Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 315

Angry about gay marriage? Mr Slippery will be SO happy

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Hardly a day passes without someone ringing me up or writing to me to say that  they now realise that our Prime Minister, Mr Slippery, is a fraud.

Many say how sorry they are that they refused to believe me when I told them this, over and over again, before the last Election.

Well, as the Scottish pastor said to his wayward flock as they called up to him from the flames of Hell 'We didn't know!', I reply smugly 'You know now'.

Why it took them all so long, I don't know. Mr Slippery's shamefaced U-turn on the EU's Lisbon Treaty happened before the Election, for all to see.

But people would keep telling me  that he somehow 'really means it' about  his (rather feeble) scheme to recognise marriage in the tax system and his claim that he would do something to curb the Human Rights industry.

They seem to have thought that one day he would rip off his suit and reveal himself to be 'SuperTory'.  

Well, as for marriage, he now claims to be much more concerned about helping a few hundred homosexuals get married than about helping millions of heterosexuals to stay married.

This is, in fact, a wind-up. I shouldn't think Mr Slippery cares even slightly about homosexuals, and I wonder what he used to say about them in private before he was beguiled by Samantha's dolphin tattoo and her fake cockney accent, and learned how to be cool.

But he knows that driving homosexual marriage through Parliament will enrage the suburban voters he despises. He longs to be assailed by them, because it will make him look good among the Guardian-reading metropolitans he wants to win over.

As for 'Human Rights', do not believe the piffle about how the Liberal Democrats have somehow sabotaged Mr Slippery's commission on this subject. Mr Slippery sabotaged it himself.

He packed it from the start with people he could rely on to make sure that nothing changed. Alas for him, he got one appointment wrong, that of Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, who had the integrity to resign when it was clear to him that he was taking part in a fake.

In one of the biggest political developments of the year (largely ignored by most of the political media, who wait for Downing Street to tell them what to write) Dr Pinto-Duschinsky revealed that the commission had been fixed.

Does anyone really believe the Prime Minister couldn't have prevented this if he had wanted to? Well, anyone who believes that deserves what he is going to get. The rest of us don't.

Anna deserves some genuine Fifties glamour

I see that the lovely Anna Friel is  to appear in a film about the Fifties,  a favourite period for movie-makers.

But what is it about? It is about  a squalid pornographer, the late  Paul Raymond.

Why do our film producers steer away from big subjects and concentrate on this sort of marginal, low tripe? A genuine drama could  be made (despite the BBC's recent abject failure in The Hour) about the Suez crisis of 1956, if Fifties glamour is what they want.

Vanishing into the euro-gloom

Darkness is falling on this country in more ways than one. As free speech and thought are squeezed by 'Equality and Diversity' codes, our power supplies are threatened by Green lunacy and by our subjugation to Brussels.

An EU directive on 'large combustion plants' has set rigid time limits on the operation of coal-fired power stations. They are now running out of hours faster than anyone expected.

The first to be halted for ever will be Kingsnorth in Kent, a perfectly viable plant that must now shut in March next year. Many more coal-burning stations will be closed by order of the EU by 2015. Several nuclear plants also need to close soon.

Let's hope that 2015 is very windy. If not, it could be the year we become the first cold country in the Third World.

It's not funny and it's not clever

Last week I had my first encounter with the alleged comedian Russell Brand.

Mr Brand,  co-culprit in the Sachsgate affair, was arguing (if that is the word for his technique) in favour of liberalising the laws on drugs.

I suggested that people like him are selfish kids pursuing pleasure at the expense of others.

I am afraid I teased him a bit (Why does he wear that hat? Why do people think he is funny?). 

He then gave an excellent imitation of a  tree-climbing rodent cheated of its nuts, using  a voice that sounded like a wonky hot-air  hand-dryer in a public loo.

The exchange can be found easily on YouTube.  I think it gives a pretty good idea of the difference between the pro and anti-drug causes.

Does the Prime Minister really need benefits?

If your Government sets out to restrict welfare payments to those who really need them, you do rather open yourself to scrutiny on your own claims.

The Prime Minister plans to take Child Benefit away from higher-rate taxpayers on the grounds that they don't need it. He has also cut housing benefit so that welfare recipients cannot live better than people who work for a living.

Both these are reasonable steps. But  in that case, what do we think of the  fact that the Tory leader, who is by  no means poor, claimed Disability  Living Allowance?

I know, I know. All of us must sympathise with the Premier over the tragedy which befell his son Ivan. And  I, of course, do so.

But should that sympathy get in the way of a reasonable examination  of relevant personal behaviour  by our head of Government?

The fact that Our Leader claimed disability payments was revealed by him, in an answer to a Labour MP, Joan Ruddock, during Prime Minister's Questions in the Commons on Wednesday, March 7.

I have sought further information from No 10 Downing Street and at the time of writing have had no response. But I should say that for a couple as rich as the Camerons undoubtedly are, the sums involved (probably no more than £150 a week) cannot have been vital.

In any case, they do not compare to his enormous and still little-known claims for mortgage interest on his substantial country house near Witney.

I have always wondered whether he really needed to borrow £350,000, or indeed needed a house at all in a constituency only 70 miles from Parliament.

But I have absolutely no doubt that he did not, in any true sense of the word, need you and me to fork out roughly £1,700 a month in mortgage interest payments on that house, for eight long years. We might call this payment 'Parliamentary Housing Benefit'. Worse than a duck house, any day, I'd say.

Is there a pattern here? I personally think this keenness to apply for other people's money, even when he has lots  of his own, undermines claims about  'all being in it together'.

How rich is  he really? We do not know. But I think  he was rich enough to manage without filling in the claim forms.

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A Serious Answer to a Silly Argument

Sometimes people loathe me so much (there'll be another posting on this subject shortly) that they convince themselves that I have various bad personal characteristics.  Some years ago, when I said I drank half a bottle of wine a day, I was assailed by drug lobbyists as if I had admitted to a Bacchanalian nightly debauch, and was a terrible hypocrite for doing this and being against illegal drugs. This nonsensical case emerges from time to time, advanced by people who seem to take it seriously. Worse, others then take it up and the intelligent contributors here (you know who you are)  fail to note its absurdity. So I must oppose it, though I have other better things to do, or people will think it might be valid.

Half a bottle a night has for some years been way beyond me. I'm even quite enjoying Lent, as it gives me a permanent reason to refuse any alcohol at all, and not specially looking forward to being able to resume my occasional small glass of wine or even more occasional pint of beer after Easter.

None the less a couple of anonymous contributors claim that my raucous, alcoholic behaviour stands in the way of policies I desire. This is tripe. I explain why below,  with more patience than I personally think the argument deserves.

I am now told that, to be consistent, and apparently to set an example to a waiting nation, I must give up alcohol entirely.   

I respond to the comment on the 'In Front of Your Nose' topic by Mr 'Think', (a comment which contains many quotations from me) interleaving my responses in his contribution and marking them **

Mr 'Think' begins:' [I am] Not the original questioner but I can see the obvious answers: ((PH asked) ' How, precisely, do I 'help to fuel the demand for alcohol' among other people with my own drinking? What are the mechanisms of this 'help'?'

Mr 'Think' replies: The same way that those who buy and consume other drugs help fuel that demand, an argument you've made several times before.

**Not so, and in fact dead wrong in in several ways. I am not opposed in principle to alcohol prohibition, though I think it impracticable, for reasons many times stated here. If I turned out to be wrong, I would willingly obey a prohibition law. It is precisely because I am an untypical drinker that I doubt that such a thing could be implemented.

I do however frequently call for the reinstatement of the 1915 alcohol licensing laws, the closest this country could (in my view)  reasonably come to prohibition. This does not in any way conflict with my personal drinking habits.

My argument is not that those who take drugs are making drug legalisation more likely, though I do believe their actions are immoral as mine would be immoral if I drank to get drunk or to dull my discontent with an unjust world. . My argument is that campaigners for drug liberalisation are almost invariably drug users, whose motives are self-serving, though they generally don't say so. It is their illegal act which impels them to join this cause, because they would rather it were legal. There is no parallel, for the legal consumer of alcohol, especially a consumer like me, who wants alcohol to be more restricted than it is. To the extent that I campaign on drink laws at all, it is to make them more restrictive. This wouldn't, as it happens,  incommode me one bit.

They disguise their individual self-interest as a supposedly noble, libertarian cause. I do the opposite. I am quite open about my alcohol use, as they are generally not open about their illegal drug use. And I campaign for restrictions on the sale of alcohol, and have said not above a hundred times that I would happily give up alcohol for good if I could be persuaded that by doing so I could diminish the scourge of drunkenness.

Next, alcohol is already legal. Illegal drugs are, er, illegal. By consuming alcohol I don't deliberately defy an existing law, so I neither corrupt myself by deliberate lawlessness, nor do I corrupt others by a bad example of deliberate lawlessness.  Users of illegal drugs do these things, to their own detriment and to the detriment of our society.

(PH said)' If I entirely ceased to drink (a state I have very nearly reached, as it happens) , who would even know, let alone care, let alone be influenced by it?'

Mr 'Think' replies: 'The shops, bars and restaurants that supply you'

**I drink at most two or three glasses of wine a week, and perhaps a pint of beer three or four times a year. I doubt if any of these suppliers would even notice my absence, or my abstinence. Or care.

Mr 'Think' Your friends and family.

**In what way would it influence them if I reduced this minimal consumption to nothing?  Explain.

Mr Think ''Your readers.'

**I must here ask if there is anyone reading this blog who will say honestly and with a straight face that, were I to declare that I will nevermore touch a drop of alcohol, their personal behaviour would alter in any way. If so, how, and can I have it signed on a piece of a paper, with full name and address? Honestly.

(PH quoted again) 'Why is my failure to cease drinking 'one of the reasons why alcohol prohibition is impracticable'.

Mr 'Think' :'You argue that alcohol should be outright banned, but cannot be because it is culturally ingrained.'

** This is a mixture of error and half-truth. I don't argue that 'alcohol should be outright banned'.  I have no moral objection to the moderate consumption of alcohol. I argue that it should be more restricted. The fact that a drug which is already legal cannot easily be banned is part,  but not all,  of my argument. It also cannot be banned because, thanks to being culturally ingrained, it has been legal for centuries, and making things illegal that ahve been legal for centuries is notoriously difficult if not actually impossible, however Draconian the law .(see modern Iran)

Mr 'Think' :'You are one of those who drinks it, who contributes to that culture.'

**But as I keep saying, I have no principled opposition to alcohol prohibition. I simply believe it to be impracticable. I could live my life without alcohol, missing only the taste of a glass of good Burgundy with a cold steak and kidney pie or of a pint of good ale drunk after a 50-mile bike ride. My life would be slightly, but not vastly, different. Were there to be a serious campaign for prohibition, which there is not,  I would not oppose it on principle. I don't think there will be such a campaign, but I have made this statement several times and would abide by it if there were.

Were it to be enacted, I would abide by it. How is this in any way comparable to someone who a) defies the law to use a stupefying drug and b) campaigns selfishly to change the law to suit himself?

Note also that the campaign to destroy the drug laws currently exists (as a campaign for alcohol prohibition curerently does not and has not for many years) and the drug decriminalisation campaign is close to irreversible success ( rather unlike the non-existent campaign for alcohol prohibition, which my minor drinking is supposed  somehow to be influencing, though how one can influence the outcome of a non-existent campaign, I am not able to say).

Mr 'Think' asserts :' You are part of the barrier to the total prohibition you'd apparently ideally like to see.'

To which I retort that actually I wouldn't 'like to see 'total prohibition', however it may 'appear' to Mr 'Think' that I would. I am sorry for him if he sees apparitions of this kind.  I wouldn't 'like to see' it because I believe it to be impracticable. And I would add  that nobody else of any significance is campaigning for it either. So how can I be an obstacle to something that nobody (including me) is asking for? An obstacle, to be an obstacle, surely has to have something to obstruct.  What is it obstructing? Who is calling for this? 

(PH quoted again);'Who, with any influence over laws and events, is even considering such a measure?'

Mr 'Think' alleges ' You considered it, you considered it would be desirable, but you considered it would be impractical. Because of people like yourself, whose culture it is to buy and consume alcohol.';

**No, not because of people like me, for whom alcohol is a minor pleasure which we could easily abandon if we wanted to, but because of  people quite unlike me for whom alcohol has become a central pleasure of their lives, which, like illegal drug-takers, they would never consider giving up for the greater good. And the fact that I have considered and rejected it means that I am no longer considering it.

(PH quoted again) 'Even if they were, what difference would my actions make?'

Mr 'Think' asserts :'You would stop funding drug suppliers.'

** This is an abuse of language. Like it or not, alcohol is legal in this country and those who sell it are not 'drug suppliers' in the sense intended here. They are undertaking a legitimate business. I am not 'funding' them. I am legally buying their legal product.

More, if they relied on me to sustain them, they would long ago have gone out of business (as it happens, both my local wine merchants have shut down in the last two years, but I don't think it's my fault, I just think that good-quality wine is not the most popular form of alcohol in my particular suburb, and I wonder why that is,  if my habits are so influential?) .

Mr 'Think' asserts again ' You would be setting an example.'

**And I repeat my point above, an example of what, to whom?

He claims : ' You would be taking a step to change a culture you apparently disagree with, but join in with nonetheless.'

**Wrong. I would be taking a step of no significance, in support of a cause I don't even endorse.

Mr 'Think again:' You would stop appearing as a hypocrite.'

Well, I can't stop *appearing* as a hypocrite to people who loathe me so much for opposing them that they are laboriously determined (see above) to believe that I am a hypocrite whatever I do or say. That is beyond my power to influence, as the *appearance* is in their minds, not in my actions, and is not susceptible to correction by facts or logic, as it is motivated by hostility. As i say, I hope he doesn't see too manyof these apparations. It's a bad sign.

But, as I explain above, my actions do not in any way conflict with my opinions. so I am not (in this matter at least ) a hypocrite.

On being Insulted by Experts (and non-experts), and my evening with Russell Brand

Well, not an evening, exactly, but a few joyous minutes, connected by some sort of electronic miracle of the kind that has become all too easy in the modern world. The occasion can be found in full at about 40 minutes into this YouTube link

I appear again at around one hour 48 minutes and also briefly at one hour and 54 minutes. And I'm not planning to rehearse arguments on drug legalisation which have been held many times here and can be found in detail in many indexed items, and the comment threads that follow them.

The occasion was a very strange encounter, presented as a debate but in fact not really one, more a sort of combative colloquy, streamed live by Google and Intelligence Squared (who do organise successful debates in conventional style) from a large hole in the ground near King's Cross Station in London, underneath the offices of the 'The Guardian'.

I have no idea how the actual audience came to be selected, though I am used to the fact that metropolitan opinion is generally identical with the received wisdom of the BBC and the left-wing media - I might add that many supposedly conservative newspapers have, during the long slow surrender to drugs of the past 40 years, swallowed the propaganda of the liberalisers.  I am sure that there were far too many people taking part, and I suppose that quite a lot of the audience (especially the overwhelmingly pro-drug online audience, and why is that?) thought that I could usefully have been left out of the cast.

Like Theodore Dalrymple, another sceptic about 'addiction', I was even inconvenient to my own side. Thanks to the widespread acceptance of psychobabble, and the strange ascendancy of the pseudo-scientific chimera known as 'Neuropsychopharmacology' many arguments which would once have been open are now more or less closed, and those who do not agree with the orthodoxy are pushed to the margins.

That is what Tuesday evening's event also demonstrated. My main contributions to the event were as follows. First I blamed drug-takers for their own actions, and also blamed them, and their hedonistic selfishness, for the disasters which have befallen the narco-states, disasters about which that very good man Ed Vulliamy is rightly incensed, though I don't share his solutions.

Second, I stated that drug-taking was itself morally wrong. This is absolutely true for the reasons that I stated, and for other reasons too , which I hadn't time to set out but which are dealt with in my book 'The War We Never Fought' (manuscript now delivered to the publishers).

These are perfectly arguable propositions and I think I made the case for them clearly and rationally. The response I received was not rational. It was a form of rage, mingled with incredulity. They thought everyone like me was dead already. How dare I still be alive? (For an unfettered expression of this hatred see many of the barely coherent comments on the YouTube original, seething with rage and loathing). The alleged comedian in the hat (he was wearing a hat indoors, and nobody else was,  how was it abusive to mention his hat, obviously a consciously chosen personal trademark? Perhaps he didn't like me calling him an 'alleged' comedian, but I have to say I have yet to see any proof of the contention that he is one) responded to my point about selfish rich kids with a tirade of personal abuse and the standard all-purpose false accusation of racial prejudice that is the universal sign of a person who has no good argument, and knows he has no good argument.  As his voice rose to a whine similar to the sound of an ill-tuned hand-dryer, he railed at me for daring to work for a newspaper he didn't agree with (and which caught him out in a piece of behaviour which doesn't exactly redound to his credit). It is amusing to be accused of bigotry by someone who fulfils its characteristics himself.

Mr Brand was one of three people that evening who chose to abuse me personally and crudely.  Another was Julian Assange, a person I have never previously met and for whom I feel, in general terms, some sympathy. If he wants to call me lavatory-wall names, that's his privilege. But once again he offered no serious counter to my point.  And, like Mr Brand, he received the general support of the audience for behaving in this way. The third was the extraordinarily over-rated lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, who – on every occasion when I have debated  him – has shown himself to be rather poor at reasoned debate. This may be excusable, if tiresome, in an amateur, but in one of Her Majesty's counsel, a trained lawyer and part-time judge, it is pretty dispiriting. There are some opponents with whom it is a pleasure and a challenge to argue. He is not one of them. I might also add that in the Green Room beforehand he had approached me (without encouragement) in an ostentatiously  friendly fashion, to which (having encountered him before) I responded with cool civility. I might also add that I received an e-mail from one of the pro-liberalisation speakers saying how much he regretted the rudeness of his side towards me, for which I am grateful.

The point is far greater than a simple matter of manners. The point is that this sort of treatment is the presage of suppression and censorship. Now they are merely shocked that I still dare to say these things, which they had hoped to make unsayable before now. The long collapse of the remaining conservative elements in the Tory party (now almost complete) means that the spectrum of permissible opinion, in public debate, is narrowing sharply, and I do not know how much longer I shall be allowed to express my opinions on major public platforms. The Brave New World grows closer, and the world a little darker, each day.

In Front of Your Nose

 

 

I have two debates ( both on drugs) to attend in the next two days, one of them in Yorkshire, so must be brief. Sometimes I am baffled by the responses I get to particular articles. I am used to the way in which the anti-God fanatics and Olympic-standard bores try to find some way of restarting their interminable quibble on the thinnest excuse. And I am woefully aware of the bilious intolerance of the drug legalisation lobby, which mounts organised attacks on any tiny sign of resistance to its new orthodoxy.

 

But do wake up.

 

Sometimes in journalism it's necessary to be a tiny bit oblique to get a message across. You might know something you can't actually say out loud. There's a very good example of this in Arthur Koestler's 'Scum of the Earth', an absorbing account of his very narrow escape from the Nazis in 1940,  where he spots a cunning Paris  journalist evading the censorship and telling his more alert readers that the French Army has broken at Sedan, and the Germans are once more on their way to Paris.

 

I made the Lord Dannatt affair the main item in my column partly because it is an interesting and illuminating story about modern Britain.  I think it it is quite obvious to any thinking person why he withdrew from the campaign, even though I leave the explanation unsaid.

 

But I also led with it because it is by far the most important. It has little or nothing to do with homosexuality or with my views on it, or anybody's. It is I who said elsewhere that this subject is Stalingrad for moral conservatives, so I'd be obliged if other people, using this term, attributed it to me, rather than offering it to me as if it were a new-minted idea that hadn't occurred to me.

 

It is about the rapid narrowing of permissible public debate, since the three major parties united behind the policy of Equality and Diversity. In my 'Abolition of Britain' I quote the Sixties radical Richard Neville, editor of 'OZ' as saying 'there is an inch of difference between the Conservative and Labour parties. But it is in that inch that we all live'.

 

I doubt if Mr Neville foresaw that within 40 years that inch would have first been metricated into 2.5 centimetres, then narrowed to a millimetre and then, with the Howard-Cameron putsch in the Tory Party, close altogether.  Nor would he have predicted that the resulting consensus would be a good deal closer to the view of 'OZ' in 1968 than to the views of , say, the 'Daily Telegraph' of that date.

 

But so it is, and if we are alarmed by Vladimir Putin's closure of debate, and by the way in which Russian political life is open only to a small circle who conform to the views of the Putinocracy, and we say we are, then why are we not rather  alarmed at the same process, admittedly more smoothly conducted, here in our own country, where we live and where we supposedly have some influence over events?.

 

By the way, on the drugs issue, there is no need to go to the index to work out what a proper enforcement policy would be like. If anyone is so obtuse as to pretend not to know, the answer has many times been set out here – the interdiction of demand as well as supply, with severe penalties, properly imposed and enforced by an active police force, for possession of illegal drugs, and for use of premises for the consumption of drugs. This was the position in this country before 1971, when use of illegal drugs was far lower than it is now. Is it possible these facts are connected? I only ask.

 

 

Outspoken, principled, fearless... so what has silenced Lord Dannatt?

This week I would like you to help me solve a mystery. Why did Lord Dannatt, one of the bravest and most illustrious soldiers of his generation, disappear from a campaign in favour of traditional marriage?

Or perhaps I should ask instead, why was he disappeared from it?

I can tell you these facts. Lord Dannatt chaired a large pre-launch meeting of  the Coalition for Marriage on January 16, at the grand Langham hotel in Central  London. A woman who was present tells me that he seemed bullish and enthusiastic when he mingled with the others – like him, mainly Christians of various denominations – before the gathering got going.

Many of those present had the  impression that this distinguished and outspoken former Chief of the General Staff would be the figurehead for their  movement.
Then two things happened. The launch of the Coalition was delayed from February 3 to February 20. And when it finally burst into the open, Lord Dannatt was nowhere to be seen.

Its leading figure was instead Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. He is a powerful force in our national life but far less powerful than Lord Dannatt would have been in that role. It is hardly surprising to see an archbishop defending marriage. It is a good deal more arresting if a retired  General, an unashamed Christian much admired for his courage and conscience, stands in the front rank.

But the General wasn't there. I have asked him to explain what happened and he politely but firmly declines to do so, saying it is a private matter. Well, he is entitled to that. But I am likewise entitled to carry on asking, and to mention one or two things.

Mr Slippery, the  Prime Minister  – who appointed Lord Dannatt to the peerage – is now a keen apostle of homosexual marriage. I suspect Mr Slippery couldn't care less about the issue. But in his oily way he wants to provoke moral conservatives into opposing him. Then he can smear them as 'homophobic' bigots and crush them for good.

This would be a good deal harder to do if General Dannatt, nobody's idea of a goofy swivel-eyed prejudice-monger, were on the other side.

Anyone who wants to guess at Lord Dannatt's (private?) views on the matter may study his brief intervention in the House of Lords, in a debate on whether churches can legally be forced to host civil partnership ceremonies, on December 15, 2011.  He tried quite hard to get into this debate. I think it fair to say that Lord Dannatt is not a member of the Notting Hill Set.

These are the facts as we know them. Is it possible that Lord Dannatt came under some sort of pressure between January 16 and his disappearance? Who can say? But I will be grateful to anybody who can throw light on this puzzle.

It is, after all, an important political development, far more significant and interesting than most of the power-worshipping gossip and drivel that passes for political journalism in this country. I do wish people would realise that the future of Britain is no longer decided at Elections or at Westminster.

Instead, an intolerant radical elite is moving rapidly to ensure that any strong centres of resistance against the politically correct 'Equality and Diversity' agenda are first  isolated, then intimidated,  then crushed.

And we airily attack Vladimir Putin for squashing dissent.  If he'd been to Eton, like our  Mr Slippery, he'd obliterate opposition with such smooth charm that we wouldn't even notice he was doing it.

Only a REAL war on drugs would have saved Amy
The father of Amy Winehouse, God rest her soul, is campaigning for compulsory drugs education in schools. He says his daughter might still be alive if she had received such education.

My heart goes out to Mr Winehouse in his loss. But he is terribly wrong. His daughter did not die of ignorance. She died because our corrupt society, whose elite is crammed with past  and present illegal drug users, not to mention  legal heavy drinkers, is prepared to sacrifice  a significant minority of young people to  death or madness, to protect its own pleasure.

Severe and properly enforced laws against drug possession, combined with a restoration of the tough alcohol licensing laws we had until 25 years ago, would save and protect the young. Drug 'education', like sex 'education', would take the form of amoral propaganda, based on the false assumption that 'everybody's doing it anyway', designed to undermine and bypass the authority of parents.

Mr Slippery's empty words of regret
Our three identical political parties this week praised the six soldiers they had  sent to needless, pointless deaths in  Afghanistan. Then they expressed regret at deaths they could have prevented and didn't.

Scorn is not a strong enough word for what I feel about these people. How dare they regret what they could have prevented, had they possessed one hundredth part of the dead men's courage?

Mr Slippery keeps our soldiers in Afghanistan, where many more of them are bound to meet equally purposeless deaths, because he is too cowardly to admit the mission is pointless and pull them out. He ensures that they are sent out (often so scared that they throw up their breakfasts, but, even so, they still go) on terrifying foot patrols on which they may at any moment be blown to pieces or maimed horribly for life –  for no reason at all. Let me repeat that, for no reason at all, for no reason at all.

Yet Mr Slippery himself does not dare  to make the journey from Downing Street to the House of Commons on foot, but is instead cocooned in an armoured limousine.
I wouldn't be surprised if Mr Slippery's car was better protected against bombs than the obsolete Warrior in which the six met their deaths.

Oh, and let me just remind you that when the bodies of the six dead men are returned to RAF Brize Norton, probably next week, they will be driven out by the back gate, avoiding the town of Carterton which sits at the front gate.

I do hope the people of Carterton will not allow this cynical trickery to keep them away from the roadside when the time comes to honour six men who did their  duty and kept their word, and who are giants compared to those who sent them into danger for nothing.

Act now on scandal of 'antidepressants'
Here's an important breakthrough in the battle to get a proper investigation into 'antidepressants'. Dr Declan Gilsenan, former Assistant State Pathologist in Ireland, says he has seen 'too many suicides' after people had started taking antidepressants, and has questioned whether GPs are overprescribing them.

After  30 years as a pathologist he says the evidence  is 'more than anecdotal'. Sooner or later, this scandal will explode. Why not sooner?

Get the Cabinet to Patrol the Roads of Afghanistan

If The Prime Minister and his colleagues think it is so important to have a British presence in Afghanistan, and they claim to, then they are the only people in the country who know why that is. So I suggest that they are given driving lessons in Warrior vehicles, or backpacks for foot patrols, and sent out into the roads and fields of Helmand Province, allowing soldiers, who are much more valuable than politicians, better-trained, smarter and immeasurably more honest, to go home.

 

We have been through so many idiotic justifications for this war that I thought the government had run out of them.  We all remember Dr Comrade Baron John Reid's claim (at the start of this witless deployment) that our soldiers were going there as a sort of social work brigade and would leave without a shot being fired, which has ever since served to show that these people's heads are as empty as their salaries are big. On Thursday the latest Defence Secretary,  Philip Hammond, a reasonably intelligent man when it comes to economics, emitted the following drivel :'The judgment is that Afghanistan would still be a very preferred base for terrorist training and activity if we were not there. The nature of the terrain makes it very attractive to international terrorists. We have done a great job there, our troops have done a fantastic job in clearing and holding the ground and squeezing al Qaida out of Afghanistan.'

 

'We are nearly there. We have put in a huge amount of effort. We just need, over the next two and a half years, to complete that task, then we can leave with our heads held high, knowing that we have done the job and knowing that we will not face a further threat from international terrorism in Afghanistan.'

 

We are not nearly anywhere. We have achieved nothing in Afghanistan, and worse than nothing because 404 good people have died in achieving that nothing - and imagine the long threads and rivers of grief and loss that flow out from each of those deaths.

 

We have not built a new society, or overcome the Afghan people's views about women, or prevented the growth of Opium (indeed, the Afghan Opium crop has grown while we have been there, and,  as I so often state, the British government licenses the growing of Opium Poppies in Oxfordshire, and elsewhere in England,  each summer for the production of medical Morphine, so why can't we do the same in Helmand?) . And once politicians reach for the bogey of 'Al Qaeda', we know we are lost.

 

It remains the case that this war is never properly debated in Parliament, and that all our supposed democratic political parties cravenly support it, so the huge numbers of British people who want our soldiers brought home have no voice in Parliament (and we call Vladimir Putin undemocratic) .

 

Our various invasions, bombings and interventions in the Muslim world over the past ten years have now created so many zones of Islamic militancy that, assuming a 'terrorist training camp' in a desert actually offers many real skills in blowing up a London bus (a crime that could be rehearsed here, and indeed was rehearsed here by the IRA, the terrorists we gave in to, and about whom ignorant fools now lie that they 'gave warnings' and so were somehow different from Islamist terrorists) , such camps could now be sited in several places (not least 'liberated' Libya and 'liberated' Iraq) where formerly they would not have been allowed by their dictators.  In any case, Helmand province is a small portion of Afghanistan.  The Afghan government that we back does not control the country more than about 200 yards beyond the walls of Hamid Karzai's compound. And it needs saying from time to time that the culprits of the atrocities of 11th September 2001 came not from Afghanistan, but from Saudi Arabia, a country we haven't invaded and won't, the 'ally' we now seek to propitiate by madly beating the drum for war with Iran, and backing an Islamic revolution in Syria.

 

I am not safer because our troops are in Afghanistan. You are not safer. But the soldiers themselves are in terrible danger, and for no good reason.

 

As long as they are there, they more or less control the air and soil within about 20 feet of where they stand. When they leave, the forces they seek to combat will reappear strengthened and undamaged, and resume their briefly interrupted rule.

 

All we do by sending soldiers to Afghanistan is to transport victims into easy reach of people who want to kill them.

 

And then, with the politicians noisily pretending their political grief, and their families genuinely stricken with inconsolable lifelong loss and sorrow, we bring their bodies home (and send them out of Brize Norton by the back gate in case the crowds of mourners get too big).

 

Once again, I feel the need to quote Rudyard Kipling's savage couplet on politicians who send others to war.

 

'I would not dig. I dared not rob

And so I lied to please the mob'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Desecration, Desecration, Desecration

I'm surprised,  but not all that surprised, by the lack of attention paid to the Mail on Sunday's major story on Sunday, the account of the desecration of Commonwealth War Graves, and of a cross, in a cemetery in Benghazi.

Video footage of this miserable event, shot by the perpetrators, is easily found on the web.  It raises profound questions about the Libyan revolution which our government did so much to help. Yet the news did not dislodge the liberal media's unrelenting obsession with backing pro-Saudi Islamist rebels in Syria, or their other preoccupation with destabilising the Putin government in Russia, and seeking stoke a 'colour revolution' against it.

It should have done, as it raises the precise question which these campaigns ought to raise – will what follows be better than what it overthrows?

Well, better for whom? By the way, I must stress here,  to remove any doubt,  that I am genuinely sure that most Muslims are as repelled by this episode as I am. I   think that they would view the destruction of gravestones and the smashing of a Cross just as I would, as disrespectful to the dead, wounding to the bereaved and in general despicable. The disturbance of the dead is taboo in any serious civilisation.

But back to the question, better for whom?

These revolutions are presented as being good news for the people of the countries involved. Well, this I doubt anyway. I have seen enough violence to know that a revolution, whichever side you are on, is terrifying to anyone with a home, children or elderly relatives (whom you know to be in danger, but whom you cannot protect),   damaging to anyone with productive work ( as they are unable to do it) and filled with uncertainty and lawlessness (as it puts on the streets young men with guns who, once armed, will be very hard to disarm and who will be free to pursue private vendettas or fanatical causes once they have triumphed).

I wouldn't wish a revolution on anyone. But those who cheer on these events often claim to be acting for 'humanitarian' purposes.  They are preventing supposed massacres or escorting humanitarian aid, or some such. And people are often fooled by this. No 'humanitarian' would have stoked up the conflict in Syria, it seems to me, which began without violence but which has somehow acquired arms and a belief that the 'something must be done' lobby is going to bring about a NATO military intervention. I have already explored the reasons for this. I believe that many now dead would be alive, and many now maimed would be whole, had outsiders not encouraged these fanciful beliefs and (I suspect) shipped weapons to the rebels).

The truth is these revolutions are pursued by outsiders with foreign policy objectives. They don't really care about the people of these countries. They care about overthrowing governments which are not to their taste and which obstruct their foreign policies. I think this is how war is fought. I tremble to think that, if this country ever acquires a government concerned to defend its own independence ( not much of a danger now, admittedly), similar methods will be used against it. In a small way, when the technique was only partly developed,  this did happen in Northern Ireland, where a campaign of lies and disinformation about British policy and behaviour, very successful among the American public,   secured the triumph of the IRA over the constitutional government. Imagine how it would have gone these days,  with speeches at the UN (and commentators on TV networks) accusing the British government of 'killing its own people' (quite how this is so much worse than killing other people's people, I am not exactly sure).

What the desecration in Benghazi shows is that , while the Libyan government may have been overthrown, to the satisfaction of whatever foreign policy interests support the 'Arab Spring', Libya is a worse place than it was before, even for the dead. If the media really cared about Libya, they would recognise that was important. As it is, they (mostly)  mention it but quickly pass over it.

A Note on Google

My thanks to all who sought to answer my questions on why Google kept coming up with such odd results for searches for this site. I was most interested by the contributor who did alternative searches on other engines, and came up with quite different results. I was least convinced by the person who thought that my personal search record had resulted in Google's enthusiasm to give me BNP results. Hardly. Thank you all anyway. It has been an education, though an inconclusive one.  Google have now been in touch with me, for which I am grateful,  and I have taken steps which should avoid this in future. But it remains , for me, just one of those mysteries.

Is Google biased? If so, how does it work, and who can tell me?

Every time I Google the word 'Hitchens' , this weblog is of course mentioned. What's interesting is the extract from the blog which then appears below. I've vaguely noticed that it's often not from what I've written, but from an uncomplimentary reference to me by a contributor. I wish I'd logged them in the past. I certainly shall in future. Currently, for instance, if you Google 'Hitchens', the quotation from this site is the following rather mysterious selection:

"Anyone who gives the BNP's manifesto just a cursory glance will see that Peter Hitchens and Nick…"

Last Friday it was a bit longer and read : "Anyone who gives the BNP's manifesto just a cursory glance will see that Peter Hitchens and Nick  Griffin more often than not agree on both… "

Now, as it happens, on Saturday I e-mailed the Google media relations office (no phone number appears to be available for this important bureau) and asked if they could explain why this particular quote had been selected from my fairly large output and reasonably large response to that output. I have had no reply, but at some point over the weekend, the quotation has been shortened.

If I make similar searches on some other blogs, I find that the same slot, referring to 'Guido Fawkes' is , quite properly, a description of the site 'Discussion on parliamentary plots, rumours and conspiracy' . Toby Young is summed up with 'The Sun shone yesterday' ( a direct quotation from the beginning of his most recent posting).  'Conservative Home' is summed up as  : 'Former Conservative Central office staffer Tim Montgomerie comments on British politics and the Conservative Party'. Melanie Phillips gets a mention of her book 'The World Turned Upside Down. By Melanie Phillips'.

And so on. I'd be grateful for any other examples (the key is to put in the name of the blogger and do an 'everything' search) Yet when one contributor to my blog seeks to associate me (falsely) with Nick Griffin and the BNP, this rather obscure and obtuse extract is placed on the web as typical of my blog, and lingers there for many days, long after I have posted blogs on several subsequent subjects. How does this happen? If it is done by a computer programme, what is that programme designed to do?  

Pay Cops – a Grim Prophecy May be Coming True

Some of you may remember a specially grim future fantasy which appeared on British TV in 1979.  It was called 'Quatermass', and aroused memories and shudders in millions who recalled the astonishing and terrifying 'Quatermass and the Pit' (1958) TV series ( and the even earlier 'Quatermass Experiment'  from the early 1950s). As a small child I was absolutely forbidden to watch 'Quatermass and the Pit' but managed to catch a bit of it from halfway down the stairs before being detected by my parents and ordered back to bed. I've since seen recordings. I'm glad they sent me to bed. I wouldn't have slept for weeks.  The inventor of Quatermass, the late and much-missed Nigel Kneale, was brilliant at scaring the (then) settled and safe English middle classes with fantasies which originated in normal suburban settings and then exploded into utter horror and dissolution. He is also author of  'The Stone Tape' perhaps the most terrifying ghost story ever shown on TV anywhere, and of 'Year of the Sex Olympics', broadcast in 1968 and believed by many (especially the Guardian's illustrious and thoughtful TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith) to have been a prophetic prediction of the reality TV show. 

The 1979 serial opened with the words : 'In the last quarter of the 20th century, the whole world seemed to sicken. Civilised institutions, whether old or new, fell... as if some primal disorder was reasserting itself. And men asked themselves, "Why should this be?"'.

In the series, this decay is blamed on alien forces, anxious to consume the young people of this planet, so explaining the curious madness (based on the actual youth spasm of the 1960s) which grips only the young. Maybe Kneale meant this as a metaphor. But it gives him the chance to explore a fantasy about a society in the extreme of decay – books are no longer read, but sold and burned as fuel, terrorists having destroyed the North Sea pipelines. British broadcasting has decayed into an amateurish and crude shadow of its once inventive and culturally responsible self.

The young are almost invariably crazed in one way or another. Gangs fight, horrible, unnamed things happen (sex trafficking is suggested)  in luxury hotels, politicians hide behind security barriers, the old live in fear behind boarded-over windows. It didn't go down very well with critics or viewers, probably because it was too gloomy, , though I found it completely impossible to miss and remember the dark evenings in Belsize Park, the agreeable London quarter where I then lived in a tiny flat,  as I stared at the screen recognising an imagination which worked on the same lines as mine, but much, much more productively and inventively .A knife-murder had recently taken place outside the nearby Tube Station, leaving a opatch of sticky vblood covered in sand for us to walk past. The whole country had a generally twilit, finished feeling - the 'Winter of Discontent' had recently taken place and Geoffrey Howe had embarked on his interesting experiment in economics,  creating a post-industrial society by accident. I spent all my time in glum industrial cities reporting on strikes.

And one of Nigel Kneale's prophecies involved what he called 'Pay Cops' , police you paid for, or they didn't come.(To give them added dislikeability, they were mostly racially bigoted Afrikaner South Africans).

He saw such an idea as an ultimate callousness – that the law was no longer a moral occupation in which the strong came to the aid of the weak in the struggle to protect good against evil, but that the muscle of the state would officially only be available to those who could pay for it.  It is a particularly horrible idea, for anyone of my generation. We all know that in reality the rich are generally better-treated by the law than the poor. It would be hard to devise a system that did not have this bias – and the alternative, a bias towards power, is far worse.(For example, the Soviet system, where the militia were entirely subservient to power - see a personal experience I had of this, recounted in my book 'The Rage Against God'. Readers will be relieved to know that it operated very much in my favour, as I was at that time a neighbour of the Brezhnev family).   But I would say that in mid 20th century Britain, the law-abiding poor got reasonable protection from a police force that was not (as Marxists claim) the army of the rich, but was genuinely the guardian of the good.

How and why did this end? Some of the answers are given in my book 'The Abolition of Liberty', in which I explain how foot patrolling was discontinued, and the pretexts given for it, and how small and responsive local forces were merged into bureaucratic, centralised bodies which had no proper relation to the areas they policed.  And then there is the Bramshill Police College and its command course,  and the Scarman Report, and the Macpherson Report, and all the other incessant equality and diversity inquisitions to which all police officers are repeatedly subjected , and all the other devices by which Home Office liberals have imposed their dogma on policing in this country. And under it all lies the shrivelling away of the fundamental shared idea of right and wrong which made British police officers the allies of the people, and made policing by consent so easy to achieve.

What I should have made more of, and would were I to rewrite the book, was the amazing number of jobs the police used to do which became the preserve of highly profitable private security firms – security of commercial promises above all, parking enforcement, unconvicted prisoner escort. And then all the jobs which were passed to civil servants – the huge white-collar bureaucracies wrongly described as 'civilian' police employees (police are civilians in English law) and the Crown Prosecution Service. So, part nationalisation (the destruction of truly local forces) , part privatisation (the passing of jobs to private security firms and parking enforcement officers hired out to local authorities) , part Quangoisation (the Crown Prosecution Service). But as long as people viewed law enforcement as a moral activity, how could that be farmed out to profit-making bodies?

Now, it seems we have reached that point. A story in Saturday's Guardian (not in my view followed enough in the rest of the media) reported that two major forces, Surrey and West Midlands, have invited bids from private security companies to 'take over delivery' of a wide range of 'services' currently carried out by police officers.

It's not quite clear whether this will involve actual patrolling (not that today's police *do* much patrolling). But the power of arrest is not (yet) to be privatised. I'd guess that some lesser power of detention, similar to that given to PCSOs, will probably come about, and this will then need to be rubber-stamped by a *real* policeman back at the station. But the distinction will in time become meaningless.

Activities that are involved apparently include 'investigating crimes, detaining suspects (see what I mean?) , developing cases, responding to and investigating incidents, supporting victims and witnesses, managing high-risk individuals, patrolling neighbourhoods,(that sounds like patrolling to me, but apparently this is disputed) and ' managing intelligence'.

There seems to be little doubt that the planned contracts are pilots for a much wider use of private security staff, not just restricted to these two forces (or services, as they now like to call themselves) . Last month a major security firm won a £200 million contract to build and run a police station 'on behalf' of the Lincolnshire force. There have been reports of private firms funding police to carry out specific tasks.

Allegedly,  the idea is driven by the need to cut costs , an aim achieved by reducing the numbers of sworn constables (expensive, and with expensive pension expectations) and replacing them with cheaper security employees. Maybe. It'll be interesting to see how it works out. Most Whitehall cost cutting, especially when it involves farming out services to private providers, seems to end up more expensive than the things it replaced. I'm told EU competition regulations may even be involved.

To me, it's revolting (as are private prisons – how dare you imprison someone unless you have a *moral* purpose for doing so. How can anyone so such a thing for money? ). The enforcement of law is not a neutral, commercial or bureaucratic mediation between 'victim' and 'offender' (himself allegedly a 'victim' of 'addiction' or 'deprivation'), and a passionless management of crime and disorder to meet targets. It is a profound moral duty.

Or it was.

How many more of Nigel Kneale's gloomy predictions, all of which seemed to be very distant when he first wrote them, will now come true in the Country Formerly Known as Great Britain.