret selection, most parents who can afford fees, even if it is a major stretch involving considerable sacrifices, will do so. They are not , as is so often claimed by leftist metropolitans who have access to the London Oratory, Cardinal Vaughan, Camden School for Girls, William Ellis or similar exceptional state secondaries with religious qualifications or small catchment areas, rejecting the comprehensive idea out of silly snobbery. They are rejecting it because they have studied the facts and concluded their local state secondary simply is not as good, and will not miraculously become as good if they send their children to it.  

Some of them think (research supports this view) that single-sex education is better than mixed schooling, ad find that their local state schools are all now mixed.  Some of them – I am among these – are also worried by an egalitarian, secularist, morally relativists and often anti-patriotic, multicultural ethos which they see as hostile to the ideas and beliefs they have sought and hopes to pass on at home. While few private schools offer active reinforcement of religion, patriotism and conservatism, they also don’t actively seek to undermine these things.

As for it being in some way their duty to sacrifice their children on the altar of equality for the good of all and the creation of a classless society, I suspect this is bunk. While I can see how a mediocre state secondary school’s *results* might get better if it had a bigger middle class intake, I cannot see how the school *itself* would get better. All that would change would be the quality of the material, not the quality of teaching or the strength of the discipline. Meanwhile I suggest that the *outcome* for the children subjected to this social engineering would in almost all cases be worse than if they had gone to a grammar or private school.

As for the hoped-for mixing of the classes, the experience of Robert Crampton,  who has written frankly about this in ‘The Times’ seem to suggest that it does not in practice take place, or certainly didn’t in his Hull comprehensive.  Whereas I suspect that in grammar schools, there was mixing and the general direction was up; in most comprehensives, there is little mixing, and the general direction is down.

Now, let us take the crucial segment of Mr Gove’s speech:

‘I can’t help reflecting on some other facts about our society which the excellence of the education offered in our independent schools underlines.
 
It is remarkable how many of the positions of wealth, influence, celebrity and power in our society are held by individuals who were privately educated.
 
Around the Cabinet table – a majority – including myself – were privately educated.
 
Around the Shadow Cabinet table the Deputy Leader, the Shadow Chancellor, the Shadow Business Secretary, the Shadow Olympics Secretary, the Shadow Welsh Secretary and the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development were all educated at independent schools.

On the bench of our supreme court, in the precincts of the bar, in our medical schools and university science faculties, at the helm of FTSE 100 companies
and in the boardrooms of our banks, independent schools are – how can I best put this – handsomely represented.
 
You might hear some argue that these peaks have been scaled by older alumni of our great independent schools – and things have changed for younger generations.
 
But I fear that is not so.
 
Take sport – where by definition the biggest names are in their teens, twenties and thirties.
 
As Ed Smith, the Tonbridge-educated former England player, and current Times journalist, points out in his wonderful new book “Luck”:

Twenty-five years ago, of the 13 players who represented England on a tour of Pakistan, only one had been to a private school. In contrast, over two thirds of the current team are privately educated. You’re 20 times more likely to go on and play for England if you go to private school rather than state school.
 
The composition of the England rugby union team and the British Olympic team reveal the same trend.

Of those members of England’s first 15 born in England, more than half were privately educated.
 
And again, half the UK’s gold medallists at the last Olympics were privately educated, compared with seven per cent of the population.
 
It’s not just in sport that the new young stars all have old school ties.
 
It’s in Hollywood, Broadway and on our TV screens.
 
Hugh Laurie, Dominic West, Damian Lewis, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne – all old Etonians.
 
One almost feels sorry for Benedict Cumberbatch – a lowly Harrovian – and Dan Stevens – heir to Downton Abbey and old boy of Tonbridge – is practically a street urchin in comparison.
 
If acting is increasingly a stage for public school talent one might have thought that at least comedy or music would be an alternative platform for outsiders.
 
But then –
 
Armando Iannucci, David Baddiel, Michael McIntyre, Jack Whitehall, Miles Jupp, Armstrong from Armstrong and Miller and Mitchell from Mitchell and Webb were all privately educated.
 
2010’s Mercury Music Prize was a battle between privately educated Laura Marling and privately-educated Marcus Mumford.
 
And from Chris Martin of Coldplay to Tom Chaplin of Keane – popular music is populated by public school boys.
 
Indeed when Keane were playing last Sunday on the Andrew Marr show everyone in that studio – the band, the presenter and the other guests – Lib Dem peer Matthew Oakeshott, Radio 3 Presenter Clemency Burton-Hill and Sarah Sands, editor of the London Evening Standard - were all privately educated.
 
Indeed it’s in the media that the public school stranglehold is strongest.
The Chairman of the BBC and its Director-General are public school boys.
 
And it’s not just the Evening Standard which has a privately-educated editor.
 
My old paper The Times is edited by an old boy of St Pauls and its sister paper the Sunday Times by an old Bedfordian.
 
The new editor of the Mail on Sunday is an old Etonian, the editor of the Financial Times is an old Alleynian and the editor of the Guardian is an Old Cranleighan.
 
Indeed the Guardian has been edited by privately educated men for the last 60 years…
 
But then many of our most prominent contemporary radical and activist writers are also privately educated.
 
George Monbiot of the Guardian was at Stowe, Seumas Milne of the Guardian was at Winchester and perhaps the most radical new voice of all --Laurie Penny of the Independent – was educated here at Brighton College. 
 
Now I record these achievements not because I wish to either decry the individuals concerned or criticise the schools they attended. Far from it.

It is undeniable that the individuals I have named are hugely talented and the schools they attended are premier league institutions.

But the sheer scale, the breadth and the depth, of private school dominance of our society points to a deep problem in our country - one we all acknowledge but have still failed to tackle with anything like the radicalism required.’

Well, the facts are undeniable (I enjoyed his outing of the inescapable, relentless Laurie Penny, too) , though it is pretty obvious why most Rugby Union players are privately educated, and couldn’t care less where the culprits of popular music went to school.

But then Mr Gove went on to say ‘We live in a profoundly unequal society.

More than almost any developed nation ours is a country in which your parentage dictates your progress.

Those who are born poor are more likely to stay poor and those who inherit privilege are more likely to pass on privilege in England than in any comparable county.

For those of us who believe in social justice this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible.

And for those of us who want to see greater economic efficiency it is a pointless squandering of our greatest asset - our children - to have so many from poorer backgrounds manifestly not achieving their potential.

When more Etonians make it to Oxbridge than boys and girls on benefit then we know we are not making the most of all our nation's talents.’

This is all very well, so far as it goes, but surely it is an argument for the reintroduction of the academic selection which, as I have so often pointed out here, unquestionably opened up Oxbridge, the professions and all the higher trades and professions, to boys and girls who would otherwise never have climbed?

Mr Gove knows these facts perfectly well. I know, for instance, that he has read my book ‘The Broken Compass’ (reissued as ‘The Cameron Delusion’ in paperback) in which in a chapter called ‘The Fall of the meritocracy’, I provided the fullest and most detailed description of the comprehensive revolution, its reasons, its ignorant good intentions and its actual effects , together with incontrovertible evidence of the success of grammar schools in storming the battlements of Oxbridge.

But the speech doesn’t mention grammar schools, or selection. He alleges the unproven virtues of ‘Academies’, a type of school which cannot be precisely defined because it relies so largely on the presence (or absence) of a charismatic head – who can of course  leave or be replaced at any time. That definition is growing vaguer all the time as the number of academies increases, under heavy pressure from the government, and encouraged by suggestions that the new status will bring bigger budgets. What it actually brings is nationalisation, direct central control through budgets, a weapon in the hands of a future Labour government which they may come to regret.

Are Academies, as such , better than other schools because they are academies, as grammar schools are undoubtedly better because they are grammar schools?  It seems open to question. Anastasia de Waal, in work done for the far-from-leftist thing tank Civitas in 2009, suggested that many academies (which were to begin with exempt from Freedom of Information Laws , though this has now been put right) were doing what so many other schools do to hide the real state of affairs – entering pupils for easier subjects avoiding history and geography, and concentrating on vocational courses which bump up grades.

If there is more recent work showing a connection between Academy status and academic excellence, I should be interested to see it.  

Mr Gove, of course, knows that his leader, Mr Slippery, has no time for grammar schools and risked a serious row in Opposition, so that he could distance his party from the idea that grammar schools might one day be restored ( as they have been successfully restored in the parts of Germany formerly under the control of the defunct German Democratic Republic, which was of course keen on comprehensive education).

I suspect that the purpose of this speech was to put pressure on private schools to co-operate with him in sponsoring more ‘Academies’ and ‘free Schools’. But what if they don’t?  What if their parents, already groaning over fees of £15,000 a year of post-tax income, plus paying heavy taxes for state schools they don’t like and don’t use, might resent part of that hard-earned money being diverted to dubious ‘Big Society’ schemes to save the useless comprehensive system from itself?

If Mr Gove really wants to end the dominance of the private schools, rather than to milk them, he has a simple solution available. He can be the first Education Secretary in decades to come out openly for a large-scale return to selection in state schools. He has the intellectual power and the standing to do, and it would revolutionise the whole education debate in the country if he did so. Why doesn’t he?

Agony aunts for criminals - and scorn for the rest of us

This is Peter's column from the Mail on Sunday

The British State treats us, the good, kind and law-abiding, with officious scorn. We have learned, when we are the victims of crime or disorder, that the police don’t need us, and they expect the same in return.

If we dare to travel abroad, we are terrorist suspects on the way out, to be poked and humiliated, and serfs on the way back in, herded, hectored and corralled.

If we try to pay our taxes honestly and on time, we are held on the phone for half an hour. Happy families are torn apart in secret courts, where guilt is presumed and a fair hearing impossible.

The state school system pretends to offer us ‘choice’ while imposing a wretched low standard on all, from which only the wealthy can escape. If we dare to grow old and ill, our savings are plundered and stripped, or we die in our own filth in callous hospital wards.

But fight and rob your way into one of our prisons, which generally involves at least a dozen quite serious criminal convictions, and the attitude is entirely different. Suddenly they want to be nice to you.

Pasted up in an Oxfordshire byway, I found extraordinary proof of what most of us have long suspected and what politicians always try to deny (above). We are now so soft on wrong-doing that the wicked must be laughing at us.

It is a recruiting poster for prison officers. Beneath a picture of two smiling, kindly types in uniform sharing a jolly moment are the words: ‘Father figures. Agony Aunts. When you’re the closest to family anyone’s experienced in a long while, it becomes less of a job and more of a calling. Prison officers. People officers by nature.’

It continues: ‘Gaining the respect of offenders isn’t a skill you can learn. It’s something you need to have in you already: that ability to build rapport with a broad range of characters and ultimately make a breakthrough.’

The Ministry of Injustice, whose name and superscription are on the poster, have confirmed to me that it is really theirs. There you have it. For the worst people in the country, we hire ‘agony aunts’ and ‘father figures’ whose job is to ‘gain the respect’ of people who have repeatedly trampled on the rights and freedoms of their neighbours.

For the rest of us, death and taxes, indifference, inefficiency, scorn and an array of decrepit, slovenly ‘services’, which grow worse the more we pay for them.

Why, exactly, do you vote for the people who are responsible for this? I’d love to know.

 

It's pompous pagan piffle

Is it compulsory to be enthusiastic about the Olympics? Too bad, if so. I laughed and laughed when the Olympic flame, an ‘ancient tradition’ in fact invented by the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, was blown out by the wind.

I see no reason to look forward to this flatulent festival of cheating, whose authenticity was long ago destroyed by drugs. I certainly don’t look forward to paying for it.

Surely only a totalitarian maniac could want it in his capital? What free country desires or needs the silly pagan panoply, the absurd, grandiose buildings, and the pompous self-importance of the IOC who want special lanes for their cars, like the old Soviet Politburo?

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War on Drugs latest. The fiction that we have stern prohibition of drugs in this country is still seriously believed by some people. How do they keep it up?

As Paragraph 6.65 of  the Independent Chief Inspector’s report on Border Control at Gatwick records, passengers arriving with cannabis ‘for personal use’ who should have been arrested were let off with a warning.

The only mystery is why they bothered to import it, when cannabis farms are Britain’s only boom industry.

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Why 650,000 children are using mind-altering drugs

A powerful stimulant drug, methylphenidate hydrochloride, is being widely taken by British schoolchildren. At the last count, more than 650,000 young people, some very young indeed, were believed to be regular users.

This emerged last week from a Parliamentary question. The use of this potent pill has increased fourfold since it first became common in 1999. And its users are taking stronger and stronger doses, as they grow tolerant.

The drug has a long list of adverse effects including chest pain, hair loss, palpitations, stunted growth, insomnia, rapid heart rate, skin rashes, dizziness and anxiety. It has been linked to suicide. If those involved were teenagers in nightclubs, and they were buying it from the usual evil dealers, I expect there would be a big media fuss, and rightly so, especially about the three-year-old users.

But there isn’t, because the other name for methylphenidate hydro-chloride is Ritalin, and legions of parents, teachers, doctors and social workers have somehow been persuaded that this powerful mind- altering substance is actually good for children. You and I, meanwhile, are paying for it on the NHS.

By the time our sluggish nation realises that this is a horrifying national scandal, the damage will have been done.

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On a rare visit to W H Smith, the shop where good books go to die, I find that this once-staid chain has a huge stack of what I believe is known as Mommy Porn right by the checkout.

And once I have swerved round the bondage and whipping department, the next thing I see  is a special communications booth, by which I can get into instant touch with a law firm. And people tell me I should be optimistic.

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Mr Slippery proclaims that there are lots of proper conservative things he longs to do, if only it wasn’t for those horrid Liberal Democrats.

Not only does Old Slippery do this in the same week that he appears with Nick Clegg in a comical Renewal  of Coalition Vows in a tractor factory. He also doesn’t seem to realise that it is completely incredible.

The Liberal Democrats have been rubbing their eyes in wonder since 2010 because of the happy willingness of the Tories to give in to all their demands. And the Prime Minister has strong conservative instincts in the same way that hamsters are famed for their feral aggression.

It’s the political equivalent of ‘the cheque is in the post’ or ‘the van broke down’ or ‘the dog ate my homework’.

The fact that he doesn’t seem remotely ashamed of it suggests that he is actually beginning to turn into the true Heir to Blair, a man who has so successfully faked sincerity that he no longer knows or cares when he is lying.

Tony or Anthony?

My habit of referring to our former Prime Minister as ‘Anthony Blair’ has a strange power to annoy people (though not as much as my former practice of calling him ‘Princess Tony’, which I did as punishment for his claim - scripted by Alastair Campbell -  that Princess Diana was ‘the People’s Princess’. And also because it seemed to me that he was in so many ways the New Diana. I abandoned ‘Princess Tony’ after he took to bombing civilians from the air, and it seemed too frivolous a jeer at a man who was actively doing violent harm).

But, while it is sometimes a pleasure to annoy certain sorts of people,  it is simply a statement of fact.  Anthony is his name. At least, it was his name when his wife, Cherie, mentioned him in her election leaflet when she stood for Parliament in Thanet North in 1983. Not merely did she call him ‘The barrister, Anthony Blair’. She later spoke at a large meeting in Margate, at which her father, Tony Booth, and her then hero, Tony Benn, were on the platform (and her husband was humbly seated in the audience) of the ‘two Tonys’ who had influenced her in her path to socialism, or some such phrase. The two Tonys were Benn and Booth. Her husband was in any case an Anthony. So she knew the difference between ‘Tony’ and ‘Anthony’, and must presumably have asked him how he’d like to be described in her leaflet. One day I’ll tell the story of my struggle to get hold of that leaflet, during which I discovered that Mrs Blair/Ms Booth had apparently stood for parliament *in private* and it was quite wicked and rude of me to make enquiries about her campaign

When Cherie was selected for Thanet North, her husband hadn’t been picked by any constituency anywhere and, according to the official myth, which is so full of holes you could use it as a colander, had almost despaired of getting a seat. He then, amazingly, was selected for one of the safest seats in the country at the last minute, effortlessly defeating that consummate in-fighter Les Huckfield, a former Minister, despite himself being a privately-educated no-account lawyer with no connections at all with Sedgefield, who had polled so badly I think he lost his deposit in the only by-election he had ever fought (see below).

If you believe that version of his selection, you will believe anything, and you will demonstrate that you know nothing whatever about the Labour party and how it works, but it remains the official version, in both major biographies, trotted out by political journalists as if it were gospel. 

For in 1982 he had fought, and spectacularly failed to win, the safe Tory seat of Beaconsfield in a by-election. I have just got out the cuttings. In some reports he is referred to as ‘Anthony Blair” and in others as ‘Tony’.  The Times Guide to the House of Commons, in its summary of by-elections during that Parliament, lists him simply as ‘A.Blair’.  I would be interested to see any of his election leaflets from that time. He was cruelly picked on by the Daily Telegraph’s waspish sketch-writer Godfrey Barker, who describes him making a huge fool of himself over strikes by health service workers, and calls him ‘Anthony’ throughout. Mr Barker also spotted something interesting about him, and called him ‘mysterious’ . Which he was, and is, and will be till a proper critical biography is eventually written.

What is interesting is that whenever the Blair machine wanted to get a favoured candidate into Parliament via a safe seat, they always parachuted him into the constituency at the very last minute. I wonder where they got that idea from?