Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 314

I said I'd never stand as an MP... Well, I've changed my mind

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

If George Galloway can get elected, should I too stand for Parliament? I have resisted the idea for years. I once worked at Westminster and saw the powerlessness of the individual MP against the thuggish pressure of the party whips.

I know that almost all elections in this country are rigged to suit the big parties. I am saddened by the way so many good people honestly imagine that they pick their own MPs at General Elections.

In fact, by clinging to habitual party loyalties, they just confirm the choices already made for them in secret by the party machines.

These machines are ruthlessly centralised nowadays, so that any independent or honest person is sifted out of the selection process. A few get through by accident, but you will have noticed that the experiment with open primaries has not been repeated. We can't have actual voters playing any real part in picking candidates for safe seats. That would mean revolution.

Then there is the problem of party loyalty itself. I am endlessly baffled by the way in which the patriotic, honest, law-abiding people of this country vote for Labour and Tory candidates who loathe Britain and refuse to stand up for nation, law, liberty or justice. Yet they do. The millions of patriots who voted Tory at the last Election committed an act of self-harming idiocy. To support Mr Cameron's openly declared Left-liberal project was as unreasonable as punching yourself repeatedly in the face, or burgling your own house.

Yet suddenly, in the past few weeks, I think we can hear the sound of mental chains snapping. The ridiculous and squalid performance of the Government on so many different subjects has – perhaps briefly – woken large numbers of people from their dreamlike doze of dangerous complacency.

They may have vaguely known that government was for sale. But the sight and sound of the unlovely Peter Cruddas openly selling the Prime Minister of this country (and his wife) to anyone with the money to pay suddenly brought home the truth in a way that thousands of words could not have done.

Mr Slippery's attempt to get himself out of this was even more obviously the act of a fraud who has been found out and knows it. Caught in the searchlight, we saw a naked Public Relations Man, whose first and last resort is trickery and slickness, because that is what he prefers.

First we had a fake panic over petrol, then a fake pretence at being a man of the people by claiming to have stuffed his face with a fictitious Cornish pasty from a shop that had long ceased to exist. What a surprise, then, to find him last week claiming unconvincingly to have a lively Christian faith, while his Home Secretary gets on with snubbing and sidelining genuine Christians in the accursed name of 'equality and diversity' – Mr Slippery's real religion, as we surely must now realise.

Those of us who have known this for ages, who have studied Mr Slippery's bottomless  cynicism, grotesquely greedy expenses claims and instinctive Leftism on all major issues, have until now been stuck hopelessly at the edge of things, surrounded by deluded optimists who think that Mr Slippery is only held back by Nick Clegg, and is preparing to emerge as his true self at some vague point in the future, round about the same place as the one where parallel lines meet.

Surely this is now unsustainable. As for the other parties, they are the same. I think that is one of the reasons for George Galloway's victory in Bradford West. The old loyalties are at last dying, the Coalition actually speaks for nobody, there is no proper opposition in Parliament and – instinctively, like a flower seeking light – the electorate is recognising that this has to be put right. Mr Galloway is not, of course, the solution. We must do better than that.

John Maynard Keynes once said: 'When the facts change, I change my mind.' And he asked those who criticised him: 'What do you do, sir?' Well, I too have changed my mind.

And I think several hundred other people should do the same. In each parliamentary seat, concerned and wise men and women should now turn their minds to finding a candidate who has independence of mind, who is neither bigoted nor politically correct, who loves this country and is proud of its independence and its ancient liberties, who hates crime and injustice, who supports the married family and the rule of law, who understands that education without authority is impossible.

Where by-elections arise, they should be ready to fight them, and when the next General Election comes they should be ready to fight that too, to bypass and overthrow the sordid, discredited tyranny of spivs, placemen and careerists that is now ruining what ought to be one of the greatest civilisations on Earth.

I urge them to do so, under the simple motto of Justice and Liberty, a name that nobody can copyright and a pledge that nobody can fake. And if they do, then I'll seriously consider putting my name forward.

Palin: Ignorant but profoundly decent

There is an extraordinary new film about Sarah Palin, Game Change, in which that fine actress Julianne Moore – herself a PC Leftist – gives an Oscar-worthy performance as the luckless Vice-Presidential candidate, who was even more ignorant about politics than our own Anthony Blair.

Unintentionally, the makers of the film reveal that Mrs Palin, for all her failings, is in fact a profoundly good person.

The scenes of her meeting Down's children on her campaign and treating them as they should be treated – as fully human, valuable people rather than as embarrassments who should have been aborted – are inexpressibly moving.
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This weekend thousands of returning British travellers will face appalling passport queues. When will people realise that this is because the EU bans us from having what every truly independent country has – special queues for our own subjects?
France can teach us nothing about 'human rights'

France can teach us nothing about 'human rights'

Beware of praising France's fake-conservative President Sarkozy (never more fake, and never more conservative than during elections) for deporting Islamists in defiance of the Human Rights Charter.

France can do this because, for all its democratic trappings, it is utterly different from Britain. Like most of our continental neighbours, it has no real tradition of law being above power – the key to civilisation.

Britain by contrast, abides by the laws she makes and the treaties she signs, a principle going back to Magna Carta. That is why there is no compromise available.

If we are to regain our own laws and liberties, we must withdraw from the Human Rights Charter and leave the European Union too. Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights are a far better guarantee.

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Do this in Remembrance

I am running only a skeleton service here during this Holy Week. My mind isn't fully on temporal matters, as I've found as I grow older that Easter becomes more and more important as a time for thought and consideration. Housman's 'Cherry Tree' from the Shropshire Lad (you should know this too) gets harder to recite once you hit 60. 

As John Betjeman wrote, though oddly about Christmas 'And is it true, and is it true, that most tremendous tale of all?' If it is true, of course, the world is one sort of place. If not, it is another. I have always been most persuaded of its truth by the story of the Supper at Emmaus, brief and unsettling, full of human doubt and inability to see what is in front of your nose because it does not fit with what you think. The words (presumably of Cleopas ) 'Abide with us, for it is toward evening and the day is far spent' are mysteriously moving (this is to be found in what Mr Slippery, who is being Christian this week, calls 'The Book of Luke', more generally known as the Gospel according to St Luke, the 24th Chapter)

Something about the weather and the sky at this time of year, combined with my good fortune in having many times visited Jerusalem (where General Gordon became convinced that Golgotha was on what is now the site of the East Jerusalem bus station, a theory which led to the creation of the only Protestant shrine in that city, the – enchanting but unproven – Garden Tomb) makes each spring twilight very poignant. It is easy to imagine the surreptitious gathering, the expedition to the Garden of Gethsemane (gardens are everywhere in the Bible, and a tiny trace of Gethsemane still, astonishingly, survives), while the arresting party assembles, Judas nerves himself for his treacherous kiss,  and then the chilly early morning where Peter warms himself by the fire and betrays his master, and the agitators prepare the mob for the show trial, and the orchestrated calls for the release of Barabbas, which will follow soon afterwards.

Oddly enough these scenes only came fully to life for me when I read Mikhail Bulgakov's difficult, confusing but often enthralling 'The Master and Margarita', in which Pilate appears as a fictional character. Suddenly, in my imagination, an old, stiff black-and-white woodcut of Easter, filled with rather dark colour and became fluid and alive and rather frightening. It has ever since. And as I observe the world, I see the truth of (who said this?) the statement that the Crucifixion and Resurrection did not just happen once. They are happening, again and again, all the time.

On Thursday night, Maundy Thursday, find a quiet place to listen out and see if you can hear ordinary time  falling into step with eternity.

Iron Fists, Islamic votes, general thoughts

I see the poor father of the murdered boy Damilola Taylor is calling for an 'iron fist' to combat knife crime. He will eventually get his iron fist, a rock-jawed, relentless militia adept at bashing down front doors and using the power of arrest to frighten everyone. He will also get a surveillance state – it is obvious that the desire to snoop on us, driven by supposed 'security' concerns is now entrenched in the establishment, and will happen.

But at the end of it, when we have a strong state and almost no safeguards, we will still have the knife crime. In my years in Communist ( and recently ex-Communist) Moscow, the Militia were everywhere, twirling their rubber truncheons and immune to criticism or accountability. If the authorities said you were guilty, you were guilty and that was that.

Yet Soviet Russia remained horribly violent ( Examples known to me personally - a friend's husband was abruptly murdered in a stupid, sudden fight, and a beautiful, educated, middle class  woman who occasionally translated for me, and who lived as close as it was then possible to come to a middle-class life in the Soviet capital,  was set on in the snow, beaten into a mass of bruises and left stripped and naked by her assailants. She was lucky not to freeze to death).

My simple point is that iron fists and snooping don't actually make people safe. They make the state safe, because it is the state that such methods are designed to serve. A genuine 'people's police', like our own before Roy Jenkins wrecked them in the 1960s, are present on the streets as individual, citizens in uniform with few powers, are governed by law, must answer to the courts and derive their authority from those they protect.

The sea they swim in is a general high level of morality and obligation, backed up by a death penalty for those who refuse to abide by the basic rule of respect for innocent life,  which again was undone by Mr (later Lord) Jenkins and his cultural revolutionaries. They escaped the consequences of what they had wrought – Lord Jenkins living out his years in a delightfully unspoiled village in the shadow of the Berkshire Downs, all but untouched by the new Britain he had helped to make.
I have also been struck by the way that almost every report of George Galloway's Bradford victory( which is causing me to rethink many of my opinions on voting) concentrate on the blow to the Labour Party.

Well, there was one. But they really also ought to mention to parallel blow to the Tories.

In 2010, Bradford West was a Tory target seat.  Labour did not hold it very strongly. (I've put 2005 votes in brackets after the 2010 totals)

Labour's Marsha Singh won 18,401 votes, 45.3%  (14,570 and 40.1% in 2005) to the Tory candidate's 12,638, 31.1% (11,544, 31.7% in 2005).

In the by-election, on a lower turnout George Galloway won 18,341, (55.9%) . Labour won 8,201(25%). The Tories won 2,746(8.4%)

Now, the Labour collapse is shocking, from 45% to 25%. But the Tory collapse from 12,638 ( 31.1%) to  2,746 (8.4%) is in some ways even worse. They can't possibly consider it a target seat from 2015. This seat is now lost to them - I should say it is now closed to them for the foreseeable future, while Labour, if they are clever with candidate choice and so some hard work,  have some chance of clawing it back in time. Why don't the toady press mention this aspect more?

It's been pointed out that George Galloway has mobilised what appears to be a rather Islamic vote.  I think this is true, though Labour(and in some places to the Tories) have not been reluctant to courts Muslims themselves in the past. It is their own fault that they have now made this very hard for themselves by supporting the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. As some contributors point out, George Galloway is often criticised for doing what establishment politicians and parties also do, and get away with.

The point made by 'Pinky' (I hope not from Brighton) is a misunderstanding. I regret not knowing more about the sciences and mathematics, and try to remedy my ignorance. I certainly don't defend it ( despite silly claims made by some contributors here that my dislike of the University Challenge science questions involves a disdain for this area of knowledge).

Nor should Mr 'Pinky' defend his lack of knowledge of the riches of English poetry. He should recognise that it is not his fault, that it is regrettable and that (in my view) it is a good deal easier to remedy than my gaps in scientific knowledge. I have never said I was 'properly' educated (I readily acknowledge that my education is full of gaps, most f them my fault, and always have done). By my own standards I am very poorly educated indeed.

I am also lamentably ill-schooled by the standards of many of my father's generation, who never hoped to get to University but who knew by heart the classics of English poetry, had read English literature widely, were well-informed about geography and national history, and in addition understood the claims and scriptures of the national religion.

It took a wide boy with a tax-haven tan and a big mouth to tell us what's really going on

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Those of us who try to care about this country sink from distaste to disgust to revulsion, till in the end there is nothing left to do but laugh.

Every so often (it happened three times last week) someone says to me that I should find something cheerful to write about. They've come to the wrong shop. All the political parties employ battalions of professional liars who can provide you with all the happy falsehoods that you want.

And the power-worshippers and courtiers of political journalism proudly pass on this tripe as if it were their own work. Talk about having no shame.

Read them if you want that. What I write here is the sober truth, though during the past seven days it has not seemed that sober. Even in the fifth week of an alcohol-free Lent,  I felt intoxicated by the secretly filmed blabbering of the former Tory co-treasurer Peter Cruddas.

Here, thanks to the cunning behaviour of my wrongly reviled trade, was the real face of British politics – a crude wide boy with a flapping mouth and a tax-haven tan, fake mateyness wafting from every pore.

How I laughed. This person was the head waiter at Mr Slippery's Secret Diner, holding out his fat hand for wads of £50 notes in return for Supper with Samantha. How very unlike the Clubland smoothness of Mr Slippery himself; but how very much more true.

Now, say you wanted to lobby Mr Slippery about the awful school your children have to go to, or the police-free streets of your town, or the mass immigration that has changed your city for ever, or the plans (they haven't gone away, you know) to build over every hill and vale in sight.

Well, first, don't bother. I've tried on your behalf (without paying, though it made no difference). Mr Slippery and his Cabinet view people like you and me as tiresome, boneheaded fascist nonentities, who have somehow failed to become as enlightened as them.

It's easy to be enlightened in modern Britain if you are very rich. They ask, languidly: 'What do you mean, crime? What do you mean, dirty hospitals? What do you mean, terrible schools? It doesn't affect us. You're having a Moral Panic. Now do go away.'

But it is harder for a poor and honest person to have his voice heard in the chambers of the powerful than it is for a JCB to pass through the eye of a needle.

Oh, no, I'm not against rich people as such. But I am against the current ghastly combination of wealth and self-righteous Left-wing opinions that is ruining this country more surely than any of its more honest and straightforward external enemies ever did.

What nobody seems to see about the Cruddas Crisis is this: our three elite political parties speak only for that elite, grossly undeservedly wealthy, morally tainted and happy to see the whole country the same way. It is only thanks to rules that guarantee them BBC airtime, thanks to the suborning of political journalism, and thanks to sacks of gold from dubious donors, that these parties even exist.

Left on their own, they would wither away unwanted, like a thousand other failed businesses that ignored their customers for too long. Donors (plus the BBC monopoly) suspend the rules of survival. It is as if British Leyland were still turning out Austin Maxis, and people were still buying them. The product is dreadful, but the advertising and the monopoly keep out any serious competition. You, of course, are partly to blame for this by continuing to buy the tatty, dishonest products pressed on you. When you stop, there might possibly be some hope. I'll let you know if I see any signs of it.

Is Sam Cam taking us all for a ride?

I do wonder how those attractive pictures of Mrs Cameron riding her bike came to be taken in a week of embarrassment and fake panic over a fuel shortage that hasn't even happened yet. So should you wonder.

Televise judges sentencing convicted criminals? Sure, if you also screen the hundreds of Crown Prosecution Service meetings at which so many criminals are let off before even being prosecuted.

I rather like George Galloway, not because I agree with him – I don't – but because he says what he means and believes what he says. It is thanks to these qualities that he is a thrilling public speaker and devastating debater. I think that is what the people of Bradford liked about him, and what they never see in the official parties.

More pointless military deaths in Afghanistan mean more pious flannel from Mr Slippery – but no change in a futile policy. Why doesn't he just admit he doesn't care? Meanwhile, William Hague proposes to spend more of your money and mine stirring up trouble in Syria. People will die horribly because of this. Who does he think he is?

Locking up the wrong louts...

To avoid false accusations of 'racism' from the Thought Police, I have to make the following statement of the blindingly obvious: I think Liam Stacey, who made nasty comments about the collapse of a footballer, is a callous, foul-mouthed, drink-sodden moron. Is that clear?
Can I now go on to say that I don't think much of a criminal justice system that sends him to prison for expressing his 'views' on the internet. The same system repeatedly leaves at liberty violent thieves and louts.

For example, Kazeem Kolawole, one of the gang who ruined the life of Thusha Kamaleswaran – the six-year-old girl shot in a shop in London – was free to do this evil only because he had been spared prison after  beating up a schoolgirl, and was on bail (of course) for carrying a knife. Now, if only Kolawole had made a racist remark he would have been safely locked up.

How many different things are wrong with  a country in which a little girl's happy life is transformed in an instant into misery by a bullet flying through a suburban shop? How many of them are we even allowed to discuss in public without being howled down? Thusha's ordeal has only just begun. As long as we have the sort of Government we now have, there will be more of these horrors.

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The Grammar of Privilege, and Our Retreat from Honesty

You'll have to wait till Sunday for my thoughts on Slippery Dave's Downing Street Diner, Pastygate and the rest. For the moment, a few other thoughts.  I was at a Canterbury Grammar School (Simon Langton Boys) yesterday to debate the worthlessness of the Tory Party. The event itself was a follow-up to a similar debate I'd taken part in at the King's School, an ancient independent foundation, in the same rather moving city. Moving? Why so?   In Canterbury there are many lingering traces of the lovelier England that has now been pushed to one side by bulldozers, money, worldliness and egalitarianism. The cathedral itself (surprisingly small for the mother church of Anglicanism) on a sunny late afternoon in Spring probably looks as beautiful as it has at any time in all its centuries of history. And Evensong on Wednesday evening, with the lamentations of Jeremiah in a Purcell setting, and the Psalms chanted as they have been from the beginning, came close to what it ought to be, the most profound and intense expression of English Christianity in literature, music, architecture and ceremony.

Of course, modernism has crept in.  the lessons from the Bible were in plastic, poetry-free English. Then the usual problem arose with the  137th Psalm, which begins with the sublime lament, one of the saddest expressions of exile and loss ever written in the history of the world, elevated into great English poetry by Miles Coverdale : 'By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion. As for our harps, we hanged them up:  upon the trees that are therein. For they that led us away captive required of us then a song, and melody in our heaviness: sing us one of the songs of Sion. 
'How shall we sing the Lord's song : in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem: let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth: yea, if I prefer not Jerusalem in my mirth'.

So far so good. In this we hear the authentic voice of the enslaved Children of Israel toiling under their cruel masters in Babylon, jeeringly compelled to sing for their oppressors' entertainment, and muttering under their breath their abiding loyalty to their own land and faith. But – and there's quite a bit of this in the Psalms (check out the 109th,  a lengthy and terrible revenge curse which features twice in the astonishing ghost stories of M.R.James) - the authenticity doesn't stop there.

Except that in the English church, it does. It must have been years since any choir has gone on to sing the final atrocious words of the 137th Psalm: 'Remember the children of Edom, O Lord , in the day of Jerusalem: how they said . 'Down with it, down with it, even to the ground!' O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery, yea happy shall he be that rewardeth thee, as thou hast served us. Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children: and throweth them against the stones'.

This is a disgusting sentiment, and runs clean contrary to the New Testament injunction to forgive and love thine enemy. It's also a bit of a problem for those of my faith who treat the Bible as a Christian Koran and intone the silly words 'This is the word of the Lord' after all and any reading from the scriptures. No it's not. In this case it's the word, albeit his true feelings, of an embittered, half-starved slave, quite possibly with a hook through his nose by which his captors drag him about,  silent under the lashes and taunts of his jailers, and seething with impotent feelings of vengeance and resentment,  cruelty and loss, having almost certainly seen his own family snatched from him and either killed or raped, or perhaps both.

And, I might add, what God could reasonably stand against such feelings, except one who had himself been the victim of mob rule, falsely condemned at a show trial, ritually humiliated, tortured and eventually driven to his own death in an extremity of torment, and still managing to forgive those responsible?

(for an unEnglish but extraordinarily powerful exposition of this and other thoughts about the uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth, for believers and unbelievers alike, may I recommend the famous and astonishing sermon 'The Seven-Way King' delivered 40 years ago by the American Pastor S.M. Lockeridge,   and still to be found in various versions on the Internet).

I came out of the cathedral into the level evening light which picks out the loveliness of the carved stone, and reminds the visitor that England's cathedral cities contain riches to match those of the wonders of the world, yet hardly any people in these islands bother to visit them any more. On the advice of an old friend who lives in Canterbury, I slipped down an undistinguished side-street and found a tranquil, wholly English garden, modest, peaceful, informal, verdant, not overlooked, lovely , with an ancient chapel over a stream.

Then I stayed the night in that friend's glorious mediaeval house, hidden behind a modest frontage, full of the spirit of England, independent, guarded with privacy, unassuming , settled, thoughtful and enduring.

It was a good end to the day.  The debate, with the Tory MP Julian Brazier, would have been familiar to any reader here.  Mr Brazier would be better off out of a party that does not really believe what he believes in, and I told him so.  But he hasn't recognised this ...yet. The setting , in a school run to high and exacting academic standards, but without fees, was a good deal less familiar – and yes, as the index will attest, I do understand that the surviving grammar schools of England are besieged by so many parents that they are not really grammar schools, as such things existed before 1965, but super-super-selective academies falling far short of the demand for good selective secondary schools

So it is interesting that Kent County Council yesterday sought to expand two of its existing grammar schools, planning to create an extra 120 grammar places. This was in response to a petition bearing 2,600 people, which just shows how inadequate it is. even as a local response. It is even more inadequate as a national response. But it has to be, since in most of the country, where they do not now exist,  grammar schools are now actually illegal, a fact so astonishing in itself that I shall repeat it. In most of the United Kingdom it is against the law to open a new selective state secondary school.

Why on earth should that be so? Continuing supporters of our unhinged, suicidal obsession with using schools as engines of egalitarian social engineering (and to hell with the education)  are invited to explain why such a law might be desirable or necessary. I know the answer. But will they admit it?

I note that some readers don't share my astonishment that members of a carefully-selected team for University Challenge were clueless about John Keat's 'Ode to Autumn'. One or two even seem a bit cross that their own lack of knowledge of this poem is viewed, by me or anyone else, as a disadvantage.

Well, I am pleased if they are discontented. It might encourage them to put this right, and become better people by doing so. As a public service, even though it is the wrong time of year, here is the Ode. If you didn't know it, don't you wish you did, and aren't you glad you've now encountered it?

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Next week, we might have a go at John of Gaunt's dying speech , which I don't suppose anyone under 30 knows either.

Psychiatrists snatching our children? That's Stalin's trick

I must continue to warn, as long as I can, against the threats to our freedom now massing on all sides.

My blood ran cold at the story of a psychiatrist who is alleged to have labelled parents with mental 'disorders' so that their children were snatched away from them. One has been exposed, and thank heaven for that. But how many others continue undisturbed?

Such 'disorders' are 90 per cent jargon and ten per cent guesswork. There is no objective test for them. If a qualified person says you have one, you have one, and goodbye to your children for ever. How can this possibly be permitted in a supposedly free country?

Like the secret family tribunals, in which parents struggle in vain against loaded accusations, from which they are not permitted to defend themselves, these are growing signs of the State's power to burst in on private lives and wreck them.

The abuse of psychiatry is a symptom of tyranny. I have no doubt that many psychiatrists are honourable and thoughtful people. But their discipline, which largely lacks any objective measures, can all too easily be used to crush individuals for the purposes of the State.
If it can be deployed to snatch children, then there is not far to go before it is also used to terrify or subdue opposition.

The old Soviet Union employed it for this purpose. I once met (and I will always be proud to have shaken his hand) Dr Anatoly Koryagin, the fantastically brave Russian psychiatrist who spoke out against this perversion, and who was then himself locked away without trial in conditions so vile that his own wife could not recognise him.

When the USSR was still there, we always had before our eyes a great glaring warning of where the seemingly nice ideas of 'progressives' and reformers can so easily lead.

Since its collapse, we have assumed that the danger is gone. Far from it. Our homegrown revolutionaries were liberated by the fall of the Soviet Union. No longer were their weird anti-family, anti-patriotic views associated with treachery and oppression.

And so they fanned out into the schools, the Civil Service, the newspapers, the universities, the BBC and even the medical profession. And those of us who experienced Soviet power and remember it are endlessly reminded, in the politically corrected one-party state that is modern Britain, of that miserable place.

Gone to pot
Unsurprising facts from the non-existent 'war on drugs'. Far more people are prosecuted for not having TV licences than for possessing cannabis. The number of offences is similar. It's not that they don't have the time to punish drug-takers. It's that they lack the will.

How fitting... a joke uniform for a joke Navy
Is there anyone in the world who looks better with a baseball cap on his head than he does without one?

British policemen and women put them on when they wish to look tough, shoot people, or at least pose on rooftops with guns. I always hurry from the area when I see this. So should you.

Prematurely bald men seek to hide beneath them (a mistake. Perhaps this is why William Hague suffered his fatal headgear malfunction).

There was a period, happily past, when teenage boys seemed to have them surgically attached to their heads.

But now they are to be imposed on what is left of Her Majesty's Navy. Captains on the bridges of destroyers have been photographed, looking understandably grim, in this revolting headgear.

It makes them resemble Florida boatmen, taking rich, fat New Yorkers on a shark-fishing expedition. This is not a good look for the heirs of Nelson, Rodney, Hawkins and Drake.

Once, I would have bridled at this deliberate humiliation of what used to be a great fighting service.
But now, as I accustom myself to being an exile in my own country, I just laugh. If Britain is a joke, it might as well look like one.

Who's the 'man who stole our pensions' now?
How's it going for you now, all the gullible ones who voted for the Useless Tories because 'We have to get Gordon Brown out'?

Who now is 'the man who stole our pensions'? And how are you liking the slow but steady emergence of 40 per cent as the new standard rate of Income Tax?

Sinking in Mr Slippery's sea of concrete
If any of us was challenged to explain the roots of patriotism, he would not think of flags or wars, but of some small, beloved landscape. It probably wouldn't be anything special, much like the way Rupert Brooke described a friend's sudden sense of England on the outbreak of war in 1914: 'Grey, uneven little fields and small ancient hedges rushed before him, wild flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness, sedate houses of red brick, proudly unassuming, a countryside of rambling hills and friendly copses.'

Well, not any longer. In the midst of the Budget, Mr Slippery has slid through new planning laws that mean all that unassuming gentleness can be bulldozed by developers, to build nasty supermarkets and ugly houses for all the immigrants our Left-wing rulers keep letting in.

Old Slippery even boasts about it: 'I can see the furious objections – the banner headlines – already.' But he'll ignore the sentimental old fools who want to save the countryside. 'We will take difficult decisions, we will risk short-term unpopularity,' he proclaims. How very brave. Well, I wish him long-term unpopularity, so that he is remembered for centuries to come as the man who concreted over Britain.

Mr Slippery speaks about 'tough' community sentencing. There is no such thing. The phrase is as absurd as 'diet pizza'. If ever this man promises anything good, you may be sure it will not take place.

Ode dear, they just don't care any more
Each year the once-enjoyable quiz programme University Challenge becomes more politically correct and more boring, stuffed with kilometres, 'Common Era' instead of AD, and endless science questions nobody can answer. And each year, at the final, Jeremy Paxman argues the show is proof that education isn't being diluted. Not this year, though.

Even he looked pretty tight-lipped when not one of the winning team from Manchester University could identify well-known lines from Keats's Ode To Autumn, one of the greatest and best-known poems in the English language. To anyone properly educated, it is like not knowing that water is H2O, or that Paris is the capital of France.

Not only did they not know the poem. They didn't know they didn't know, and they didn't care. It's the not caring that pains me most.

The Death of Mao

I am now in the midst of reading a quite extraordinary book, 'The Death of Mao', by James Palmer (Faber and Faber). It cleverly mingles two events, one political and one natural, which took place at the same time – the death of the Chinese tyrant Mao tse Tung, one of the worst and wickedest people ever to rule a great country, and the Tangshan Earthquake, one of the most violent and grievous disasters ever to overtake humanity and the worst earthquake of the 20th century. 

As Mr Palmer points out, the earthquake, though colossal, is little-known in the world beyond China. This is a shaming fact, partly caused by a Western indifference to the sufferings of our Chinese fellow-creatures, and partly caused by the suppression of news and facts common to all tyrannies.

In 23 seconds, with the force of 400 Hiroshima bombs, the supposedly solid earth in and around the industrial city of Tangshan roared, boiled and shuddered, killing a quarter of a million people, often very horribly,  and injuring nearly 200,000 more, to the extent that any official figures can be believed.

I am now in the middle of Mr Palmer's description of the earthquake itself, and of two very moving aspects of it – the awful powerlessness which afflicts those caught in such horrors, and the limitless selflessness of the survivors clawing in the ruins to dig out the survivors. Many of these survivors thought for some time that they had been the victims of a nuclear attack.

The catastrophe was also preceded by many signs and portents (I have discounted the myths and legends, of which there are also many), such as strange red lights in the sky some hours beforehand, which science has yet to explain but which are often associated with earthquakes. A few people heeded these. Most did not know what they meant, and died.

The force of the quake reached Peking, less than 200 miles away, as Chairman Mao lay half-dead and half-alive amidst his plotting courtiers. The old monster would eventually die in September, leaving behind an unresolved struggle – between the sane and canny Deng Xiaoping (or Teng Hsiaoping as we called him in those days ) and the appalling, unhinged  Gang of Four, led by Mao's awful widow Chiang Ching, or Jiang Qing is she is mysteriously transcribed in the new Pinyin notation. (Can anyone tell me who, anywhere in the world, pronounces the letter 'Q' as ch'?) .

Many believe that the effective and humane performance of Hua Guo Feng after the earthquake(set against the bitter insistence of the gang of Four on continuing their campaign against Deng) helped to bring about the end of the Cultural Revolution which had wrecked so much of China since Mao launched it in 1966.

Certainly there was an effective military coup in favour of Hua Guo Feng in October that year, which eventually led to the supremacy of Deng and the creation of the modern China we have all come to know as a wealthy and industrious world power.

This account gives birth to several trains of thought. The first is a shame at knowing so little about the modern ( let alone ancient) history of China, something I intend to put right.  I first had this feeling a few years ago when I travelled, with friends in Peking,  into the country outside the capital. We passed the Great Wall itself, then went on through miles of vineyards, visited a beautiful old walled town, reasonably preserved, with heartbreakingly lovely wall paintings in some of the houses; then we travelled on through a village so untouched by the modern world that children were playing with iron hoops, something I'd only ever seen in illustrations of Victorian England in my ancient 'Children's Encyclopaedia'. And finally we ate a winter picnic on the 30-foot-high rammed earth walls of a still-inhabited settlement, looking out over the misty rice fields and (in my case) trying to come to terms that this was a civilisation with 3,000 years of recorded history and that I had not even begun to understand its force and extent. Peking itself, carefully explored, hides amid the relentless concrete of the new era many lovely remnants of the previous regimes (many saved by the personal intervention of Chou-en-Lai, or Zhou Enlai, as we must now call him). Having destroyed so much of their heritage themselves, the rulers of Communist China make a great business about the Western destruction of the Summer Palace – undoubtedly a great cultural crime, but thoughtfully explained and set in context, as well as magnificently and movingly described, in George Macdonald Fraser's typically excellent (if bawdy)  historical novel 'Flashman and the Dragon'.

The second is to consider yet again the problem of earthquakes. Leibniz argued , if I understand him right, that as this is 'the best of all possible worlds', that is to say the best that could conceivably be devised, such disasters could only explained by concluding that such cataclysms prevented or forestalled even worse events, and that a universe built according to laws, in which the inhabitants were permitted free will,  must suffer imperfections.

I also wonder if the effects of earthquakes are not hugely increased by man's actions. People in small wooden houses in country districts suffer far less than city dwellers (and I might add, countries where the authorities take earthquakes seriously, such as Japan, generally withstand them with few casualties, whereas in mad countries, governed by corrupt and ideological despots, the damage is far greater – Palmer recounts that many of the houses which fell in the earthquake had been weakened because their inhabitants, crazed by starvation under Mao's 'Great leap Forward'  ( a wholly man-made disaster) had actually tried to eat their own homes and pulled bricks from the walls in their famished madness. 

And do we, in our conviction that we are 'advanced' neglect or simply fail to see warnings that our ancestors would have understood as signs of approaching earthquakes or tsunamis? Would our forebears have seen it coming, known what the red lights meant, understood the strange behaviour of fish,  birds and animals and the inexplicable falls in water levels which so often precede earthquakes?

I am not being dogmatic here, and would be grateful if comments on this matter were as tentative. But I don't suppose they will be. Never mind. At least we can get off the subject of Russell Brand and drugs.

Not About The Budget

It is more or less pointless to form any ideas about a Budget until several days after it has been presented. Absolutely central figures are often concealed in the Treasury 'Red Book', the full version of the document , from which the Chancellor selects what he hopes will be his Greatest Hits in his actual speech. Even though the book is now pretty swiftly online, it takes some sleuthing and experience to work out exactly what it is the government are trying to conceal. There will always be something.

Personally, I have for many years ignored the instant appreciations of Budgets, and waited a day or two, or even a week or two, and sometimes a month or two, for the full picture to emerge. One thing I can promise you. Anyone who believes that this government is making deep cuts in total spending, and any newspaper which gives the impression (the cartoonists, notably that fine draughtsman and political simpleton, Peter Brookes, are particularly bad about this) that the Liberal Democrats are the crushed and pliant victims of a ruthless George Osborne and a cunning, lordly David Cameron, hasn't a clue what is going on, and belongs with the horoscopes and the alternative medicine pages.

So instead let's have some general conversation. First, here's a last examination of the word 'insult'. I know that these days people write to me to say they are 'insulted' by some opinion I have expressed (usually about the non-existent complaint 'ADHD'). But that's not an insult. They don't understand English, any more than they know how to argue. An insult is a piece of personal abuse, usually an epithet, of the sort that might once have provoked a duel. It is the verbal equivalent of the slap in the face, or the pulling of the nose (a wonderful description of what this actually involved is given in one of the Patrick O'Brian books about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, and the Napoleonic wars. Maturin pulls the nose of a Whitehall official who speaks to him as if he is a paid mercenary, when in fact he undertakes terrible risks for reasons of principle. It's extremely messy, and ends with Maturin wiping his hand on the victim's neck-cloth.

I might say, for instance, that Julian Assange 'insulted' me with his use of the t-word in his response to what I said in the drugs debate. I had always had (and still do have) some sympathy for Mr Assange's actions, and for his predicament. I don't think he knows anything much about drugs and their legalisation, so his attack on my position has no weight, and, since he is so prominent (as I told my companions at the time, and friends later), I was rather proud of having attracted his schoolyard rudeness. I might also say that Geoffrey Robertson was pretty gratuitously rude about me .

I didn't in fact respond to either of these sallies, and why should I? I have learned to expect such things, and while I don't like them, or approve of them, I don't mind them. (Yet another of my 'Hitchens is always wrong' contributors, a Mr 'Think', cannot grasp the distinction between complaining about being insulted, which I am not doing, and pointing out that this treatment in large, supposedly respectable public forums has a meaning for society as a whole. When I refer to 'we aren't there', I'm talking about all those who oppose drug legalisation, such as Theodore Dalrymple [present on that occasion], Kathy Gyngell, Mary Brett and the few others still prepared to make this case unequivocally. I am not referring to myself in the plural, as he knows.)

The alleged comedian Russell Brand is in no position to be sensitive about the way in which he is addressed. His behaviour on the BBC, with Jonathan Ross, was quite extraordinarily bad (Those who doubt this should look up 'Sachsgate'. I do wonder if they are aware of just how nasty this episode was). Mr Brand is still very annoyed that my newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, discovered and then prominently told the story. If we hadn't, he might have got away with it  (note, as evidence of this that he didn't get the name of my paper wrong and say 'Daily Mail' as such people normally do). We got him into a lot of trouble, and we were right. I have also criticised him (and his friend Jonathan Ross) for this behaviour in my column. I don't think he has forgotten that. I think I can promise that, even had I addressed him as 'sir', and told him how much I admired his comic skills, he would have let fly at me with a river of vituperation.

If someone wants to call me an 'alleged journalist' , I couldn't care less. And were I to appear on TV in a hat, and someone called me 'the alleged journalist in the hat', I likewise couldn't care less.  Anyone who wants to know what people actually do say about me can find out by using any decent search engine. 'Alleged Journalist in the Hat' would be like balm in Gilead compared with most of that stuff.

And who would be talking about this debate at all, had it not been for this clash, in which it seems to me that Mr Brand (except in the minds of a tiny few unshakeable partisans) made a prize fool of himself?

The idea that I 'derailed myself' or prevented a rational discussion with this yelling, incoherent person with a bit of light teasing, is nonsensical. I drew attention to his unreasonable attitude. His ludicrous accusation of racial prejudice, baseless and irrelevant, exposed him more than anything else he said. Mr 'Think' presumably imagines I was in some way wounded by this. I wasn't, as my response at the time shows.

Just as with the Stalingrad of same-sex weddings, the Christian conservative propagandist has to calculate how best to say what he wants to say and teach what he wants to teach. Rather than let others tempt him into exposing his flank, he should tempt his opponents into exposing theirs.

I take as my text the Gospel According to St Matthew, the sixteenth verse of the Tenth Chapter:

'Behold , I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves'.

I tend to think this means that we (that is to say, Mr 'Think', I and my allies, it's not a royal 'we') are not required to be naïve and guileless in our actions or our speech.

If it wasn't a comedy gig, by the way, what was it?  It certainly wasn't a Parliamentary debate. Why was Mr Brand there at all? I know of no books he was written on the drugs issue, or learned articles he has written on the subject. Do my critics think I would have got as much time as I did (not very much) by sitting quiet and being restrained? They are mistaken, if so.

The general point remains the same. Conservative opinions are becoming marginal in our society, and harder and harder to express. I am used to the hurly-burly of the arena, and quite enjoy it. That's why I am one of the last to survive. But this scoffing at my simple point about the narrowing of the spectrum of free speech is interesting and, er, paradoxical coming from anonymous contributors who fear even to be named, and whimper piteously about that fear when I urge them to use their real identities.

I'm not myself frightened or intimidated by this narrowing. But others not so lucky and not so confident, especially in the many workplaces where 'Equality and Diversity' speech codes make it an employment risk to express many opinions, see what happens to me and decide it is best to stay silent and anonymous. And what cannot be said, sooner or later cannot be thought either.

This is how soft totalitarianism works. I suggest those who think I am imagining the problem make a note with themselves to keep a record of this conversation, and re-examine it, say, five years hence.

My side has lost this battle, and is, as far as I can see, defeated in this country. My main concern now is to ensure that the truth continues to be told for as long as possible. I still find very funny the idea that if I 'gave up drinking' (the very word 'drinking' suggesting a vast and rollicking debauch, rather than my trivial and finicky consumption of the occasional small glass) anyone would care in the slightest. My angry opponents among the drug liberalisers would find another excuse (as this is an excuse) to hate me. Don't be silly.

I write about plenty of subjects here. But careful readers of my columns and blogs over the past few weeks will have noticed a particular concern with the growing limits of freedom of speech in this country following the takeover of the Conservative Party by politically correct liberals. I happen to think this change has how become particularly noticeable and pervasive. If some inimical, or slow-thinking persons mistake this for some sort of personal complaint about my own treatment,  I cannot help it. I cannot make people understand things they are determined to misunderstand, as I well know. But they are wrong.

The Sabbath Day

There has always been a case against interpreting the Sabbath Day too strictly. Our Lord himself reminded us that  'The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath'. And I have always laughed at the description of Victorian London on a Sunday, by the French writer Hippolyte Taine, as being 'like a large, well-ordered cemetery'.

I can remember such Sundays in a small Devon town under black, wet skies with the wind whirling round the bleak corners and nothing open but the churches. Much later I can recall that there might be one small newsagent, perhaps selling cartons of milk,  for miles around. It really wasn't much of a hardship. You just had to do your shopping on other days.

The important thing was that the day had an entirely different atmosphere from the rest of the week. You couldn't even if you were a visitor from abroad, have been unaware that this was a Protestant Christian country. And at the same time, the idea that everyone had at least one day free from work, and it was the same day each week, and the same day as your neighbours had, prevented most people from coming under pressure to work when they should have been with their families.

You get a similar sense on Fridays in Muslim countries, and on Saturday in Israel (though it's my impression that Israel's observance of the Jewish Sabbath, especially in secular Tel Aviv, is fast weakening, not least because of the many Russian migrants whose knowledge of, and enthusiasm for the rules of Judaism is often a bit weak).

There were exceptions of course. The railways actually ran more of a service on Sundays in those days.  Pubs were briefly open, hotels as well. As was always the case with the old 1915 alcohol licensing laws, anyone who really, really wanted to buy a drink could do so, with a bit of patience, persistence and ingenuity. There wasn't much daytime TV, so most people found other ways of filling the time.

The arrangement had its drawbacks. I've no doubt that it could have been made more flexible. But there were several purposes to it. One, the over-riding one, was the purpose of the Commandment – that there should be a time absolutely protected against the demands of work, a time for family responsibilities and gathering, a time when employers don't and can't bother you, a time of peace, a time for private life and even contemplation, especially contemplation of the great questions which the church attempts to answer in its prayers, ritual music and study.

Another is a weekly nod to the Protestant principle of deferred gratification, that rewards cannot and should not be immediate, that pleasure and happiness are not the same thing, that self-denial is good for us. That principle, in education, in the use of credit and many other things, is what has most completely vanished from British life in the past half-century, and its disappearance is an enormous and all-embracing change which affects every minute of our lives. 

Since the French revolution, revolutionaries who think they can 'begin the world over again' (Tom Paine's words) have thought that they could set aside this idea. Their world would be so perfect that it would have no need of such tedious obstacles. The Jacobins ( as usual not thinking very hard, and obsessed with mathematical neatness) came up with decimalised ten-day weeks. Any trade unionist could have told them this would not be popular – it meant 36 and a half Sabbaths a year instead of 52, and quickly had to be withdrawn, along with their rather haunting but equally hopeless decimalised calendar (the names of the French revolutionary months were rather poetic, though, being designed round a northern European climate they would never have caught on in Tahiti, Mozambique or Australia. If you have a month called 'foggy' and it isn't, ever, foggy during that month, you're in difficulty) .

Stalin tried to get rid of the Russian Voskresenya (the name means 'resurrection', which must have annoyed him) by staggering days off so that people all had one day off, but not all on the same day. Since both husband and father had to go out to work, and they were often awarded different days off, this too proved unpopular and was eventually abandoned.

It fell to capitalism (which Karl Marx had praised as the destroyer of tradition and established, old things,  without seeing the implications of this for his political theory, i.e. that revolutionaries should support rampant free-market capitalism, rather than wasting their time with nationalisation and central planning – and conservatives should be the ones putting restrictions on the market) to destroy the Christian Sabbath in Britain (I simply don't know what the rules used to be in the USA, where almost everything seems to be open almost all the time, and I think Germany still has pretty strict Sunday trading). You can't observe it now even if you want to. It's a human right, apparently, for everything to be open – and therefore it is no longer a human right to have the day off and spend it with your family. This is typical of 'Human Rights' – they conflict with each other, hurt as many people as they help, and invariably have side-effects less loveable than their stated purpose.

It was simply swept away, in this country at least, by greed and pleasure-seeking, and as usual with really horrible anti-Christian, anti-British measures, by a supposedly 'Conservative' government, which battled furiously to crush a powerful rearguard action by the churches and the trade unions, whose prediction that Sunday work would pretty rapidly become compulsory in large parts of the retail trade has been borne out in practice.

In my home town, little queues of people build up outside the shops shortly before 11 0' clock, with sad people who cannot bear a day when they are unable to buy a pair of shoes, or a saucepan or whatever it is. They don't even have my excuse, that they were at work all day on Saturday. Why can't they wait till Monday, or why couldn't they have done it on Saturday?

The truth is that any competent person can get all his or her essential shopping done in six days. If he or she is shopping for pleasure, than can that justify making some other creature spend Sunday at work, when he or she should be at home? I don't think so.

What's more, the Sunday trading rules clearly take the side of small shops, which are freer to open because they are small family businesses, already heavily squeezed by supermarkets and the mini-supermarket satellites which are now threatening corner shops with extinction in many towns and cities. I wonder how many of these will close, once they have put all the small shops out of business.

Now, on the pathetic pretext of the Olympics, we are to have a 'temporary' relaxation of the rules, which will remove most of the last remaining restrictions. Why the Olympics? Will Olympic visitors really have a strong need to go shopping on Sunday? Why? What for? And why does this need to be 'emergency' legislation? We have known the date of the Olympics for years. If this was a major concern, we have had ages to debate it properly. There is no excuse for this dictatorial rushing of the process. Bad laws are made in haste.

I suspect a fix and a pretext. I hope it is jeered out of Parliament.

Insult and Injury

Accustomed as I am to being deliberately misrepresented, may I just add a few words on the Russell Brand matter. I was not even slightly complaining about the puerile rudeness and baseless slurs deployed against me in the drugs debate last week. I have, as I say, been insulted over many years by experts, and these were not they. A little abuse is a reasonable price to pay for being unpopular, and unpopularity with fashionable people is seldom a bad sign.

I remember a similar misunderstanding when I objected to Matthew Parris, a man with a not very well-deserved reputation for niceness and 'decency', misrepresenting me in a debate about religion. I was attacked for being 'thin-skinned', when I was making a point about truthfulness. It was the truth that had been slighted, not me. I'm getting the same sort of misapprehension here, when I'm complaining about the narrowing of the spectrum of opinion which can now be expressed in public spaces. I can only assume it is deliberate.

This narrowing of liberty doesn't usually result in people switching off the microphones and ordering me off the platform (though this did in fact once happen to me, at the hands of an exceptionally dim-witted student leader). But it does result in unconsciously partial chairmanship, and audience jeering, themselves linked to a belief that people of my sort really ought not to be there at all and that our opinions are too 'extreme' to be taken seriously. The next stage, of course, is that the next time the debate is held, we aren't there.

If ever I point this out (as I did once over the problems of publishing) I am accused of self-serving complaining. Even were this true (and in fact I take it all as part of life, believing myself to be in so many ways so fortunate), it wouldn't alter the fact that the range of expressible opinion is narrowing, very fast indeed.

One last point. All I ever said about the alleged comedian's hat was that he was wearing it. I didn't say it was silly (though it was) or that gentlemen shouldn't wear hats indoors (well, he was indoors), just that he was wearing it. That cannot be an insult. He had put it on himself.

As for being an alleged comedian, I didn't say he wasn't one. I said it had been alleged that he was one (as it has been). My implication was that it wasn't proven. He had an easy way of proving the case. Anybody who wants to call me an 'alleged journalist' is welcome to do so.  Anyone's welcome to study the evidence. You'd have to do better than that to make me cross.