Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 318

The Cannabis Cult

The tempest of raving, enraged and (in most cases) logic-free and fact-free comments on my criticisms of 'Sir' Richard Branson are most interesting to the intelligent and informed mind.

 

First of all, what is their purpose? It is plain that most of these people have been guided to this site by other sites, and urged to post abusive messages. They probably haven't read what I actually wrote. Nor have they read anything written here before. As I write, the first of many dim and boring  'Wot abaht alcohol, then, eh? eh? ' comments has appeared, and its author is hugging himself in the belief that he has said something pithy and original. Oh dear. The index, the index, the index. It's all there. 

 

Why do they respond like this? The pro-drugs movement has won almost every propaganda battle of the last 50 years and is accustomed to the faint-heartedness and cowardice of old-fashioned Toryism, and presumably hopes that it can browbeat or insult me into being quiet as well. And one contributor, in a very important unintended giveaway – actually calls for opinions such as mine to be banned by law.

 

I have no doubt that something of the kind will eventually happen. The only question is when it will come.  I regard my life as a race between the grim reaper and the forces of political correctness – will I die before they can find an excuse to put me in prison?  I am by no means sure which will win.

 

But this raises the fascinating question of why drug-abuse is not just a disgusting and rather shameful private vice, but instead is a political and social movement.

 

I first realised that this was a problem when people write to me saying they couldn't understand how I could be in favour of liberty of thought and speech, and against identity cards, and simultaneously in favour of criminal punishments for drug users.

 

I grasped at that moment that drug abusers actually see the taking of drugs – especially cannabis – as an exercise of civil liberty.

 

This is plainly ludicrous. Drug-taking makes its victims passive, fuddles their ability to think and makes their speech incoherent. It is , in those ways at the very least, the ally of authority and the enemy of thought and speech.

 

I then found that Aldous Huxley had understood this many years before.

 

His fictional drug 'Soma' is actually a means of social control in 'Brave New World', Huxley's extraordinarily accurate prophecy of the death of civilisation.

 

At one stage a riot is quelled when police spray vaporised Soma into the air and the rioters instantly become happy and begin weeping and embracing each other. In later works and lectures (as readers have told me) Huxley became convinced that rulers would use drugs and unrestricted sterile sex to persuade people to love their own subjugation, and this isn't a bad picture of modern Western societies, where we all do as we're told and think as we're told, amid the ruins of free countries – Parliaments that don't debate or decide, media that parrot the ruling party's line, parties that represent the state to the people rather than the other way round. Meanwhile the principal occupations and diversions of the masses are internet pornography, banal social networks which incidentally provide the state with a window into our lives and souls,   and various forms of bread-and-circuses drivel on the TV, not to mention the bizarre new paganisms of football worship and brand worship, with Las Vegas as a sort of Plastic Parthenon of this ghastly cult.

 

Well, if people love their servitude, and they do (for true liberty of action guided by morality and conscience is quite hard work, and  often rather frightening) , what are they going to do to those who point out to them that they are serfs?

 

Lock them up, when they can. In the meantime, they'll infest this weblog with insulting, brainless comments. Far from putting me off, it encourages me. I have recently restarted work, after a long interruption, on my book 'The War We Never Fought', about the ludicrous lie that our society is conducting a war on drugs, when in fact they are half an inch from being formally legal, and Britain probably has the most relaxed actual drugs regime (especially for cannabis) on the European continent.   

 

I don't suppose anyone will pay much attention, as both the new establishment and the masses have an interest in having as many people happily stupefied and passive as possible. But real freedom shouldn't just go down without a fight, if it is ever to be revived in the future. Civilisations which go gently and willingly into extinction, as Winston Churchill once rightly pointed out, disappear forever. Those that go down fighting have some hope of rebirth.

 

 

 

A former dope smoker writes something fairly sensible

I cannot link to it, because it is behind a pay-wall, but several people have drawn my attention to an article in the London 'Sunday Times' of 29th January by India Knight, which has a bearing on our drug controversy.

Ms Knight confesses to a great deal of adolescent cannabis consumption. And she seems to want to keep her credentials as an all-round cool person and relaxed parent. Also, she appears to me to have swallowed the doubtful view that modern cannabis is hugely stronger than it was when she was young. This argument has proved useful to quite a lot of people who have grown up a bit since they used cannabis in their youth and want to explain that it was different then. But I believe that some experts dispute it.

Anyway, the article describes how she found a group of male teenagers in her house smoking dope. And how she remonstrated with them to stop. And how even so it happened again, until she went ballistic and also when one of those involved  (not related to her) was given psychiatric treatment (well, neuropsychopharmacological treatment, more likely, given that this trendy new discipline has more or less ousted psychiatry nowadays, and has pushed neurology to one side a bit, too) .

But it is clear from what she writes that she now grasps that cannabis-smoking is definitely correlated with mental illness. What she used to think of as harmless is (I paraphrase) likely to land you in the locked ward.

I should state, in all honesty, that I disagree with quite a lot of what she says, and – as 'depression' is mentioned in the article – I must say here that I regard the medical treatment of 'depression' with 'antidepressants' as being just as alarming in its own way (and just as much of a danger to our society) as the unofficial decriminalisation of cannabis. 

But it is something when a person of this kind, generally associated with the 'let it all hang out' faction in the media, at least begins to perceive the danger of this filthy, unpredictable poison. The unthinking defenders of dope should take note. Maybe when they, too, have responsibility for anyone else, they may come to learn that this is a serious matter.

The Lost Veto

Two weeks before Christmas, Britain's conservative media went into a collective swoon of admiration for David Cameron. He had 'stood up to the EU'. He had 'wielded the veto'. Suddenly, after years of rather embarrassing temporising, wriggling and retreating, and of shattering 'cast-iron' guarantees on referendums, the Mere Leader had become a new Thatcher. Not of course that Lady Thatcher was really ever the great champion of British independence that her worshippers believe her to have been. But let that pass. 

I did try to point out here on 12th December ('David Cameron's Phoney War') and again on 17th December ('Don't forget they cheered Chamberlain's 'Victory' too') that the triumph was not as advertised.

Unwelcome as these facts were, I explained that Mr Cameron had not wielded the veto, not least because there had been nothing to veto. I also pointed out that his action was greeted as a blessing by a senior aide of President Sarkozy, and didn't much displease Berlin either.

But there's no swoon like a media swoon. Perhaps it's my Marxist-Leninist background in mass manipulation, but I have several times found myself (usually at party conferences) alone, or almost alone in the press room, being unhypnotised by some 'great' speech. Neil Kinnock's attack on 'Militant', all Anthony Blair's supposedly 'superb' speeches,(yuk) David Cameron's 'brilliant' speech at the Tory conference in Blackpool, (can anyone remember what he said?) all left me yawning and unimpressed.  The only really great speech of my lifetime was, I think, Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' oration, crammed with the thrilling cadences of the Authorised Version of the Bible and delivered by a master of the art of preaching. By comparison with that, these measly offerings were just straw.  

Oddly enough, one of the few others who was immune to the Blair magic was Matthew Parris, and it was because we would sometimes exchange haggard looks of dismay at the mass adulation around us that I once invited him to lunch, in an attempt to form a small Club of the Undeceived. Alas, the relationship failed to blossom, as history records. Mr Parris (the moment reminded me of 'The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers' as modern Britain so often does)  turned up one day looking exactly as before, but mysteriously converted into a loyal Cameroon. Maybe they'll get me in the end, too. Don't be fooled, if they do.

But once the line has been fixed (and see Peter Oborne's bravely self-critical and revelatory remarks on this in my book 'the Cameron Delusion') it is almost impossible to resist.

And so, when the alleged 'veto' shrivelled into a yellowing heap of dust and bones, like 'She Who Must be Obeyed' when she steps for the second time into the flame in Rider Haggard's wonderful book ( was it in 'She' or 'Ayesha', can anyone recall?), it was barely noticed. Gosh the European Court of Justice can after all be used to enforce limits on state spending. Gosh , the institutions of the EU can after all be used in this cause. This was the very thing Mr Cameron was said to have 'vetoed'. In fact, last week he telephoned Jose Manuel Barroso, the President of the EU Commission, to say that the United Kingdom will *not* block the plan. That is to say, there is no veto. There never was a veto, and now there certainly isn't.  We were told that in some mysterious way the Luxembourg Court's powers (which apply to this country) have been watered down.

Well, any reader of Christopher Booker and Richard North's 'The Great Deception'  ( and anyone who hasn't read it isn't qualified to take part in discussions about the EU at all) will know what that sort of safeguard is worth. (NB I originally mistakenly posted the title as 'The Great Delusion', which is, as a contributor pointed out, mistaken. Aplogiesnto those oooking for the book, and to the authors). 

And this colossal retreat (well, it was colossal if the veto was as big a deal as was originally claimed) was blamed, as all Mr Cameron's liberal actions are, on the Liberal Democrats. 'Nick Clegg Made Me Do It'  has become the Useless Tory Party's equivalent of 'The Dog Ate My Homework'.

Who really believes that Mr Cameron couldn't simply say (if he wanted to to) to Mr Clegg 'What are you going to do about it? Resign and break the coalition? Have an election?' Mr Clegg would lose his own seat, his party would all but disappear and he would miss the chance of becoming Britain's next EU Commissioner (a post I predict for him, soon after he leads his party out of the Coalition, in a supposedly bitter but in fact planned split that miraculously does not cause the government to fall, or lead to an election, in 2014).  

The excuse is pitiful and unbelievable, so why does anyone believe it? As for the fabled 'Tory Eurosceptic Right' what are they going to do about it? Well, what do you think?

Why do people believe all this stuff? Why,  because they choose to and want to (the reason people always believe things, as I keep saying).

Oh and by the way, another mention of the 'Sunday Times'. In my edition of it, there's a very curious event on page two. There's a news item about the NHS. There's a news item about bankers, carried over from page one. There's a (very small) news item about Mr Cameron's climbdown on the EU. There's a news item about tax-cuts.

And in the middle of all these, without any accompanying text or headline that I can see, is a full-colour (though quite small) bar chart of the paper's latest YouGov opinion poll, sitting there  on its own, a bit like a weather chart.

I have never seen a poll displayed in this way. In my long-ago days as an industrial reporter Page Two was regarded as the place where good stories went to die, as they were unlikely to be followed up, or noticed by any but the most diligent readers. It was irreverently referred to as 'The Elephants' Graveyard'.  

Oh, you'll want to know what the poll said. It gave Labour(at 40%) a one-point lead over the Tories, put the Liberal Democrats at 8% and others at 13% . This isn't significant in itself . But it does clash a bit with the accepted media belief that Mr Cameron has achieved a lead over Labour thanks to his 'toughness' over the EU etc. It is true that there were three other (rather unsurprising) surveys about people's opinion on taxation. But the neighbouring story , on tax cuts, does not refer to them.

Heroin in the supermarket... why ever not, Sir Richard?

Sir Richard Branson says he doesn't want to see drugs sold in supermarkets. Why not? That is the logic of his opinions, and I can't see why he won't just say so. Is he afraid it will damage his funky brand? If you don't believe these substances are immoral, disgusting and dangerous then why not just let rip?

But 'Sir' Richard doesn't seem to disapprove. He freely confesses to having taken several of them, though curiously he only 'suspects' he has sampled cocaine.

I have no respect at all for this absurd, overrated person, who in my opinion knows almost nothing about anything, except perhaps getting people to part with their money. Even then the record is patchy.

Hands up who remembers his gormless support for Britain joining the euro on the BBC's Question Time. He could hardly get the words out, he had so little grasp of the subject. Yet he unerringly knew which was the stupid side on any major question, and equally unerringly supported it. And – which is much worse – people listened with respect.

And so last week he was taken seriously by Parliament's Home Affairs Select Committee which is, yet again, investigating the Government's drug policy.

I have suggested that they ask me along to explain it to them, as I do actually understand it. But so far I haven't heard back. Somehow I think they'd rather take the advice of the genius behind Virgin Trains. It gets them on TV.

Here's the problem the decriminalisation campaigners face. They claim that a supposed 'war on drugs' is causing all kinds of misery. But there is no such war. If there  is, how can the alleged singer Pete Doherty walk into court with his pockets actually full of heroin, drop some of it on the floor and walk out again  a free man? And why are most cannabis users let off with a meaningless warning, if the police bother them at all?

True, there's plenty of misery. Think of the poor deluded  teenagers risking their sanity because they think cannabis is 'soft' and safe when in fact it's  a terrifying, unpredictable brain poison that can make you go mad for life.

But the non-existent 'war on drugs' can't be the cause of it.

For instance, did you notice that as 'Sir' Richard was gabbling his modish opinions, the Sentencing Council (and who chooses its members, exactly?) was busy yet again reducing the penalties for drug offences, which have been fading into nothing since 1971?

Cocaine and heroin dealers can be let off if they are 'immature' or show 'remorse', which as we know means if they are good actors in the dock.

And cannabis dealers can  be caught with 13lb of dope – almost a stone – and stay out of jail. So much, by the way, for the stupid, repeated claim that leaving the minnows alone 'frees up' police to chase the big sharks. All that happens is that the minnows get bigger and the sharks remain uncaught.

How long before the groovy guys and girls of the Sentencing Council rule that anyone with a van-load of weed or a ten-acre cannabis farm isn't worth prosecuting? Not long, according to my old adversary Peter Reynolds, the leader of the cannabis legalisation party CLEAR. He wrote to his supporters last week to say: 'Effectively, growing your own [cannabis] has been decriminalised. We are free.'

He explained: 'The important point about these sentencing guidelines is that penalties have been reduced to such a level that I doubt whether the CPS will be interested in pursuing such cases.'
For once, I agree with him.

Bored to death in black and white
Yes, I knew perfectly well that the film The Artist was silent and black-and-white.

And no, I didn't walk out. But gosh, I was bored. And the plot was silly and rather nasty. Is it because they have to watch so many really horrible movies that critics go wild with praise when presented with something that doesn't actually make them throw up?
 
Seven-month mystery of the Awkward Question
David Cameron is famously said to have pretended he was the cleaner to dodge awkward phone calls and unwelcome questions in the days when he was public relations chief at Carlton TV.

This sort of thing may  have been acceptable in the hurly-burly of broadcasting PR, but is it excusable in Downing Street?

I ask because it is now seven months since I asked the Prime Minister's office a very simple, small question. At first, they flatly refused to answer it.

Then – by this time the matter had been switched to the Cabinet Office – they gave me a useless non-answer. Then, when I pursued them under the Freedom of Information Act, they failed to meet the legal deadline. This week a Cabinet Office spokesman gave me an excuse for the delay which turned out within hours to be flatly, demonstrably untrue. I am now told that last Monday, 237 days after my first query, an official finally took actual measurable steps to answer it.

I thought, when I first asked, that this was a small matter. Now, given the Government's extraordinary reluctance to reply, I am not so sure. I will let you know what happens and what this mysteriously awkward question is, as soon as I have the answer. I would have expected this sort of thing from the Azerbaijani Interior Ministry, but not from Downing Street. Maybe Downing Street, too, has joined the Third World. Or is it the cleaner's fault?
 
Happy now, Mr Dawkins?
Well, why not advertise abortions on prime-time TV? That's the kind of country we are. So why be coy about it?

Richard Dawkins and his anti-God friends have finally won the moral battle. Growing numbers of people are taking them seriously.  The world's  a meaningless accident. We have no purpose in life, right and wrong change with time and you can make them up as you go along.

So abort that baby, let the elderly starve to death in hospital, dodge your train and bus fares, buy stolen goods at car boot sales, take the bonus, maximise those expenses, drop that litter, drink until you're sick.

The Centre for the Study of Integrity finds that we're all more relaxed about lying, adultery, handling stolen goods and – naturally – drugs. Well, of course we are. Why wouldn't we be? It was the Victorian Sunday schools that made us civilised, and now they're all gone, what did you think would happen? I hope Richard Dawkins and his allies are pleased with their success.

Cold War Nostalgia, and a few responses

It is one of my greatest regrets that in my long-ago days as Defence Correspondent of Another Newspaper, I was abruptly pulled off a visit to the old Inner German Border by a silly executive. The British Army had happily agreed to conduct me along the extraordinary frontier which then ran between the two Germanies. I think that, with a bit of luck, I might also have secured a ride on the British Military Train which used to run daily between Helmstedt and Berlin to assert our right of passage between the British Zone of Occupation and the British Zone of Berlin. It was said that its dining car still sold meals and drinks at the prices of the 1940s, as its whole legal status was based on agreements from the time of Stalin and the Berlin airlift. For the same reason, flights from West Germany to Berlin in those days had to drop to 10,000 feet, because that was the height of air corridor agreed at that time. Of course, having put my kind hosts out by suddenly departing for what they regarded as no good reason, and so making them abandon elaborate arrangements they'd made for me,  I could never revive the visit.

So I have always had a special affection for Anthony Bailey's account of his own long ramble down the border, 'Along the Edge of the Forest', published back in 1983 and now a museum piece. Bailey is a very interesting writer anyway, and this is – if you are interested at all in such thing -  an unusually fascinating subject.

I read Bailey's book hungrily when it first came out, and then turned to it again (for a long time it had been more or less lost in an obscure corner of my not-very-orderly bookshelves), a few weeks ago. It was so long since I had read it that I had even remembered the colour of the cover wrongly, as brown (the colour, after all, of almost everything in the Soviet zone of influence) when it was in fact green. My brother had recently given me , by complete coincidence, another of Bailey's books, a reminiscence of his upbringing, and this made me all the more anxious to retrieve 'Along the Edge'.

I saw the border from trains and from the air, and I saw, close to, its rather different equivalent in Berlin itself, but the actual demarcation was quiet different. In Berlin, for instance, the traveller in the East could approach quite close to the famous Wall, because it was impossible to hide it at the Brandenburg Gate. In most parts of the city you couldn't do so, as there were internal barriers, but there was still this astonishing sight, a few hundred yards from the Soviet Embassy and the heart of ceremonial East Germany (which was quite grand, as the East had inherited the Unter den Linden, two Cathedrals, several superb museums and a lot of fine Schinkel architecture)  there was this unmistakable thing, lower and broader than elsewhere, curving temptingly towards the Tiergarten in the West. I never saw it from the East without having a ludicrous urge to run towards it and leap over. I had the same daft impulse at the Panmunjom crossing between the Koreas, where there isn't even a wall, just a line that looks absurdly easy to cross.

In East Germany itself, hardly anyone except border troops ever saw the inside of the great fence, with its mines (there were no landmines in Berlin) and its tripwire-triggered automatic guns. There was a three-mile-deep forbidden zone that most people could never enter.

Bailey applied for permission to see it from the East, and did eventually receive it, after he'd already finished his journey. He didn't go, which I think was a great shame. Even the obstruction he'd undoubtedly have received would have made an interesting account, and my experience of travelling in East Germany itself was always very rewarding indeed. Not specially comfortable, though the first-class carriages of the old Deutsche Reichsbahn could be quite comfy, the hotel restaurants could be quite fun once you had got used to the compulsory communal tables, if (like me) you actually quite like heavy overcooked German dishes, and East German sparkling wine, Rotkaeppchen Sekt, was more bearable than you might have thought. And at night it was very, very dark and wonderfully silent, as Pyongyang is today.

I will always be grateful that I managed to see the lovely city of Weimar (and its neighbouring concentration camp at Buchenwald) under Communist rule, not to mention Dresden,  Frankfurt and the almost indescribably haunting and beautiful city of Naumburg, with its unique cathedral. Nothing had been painted or much cared for since Stalingrad. The great wave of money which had Americanised west Germany had never arrived there, and so the traveller was able to see a much more German Germany, in which the rise of Hitler and many other things were far more explicable than they were amid the sparkle and luxury of the comfortable West.

Weimar, with the houses of Goethe and Schiller, and the (in those days) grand but shabby Elephant Hotel, now an unaffordable super-luxury palace, was a rare zone of beauty in a country which generally preferred ugliness, as Communists usually do. Its closeness to Buchenwald, which even in its wholly dishonest East German incarnation, a museum which cut out half of history, was enough to freeze the imagination and fill the visitor with a strange shame in being there to see such things.

Naumburg, whose cathedral contains some of the greatest sculptures ever made by human hand, was so melancholic it was enough to make you cry – under the grey sky, echoing with the sonic booms of Soviet MiGs, Red Army lorries ground along the cobbled streets and in the café the cakes were made out of potatoes and glue, and the coffee made of acorns. This is luxury, beyond the dreams of avarice, if your main interest is in finding out how other people live, how different life might be if things had turned out and how the world beyond your own shores is really like.

But back to Bailey. He covers much of the length of the border, which was not only a fence, but a ploughed strip, an anti-tank ditch, and then another fence, watched over by towers which (he observed) had been so badly built that many of them were falling down. He describes the lives of West Germans who lived close to the line, and also reveals a detail which I found particularly fascinating.

The actual East German border ran some way west of the fence. And in the often untended land in front of it, East German special troops (Aufklaerer, or Pioneers) often lurked (he had one or two close brushes with them). It was quite easy, if you weren't careful, to wander into East Germany, be arrested by these silent, stealthy zealots, and taken against your will through concealed gates, into the dark heart of the DDR. Eventually, they let you go, but how could you be sure? The idea that this was a fence that could bite gave it an added fear, and reminded me a bit of a passage in the Pilgrim's Progress where, quite close to the celestial city, a foul hole opens up in the hillside and some sinner is dragged off into Hell, just when he was sure he was safe. 

Reading the book now, I find it has lost much of its old power because the fence is not just gone, but largely forgotten and unknown. Yet when I first read it, in 1983 or 1984, I could not have imagined that within five or six years the whole thing would have come to an end (and I was convinced even then that German reunification was inevitable eventually). What do we now think is permanent, that will be gone in ten years?

A couple of points.  I should have said that the discussion of the renaming of Bombay can be found under the heading 'Beijing, Mumbai etc' in the index.

Why precisely is it 'patronising drivel' ( as someone calling himself 'Mick' says ) to state that children can be happy and healthy even if their parents are poor?

If I say I am not very good at driving I am not saying that I am actively dangerous to others. Nor do I agree with a critic (whose pseudonym is so silly I can't be bothered to reproduce it) that driving cautiously is in itself dangerous. It may be inconvenient to people in a hurry, but it is by its nature safer than driving without caution. What is more, this person rather misses my implication, that people who do believe they are 'good at ' driving are often in fact just good at being confident. They believe they can brake in time. They believe they can steer through that gap. They believe they can overtake in that gap. They believe they know what is round that corner. They think it will be all right to take that phone call or read that text. They believe that pedestrian will not step out, that cyclist will not wobble. A lot of the time they will turn out to be right ( though in many cases this will be because others see or hear them coming, and slow down, get out of the way or stop to let them by). But I can tell them all (having myself been in a serious road accident more than 40 years ago, though I still recall it in detail now) that in half a second their lives ( and those of several others) can be turned upside down by a tiny miscalculation. A couple of years ago a South Wales police force made an astonishing short film on the dangers of texting while driving, which managed to portray quite eerily the experience of a road accident, including the terrifying silence which falls immediately afterwards, before you dare to look and see what has happened , and before the pain explodes. Everyone should see it. To believe you aren't very good actually makes you better. It is the only responsible thing to do. But of course it should be made much harder to get, and keep a driving licence. If it were, then we would have better public transport and better provision for bicycles.

What is Child Poverty? And other questions

The mention of the word 'child' or 'children' in any political speech is often – though not always - a warning of humbug to come. The old Soviet Union used to assert that 'children are our only privileged class' a pretty bold claim from a state that had within living memory forced children to spy on their parents through the foul cult of Pavlik Morozov, and ripped infants from their parents' arms (as the parents were despatched to the Gulag) and flung them, their names stolen, deprived of any love,  to suffer and often die in cruel and hideous orphanages. But there. It is still impossible for most Western people (who often still make excuses for the USSR)  to understand just how revolting Communism was.

I tend to think that the few legitimate occasions for referring to children in political debate are in discussions of abortion (legalised child massacre), the campaign to force women into the workplace and out of their homes (organised mass child neglect for profit), comprehensive and 'progressive' education (egalitarian experiments on innocent boys and girls), and of course divorce ( legally putting the interests of adults before the interests of children), where the interests of the children are directly and demonstrably involved.

Now here we have an attempt to claim that the government's rather modest and uninteresting welfare reforms, which deliberately avoid all the real most pressing problems, will create 'child poverty'.

I think this is just emotionalism. As I so often say, there is no real, absolute material poverty in this country. Look at the living conditions portrayed in the TV series 'Call the Midwife', or those described in Somerset Maugham's novel 'Liza of Lambeth' – or indeed the factual reports of poverty in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and you will see what the word really means – unavoidable squalor caused  by the simple lack of plumbing and sanitation,  desperate overcrowding, real, gut-grinding hunger, untreated disease. You can find such things, as well, right now, in modern Bombay (those who wish to call it 'Mumbai' might like to check the Index item on this stupid, mistaken renaming by people who think they are being 'progressive'), in Burma  and in many African countries. I have seen it there. One of the striking things about it is that those who endure it are often even so unbroken, but dignified, self-disciplined, hard-working, house-proud, and  send their children, in crisp uniforms, shining with cleanliness, off to school each morning. It is very moving.

It is also quite unlike the world of the British dependent population, who have all the material basics, but live amidst terrible state-encouraged moral squalor. In many cases, people resist this,  and their struggles to maintain respectability and order in their lives area is as moving as anything in Africa. But in many cases they are corrupted by it, and the results are tragic and appalling.

What these  people need is an organised and systematic moral rescue which, alas, Iain Duncan Smith is not ready to attempt. Even so, it is surely too much to ask struggling families who earn their bread and pay their debts, to subsidise others who don't, at the sort of levels now seen.

Much of this problem arises from the mistaken sale of council houses, a measure universally praised by Tories, but which seems to me to have been one of the worst things done in the Thatcher era. This broke up settled communities, pumped billions of pounds into the housing market, so pushing up house prices and rents to absurd levels. And it led to the grotesque growth of Housing Benefit, which I think now costs more than the Army and the RAF put together, and which must be the most wasteful method of public housing subsidy ever devised.

Something plainly has to be done to put it right. I doubt whether Iain Duncan Smith has the key. But I will say this. The idea that his measures will cause 'child poverty' is just propaganda. And the idea that because a benefit is called 'Child Benefit' it will be spent entirely on children is so absurd that I don't know where to look when anyone says it (and surely this is the implication of the dogmatic insistence that Child Benefit should be exempt from Mr Smith's £26,000 benefit ceiling).  And the idea that the children of Britain's welfare-dependent households will have their problems solved by money is just thought-free.

What these children need is fathers, stable married families in which to grow and learn the rules of life, by example above all. If they had those precious possessions, they could, like their grandparents before them, be happy, healthy and good on surprisingly little money. As it is …

Bishops of the Church, of all people, should grasp that.

No Sex, Some Drugs, No Rock and No Roll. Also Some Bicycling

I shall resist the temptation to march off back to Stalingrad. I said I wouldn't argue about homosexuality any more, and I won't.  I promise to do so as soon as I see any sign that the sexual revolutionaries are going to talk seriously about the subject, rather than using it as a way to provoke and misrepresent conservatives. I see no such sign. In fact my quarrel last year with Matthew Parris (the reason for my fabled, televised sneer at the Press Awards dinner) was an indicator of the precise opposite. Mr Parris is the Voice of Reason compared with most people in this debate. Yet  could not resist misrepresenting me, and has never apologised for doing so, or withdrawn, despite the clear evidence that he had twisted my words (see index).

I'm amused by 'Wesley Crosland' , who points out that God for some reason didn't intervene to save me from being knocked off my bike on the way to church. Whyever was that? Then again, perhaps he *did* intervene, and I was only on that minor road because the Almighty had directed me away from a busier highway where I would have been erased by one of those concrete-mixer trucks. But perhaps He couldn't prevent my assailant from setting out half-asleep that morning, owing to the other plans he had for the universe that day. I don't mean to seem irreverent, but I do think we have to be careful not to assume that Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence mean that we can't do stupid things sometimes.  I suppose this is another test of the Leibnitz theory (lampooned rather crudely by Voltaire) that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. You may think being knocked off your bike is bad. But it happened this way to prevent something much worse from taking place. There's no answer to that, of course, since we cannot ever know what we avoided. 

The intervention by Mr 'Crosland', which I assume is meant to be a joke, compares quite well with some of the humourless stuff on the ill-named 'BigThink' site, where I have now gone three rounds with a nest of perpetually angry God-haters. I did so because the site's host published a series of posts disagreeing with one of my attacks on the 'New Atheism' – the difficulty of establishing an absolute morality if there is no God. I thought I should defend myself, but as so often found that the only response was series of abusive and ad hominem attacks on the fact that I am religious believer. Another Stalingrad, alas, but when where any serious combatant risks death by boredom. I shan't return.

In answer to Mr Blance, I do not say that 'crime is going up because I say so even though I have no objective evidence'. I say that all official figures ought to be mistrusted when they are politically sensitive. Thus I think we can (at present) rely entirely on government statistics on the production of oats. But I am not so sure about those which concern educational attainment, inflation, crime and disorder.

The problem, therefore, is the absence of properly objective facts which anybody can use. But the increase in crime in this country recorded by official statistics in the past 100 years  (see my book 'The Abolition of Liberty') is so great that it cannot possibly be dismissed.  Likewise the increase in the prison population.

I say that the authorities often dismiss as 'petty crime' (and do not record at all)  many incidents which are far from petty for those who are the victims of them. Such incidents have happened to me, including a violent assault on me at a railway station by a beggar high on drugs. There was no point at all in my reporting it, and several good reasons not to do so, not least the ever-present fear that the police will accidentally provide one's name and address to one's assailant during the course of whatever action they take or don't take, or that the CPS take or don't take.

I say that many series of statistics are no longer continuous ( essential for comparison) , because the recording method has changed or the classification of crime has altered, and that I personally find this suspicious. I deplore the use of the British Crime Survey, a glorified opinion poll, as a substitute for actual records of incidents that have taken place.  I say that it can be shown that various counting methods are used  (such as the one I note in my 22nd January column) whereby multiple crimes are mis-recorded as one, or thefts are mis- recorded as lost property. I say that certain crimes have now become so common, and insurance claims so difficult (or so many people are uninsured) in high-crime areas, that it is reasonable to assume that they are seriously undercounted. The allegation that I blithely say 'this is so because I say so', is absurd and unresponsive. Does the writer of this comment really believe that official statistics are wholly to be relied upon?   I do hope not, for his own sake apart from any other reason.

Someone says that if I admit I am not a very good driver then it is surely wrong for me to drive at all. I don't follow this. I didn't say I was an actively dangerous driver. I said, because it is true and because I don't confuse my driving with my masculinity, that I am not a very good driver. My knowledge and recognition of this fact make me cautious (in a way that of course gets me tailgated and flashed on crowded motorways, or on those all too frequent two-lane roads where the speed limit is a madly high 60 mph, or indeed for abiding by urban speed limits –many others will be familiar with this sort of thing) and reluctant to drive at all. I do so only when I absolutely have to. 

Most people, as I observe, are not very good drivers by the standards of the Institute of Advanced Motorists. They pull out without looking. They turn without signalling (or start signalling long after they have begun to turn, or just drive along with their hazard lights flashing, as if this means we can read their minds as to what it is they propose to do), they break speed limits, they use their horns aggressively , they drive too close to the car in front, they believe they can see round corners, they brake and accelerate violently (I feel for their passengers), they fail to dip their lights. These are all basic offences against good driving. They are almost universal. I will not list the many ways in which they treat cyclists without consideration, as that is special pleading.  The difference between them and me is that I know I'm not very good, whereas they think they're terrific. Which of us is safer?

How is the USA different from Britain, in terms of crime and policing? Let me count the ways: History, tradition, climate, shape and nature of cities, distances, existence of large remote rural areas and sprawling suburbs without public transport,  racial divisions, laws. Will that do? The USA is not a Big England, It is a wholly different country. It has very few lessons to offer Britain. If we want to know how to make a better job of law and justice, our own past is a better guide than the American present. 

I may well have talked about US Prisons to George Galloway on Talk Sport Radio, or whatever it is now called (when I had a rather good programme on it , it was Talk Radio) . But I doubt if I said anything different from what I normally say. I don't regard American prisons , largely run by the inmates, as any kind of model for ours. It is impossible to ignore the fact that a huge increase in the US prison population has been followed by a reduction in crime. But that does not really answer the fundamental moral question which we face. I am constantly pointing out that I think Michael Howard's slogan of 'Prison Works' is only very partly true. If prison doesn't deter crime, both among potential criminals and actual ones, it can only be said to 'work' in that it physically prevents its inmates form committing crimes while they are inside. Such a  policy is no more likely to reduce crime in the long run than is Kenneth Clarke's view that 'prison doesn't work'. Don't mistake me for a Tory, for goodness' sake.

To work, prisons have to be a punitive and feared experience, to be experienced early in the criminal's career, and to be fully under the control of the authorities.

We can't argue now over what would have happened if the Tories had collapsed (as they should have done) at the last election. All I ever said, and what I believe was that this would have provided the *necessary* condition for a new political formation. Whether it would have provided *sufficient* conditions was always open to doubt. The trouble is that they didn't.  And whereas there was then a chance that we might have got rid of this horrible, useless anti-British organisation and replaced it with something better, there is now no such chance. We are back to the pointless see-saw between two indistinguishable left-wing parties, in which there is no hope of major change.

A further economic decline doesn't seem to me to offer any hope of an escape.

I should note here that the proposal to put us on Berlin Time bit the dust in the House of Commons last Friday, thanks partly to the doughty interventions and determination of Christopher Chope, Philip Davies and the splendid Jacob Rees-Mogg.  By sticking to their guns they helped to obstruct the various gullible patsies who had fallen victim to the empty prattle of the 'Darker Later' campaign, which claims on the basis of flimsy guesswork that Berlin Time will bring great dollops of business and tourism to this country, while also saving lives on the roads.

It was good to see that English MPs were active in the battle to keep us on or close to GMT, our own meridian, , as well as Scots.  As I have many times pointed out here, the false impression is always given that only Scotland would be plunged into darkness in the winter mornings by this plan. England would be too. The debate is available on Hansard and contains some interesting points, especially on the Darker Later Berlin Time campaign's road safety claims, which blow serious holes in those claims. As the proposal will certainly be back (the EU never sleeps in its struggle to standardise us all),  it would be well to recall these points. I think it was Mr Chope who also shot out of the sky one of Darker Later Berlin Time's most ridiculous arguments, that a time change would bring more tourism. He noted that tourism drops off in the winter months not because it is darker in the evenings but because it is colder in general. No doubt this country would have more tourism if it were hotter and sunnier. But Parliament cannot do anything about that. I was partly pleased and partly sorry to see that none of the Darker Later Berlin Time supporters chose to insult me personally in the debate, as two of them did the last time.

One last thing. The House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee is about to start hearings on the subject of drugs ( it did this quite recently, when one David Cameron put his name to a disgraceful defeatist report, the only political act he ever performed before being suddenly made Tory Leader by a PR media campaign). I have written to the committee to urge them to ensure that they call witnesses who are not in the defeatist lobby. By starting with the comic figure of 'Sir' Richard Branson,(guess what 'Sir' Richard, once a great champion of British Euro membership, thinks about the 'War on Drugs') they risk giving the impression that they have already accepted the standard (and wholly bogus) received opinion that 'The "War on Drugs" has failed'.  One more time. There is not and has never been any such 'War on Drugs'. So it cannot have failed, can it?

Wake up, judge! We've been letting everyone in for years

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Meet Viktor Akulic (pictured), ordinary rapist, child-rapist and general violent jailbird. He is a recent arrival in our country, thanks to the liberal elite's policy of deliberately letting in as many people as they can as fast as possible, whether the rest of us like it or not.

Actually, it's lucky for you that you didn't meet him. One woman who did meet him, in Kent, will never forget the experience, for all the wrong reasons. Akulic not only raped her, but knocked her to the ground and stamped on her head.

After she reported the attack to the police, he went round to her home and threatened her.

Akulic filmed the rape while it was taking place. The victim, by this time, had black eyes and bruises on her face and all over her body. The judge in his original trial described him as 'depraved'.

Akulic, who, like you and me (though I'd much rather not be), is a citizen of the European Union, drifted unhindered into the Euro-region formerly known as Great Britain in 2010.

Nobody cared that he had spent much of his adult life in prison for violence, or that he had once raped a seven-year-old girl.

As Lady Justice Hallett (of course) reduced his prison sentence on appeal last week, she asked in some astonishment: 'Do we let in just anyone?' The answer, of course, is: 'Yes, Judge.'

Her spluttering amazement came after Akulic's lawyer explained that the Lithuanian rapist was an EU citizen, and so has as much right to be here as you and I – a simple point I have been trying to get across for years.

But if I know this, why doesn't Heather Hallett know it? To be unaware that this country no longer has any proper borders and is, therefore, no longer a proper country is inexcusable in an educated person. Yet this blank refusal to understand what is going on here is almost universal among our governing classes.

They say they will deport Victor Akulic to a Lithuanian prison. Perhaps they will. But what are the chances that, released in some Baltic amnesty or tagging scheme, he is back here within ten years, living nicely at our expense off generous British benefits, and looking out for a new girlfriend?

Well, what are they?

... and a lesson in crime for the bishop

The rather nice Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, recently interviewed me for a BBC Radio series on the treatment of criminals.

I sought to explain the simple point (to me it's simple) that a weak justice system means that wrongdoers grow in strength. So if we do not swiftly and severely punish crimes, evil grows in our society. The kind and the good suffer and are forced into retreat. Justice dies.

And I sought to explain that this meant that trying to be nice to men of violence, and to thieves, was actually cruel. It is cruel to those who will suffer at their hands.
And in the end, from a Christian point of view, it is cruel to the malefactors. If they are not properly punished, they will not understand that what they do is wrong. They will not regret what they have done and they will not be sorry for anyone but themselves.

Though the bishop generously allowed me time to make this case, his three programmes made the classic mistake of seeing crime mainly through the eyes of prisoners. It is time he saw it through the eyes of normal human beings.

I invite the bishop to study this picture of Daniel Chrapkowski emerging from Manchester Crown Court after receiving the typical empty response of our criminal injustice system to oafish cruelty. That is, nothing serious will happen to him. His lawyer, some poor pathetic booby, had just said how remorseful he was.

Chrapkowski and his cronies were scattering rubbish in the road when Joseph O'Reilly bravely challenged them. Chrapkowski punched him in the face and tripped him so that he fell to the pavement. Mr O'Reilly must now live with a metal plate in his face, suffers dizzy spells and numbness, can chew his food only on one side and is worried about going out alone. His life is worse than it should be, for ever.

Now I think it likely that Chrapkowski will one day end up in prison, if he tries hard enough. But by then, he will be a confirmed, thick-skinned horror, full of pity for himself and brilliant at talking to social workers and bishops. What a pity he isn't breaking rocks in a state of shock, within an austere and disciplined prison, learning at last that he needs to care about other people's feelings.

The foul truth - discovered in a lovely park

It being January, I suppose it's fairly inevitable that this column will be, even more than usual, a series of reasons to emigrate, if only I could work out where.

So I may as well share this with you too. The gates of a rather lovely suburban park in my home town are now decorated with notices urging users not to engage in something they delicately call 'human fouling'. The notices include graphic drawings of this activity, leaving little to the imagination.

Let me just explain, if you're in any doubt, that if dogs do this, their owners are expected to clear it up.

Ten yards from these notices is a large block of public lavatories – the modern armoured kind which look like cells in a SuperMax Prison, designed with drunk vandals in mind. These, as I recently found when I tried to use one for its proper purpose, are increasingly employed for sexual intercourse of all kinds.

Perhaps the human fouling has started because the lavatories are always full of couples. I don't know and don't much care, as that way lies madness. I just wish people would stop telling me that everything is getting better.

* * *

Enough jokes about Italian incompetence, please. Have we all forgotten the Herald of Free Enterprise? Are we so sure we're as good as we once were?

* * *

One more thing to cheer you up. Silly complacent types are always telling me that British crime statistics show that crime is falling. When I laugh, they accuse me of cynicism. Well, let them please explain official figures for the mass disorders last summer.

Apparently, crime hardly rose during this period. Why? Well, for example, 20 people looting one shop is recorded as one offence.

Oh, and remember what the rioters at Ford Open Prison shouted at the staff before doing £5 million damage that we will pay for. 'There are 550 of us and only five of you. What are you going to do?'

Luckily, most louts and robbers are quite stupid, and they have not yet realised that this is also the state of affairs on our streets. But how long will it be before they do?

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

Christopher Hitchens. Funeral and Memorial arrangements

First may I once again thank the many people who visited this site to express condolences on the death of my late brother, Christopher. I was most moved that so many people crossed the divide of opinion to do so.

Second, I felt I should post here two facts that, although they are to be found on the Internet, are still unknown to many.

Some people have asked me when and where my brother's funeral took place. In fact, as Christopher donated his body to medical science, there has not been and will not be any funeral. He took this decision partly because of his religious (or rather non-religious) opinions, and partly because, much influenced by his friend Jessica Mitford and her book 'The American Way of Death', he disliked what he regarded as the excesses of the American funeral industry.

There are many discussions now taking place about various other forms of commemoration. There will certainly be a memorial gathering in New York City during the Spring, most probably in April. I would expect that, later on, there will also be some sort of event in London. I would hope to be able to post details when these are clear.

One Reason Why I hate Cars, and a brief note on Lifestyle Choices

On Sunday morning a woman rushed out of a side road in a quiet Oxford suburb, violently knocked me off my bicycle and mangled the machine I was riding.

Quite understandable, some of you may think. It's the only sort of treatment I would understand. But in fact the person involved had nothing against me, didn't know me, and was quick to apologise for the hurt (even quicker and more comprehensive,  once she had been given quite a large piece of my mind). She also paid for the damage to be repaired.

But, as some of you will have guessed,  there was another element in all this – an element which makes an apparently shocking and inexplicable event make perfect sense.

My assailant was driving a car.

Now, like most experienced cyclists, I treat all cars, vans, lorries and all drivers with hostile suspicion. It is the only safe thing to do.  You must assume that they are either asleep, sending texts, yammering illegally on their phones,  drunk, drugged or homicidal. Many of them are not any of these things, but enough of them are to make this the only sensible attitude to take. I might add that I am even more terrified of other cyclists, who as well being as daft and unpredictable as drivers, are consumed with self-righteousness and so able to do things that no White Van Man would contemplate, such as speeding straight through red lights.

Even when I am riding to church early on Sunday morning, through one of the most peaceful and traffic-free sections of suburb in the world, North Oxford, I maintain this carapace of hostility and super-caution. When I saw the car involved, halted at the corner, I attempted to make eye contact with the driver and thought I had done so.  Even this doesn't always work. Once in the past I was so worried by the person's glazed expression that I assumed he was going to run me over anyway – fortunately, for he promptly drove straight out at me, and I was able to stop with inches to spare and to call out to him 'I knew you were going to do that!'. It was only then that he realised I was there at all. I'm not sure (see below) that he cared much, even then.

This time, all my precautions failed. I made eye contact, I rode on cautiously, she promptly turned right and accelerated quite hard into my front wheel, apparently not braking or reacting at all until she (or rather her vehicle)  had chewed it up into a sort of steel-and-rubber  Moebius strip. I did try to yell a warning, but this was cut off as I flew sideways, landing heavily on my left side, grazing, bruising or otherwise hurting my shoulder, elbow and hip. I still ache, and will do for some time. My assailant paid for a taxi to take me on to church, the only way I could cover the remaining three miles in time, but I must admit that I wasn't exactly in a  State of Grace when I got there – a position made in no way better by being asked to sing one of the worst hymns in the book (not quite as bad as 'Lord of the Dance', but very, very nearly). But I digress.

Now, if an individual had attacked me in this way without a car, then it would have been a shocking assault that would have ended in court. But as my attacker was car-borne, it's no such thing. Why is this so? Why are car-borne assaults of this kind deemed so trivial and understandable? Why can people knock you flying, mangle your property, and then think it reasonable, if they were in a car at the time,  to say they were terribly sorry, they don't know how it happened, they've never had an accident before, etc , etc, etc.

Well, you could say, because my attacker didn't mean to do it. Well, I can't tell you how little I cared about this as I rose irritably from the Tarmac to assess the damage. I was ( I freely confess) fantastically, elaborately, relentlessly rude to the culprit (though without once resorting to swearing) , ending by suggesting in all sincerity that she considered giving up driving hereafter. My own personal view is that no healthy resident of Oxford needs to use a car in the city at all. Rather the contrary.   But I know this is a minority position.

The fact was that she simply wasn't paying attention. It was a bright morning, the air was clear, I am reasonably large and clearly visible at a range of ten feet, she had stopped, she turned *right*, something you never do without care.  I don't know (and don't much care) if she was daydreaming or was transfixed by something on her car radio. The fact was, she wasn't ( as is the case with most human beings for much of the time) fit at that moment to be in charge of a fast-moving steel and glass box weighing about a ton. I might daydream on my bicycle (though I would never, ever use headphones) , but if I do the risk is mainly to me. I might daydream as I walk (once again, I'd never use headphones, though I might well make a phone call) . Once again, the risk is almost entirely to me. Yes, I can see that it could cause danger to others, but it would be very rare ,and would mainly be the result of the large number of motor vehicles on the roads.

In the case of the driver the danger is almost entirely to others, and hardly at all to him or her. Seatbelts, anti-lock brakes, side-impact protection, airbags and the rest have in the past few years made the occupants of cars incredibly safe in almost anything short of a head-on collision.

I think this has encouraged a subconscious carelessness which is really, really important where there are pedestrians or cyclists within range. For they, unlike the car-borne,  are not safer. On the contrary. Drivers of cars, and even buses, accelerate and brake more violently, drive faster, go round corners as if they could see round them, when they can't,  and take less care because of these safety devices which surround them. The risks to us soft targets increase. I was surprised how badly I and the bike were bashed, at what must have been a very low-speed impact. They are also just that bit more careless than they otherwise would be.

I think are roads are statistically safer largely because soft targets, particularly child cyclists, have almost entirely retreated from them. But the roads are not really safer. It's just that people have learned to avoid them unless they themselves go out in armour, and have narrowed their lives as a  result.

I also suspect that even the nicest person, given the measure of pure power which is available in a car, becomes instantly more selfish and less considerate once behind the wheel. Cars are advertised as providers of power, and if anybody cared to do comparative tests on aggression and selfishness, I think they would find that car-driving provided primary evidence of Lord Acton's maxim that 'power tends to corrupt'. Good heavens, even a bicycle can do this (you should hear me ring my bell and make sarcastic remarks when dozy persons, apparently unable to grasp the concept involved,  amble heedlessly on to the extremely clearly marked cycle path in Hyde Park. The problem is that I enjoy doing so ).

Anyway, this is just one of a dozen reasons why I wish cars had never been invented. Their benefits, such as they are, don't begin to counterbalance the damage they do, the ugliness, noise and desolation they bring to city and countryside alike. But perhaps it's most important of all that they make their drivers worse people and turn nice middle-class ladies into people who violently assault innocent passers-by on the street, as happened to me.  I hardly drive at all now because I just can't stand the responsibility and also because I am quite ready to admit (which many others ought to do but won't for reasons of pride)  that I am not very good at it and am not really fit to be trusted with today's machines, both more powerful and more falsely reassuring than the ones I learned to drive in.

 

 

On the question of Lifestyle choice, I'd like to repeat here something I posted as a comment on the 'Kickboxing and Scotland' thread:

In answer to Mr Bumstead, first of all the post was lengthy because I was making a rather subtler point than he gives me credit for, which took longer to explain than the crude one (which he would have preferred me to have made) would have taken. I suggest he reads what I said once more.

He says : 'Your position seems to be that homosexuality should be legal but that all public forms (e.g marriage) should not be allowed and now someone adopts a political position merely by disclosing their sexuality? So for you the only acceptable homosexual is one who is invisible? Otherwise, merely by stating their sexuality, they are inviting a political confrontation? I'm sure she doesn't want to turn you into a lesbian- neither, I suspect, does she have any interest in political arguments you could put forward to tear up her pink members card.'

No, I mean what I said, no more and no less, that deliberate disclosure of a homosexual orientation is a political act. This is a fact. My other opinions on this subject (readers should rely on my own descriptions of my views, to be found in my books and past articles, rather than on Mr Bumstead's inaccurate and propagandist description) have nothing to do with the question, and I am not discussing them here. In fact, I am not discussing them anywhere again, precisely because of the silly misrepresentation that invariably follows.

For instance, Peter Mandelson never stated that he was homosexual and was quite angry when others said it on his behalf. There are of course many others whose identities we do not know who have kept such things private in the past, in all three major parties. .

In my view it is a culturally and morally radical act, generally associated with the radical left. When we still had one more-or-less culturally and morally conservative party, it would have been quite unlikely that any member of it would have done this. The fact that we no longer have any such party does not mean that we no longer have any such body of opinion in the populace.

I think it can also be argued, without expressing any opinion on sexuality at all, that a politician who wanted to be Prime Minister, or indeed Scottish First Minister, might hesitate before taking this step. Please read what I say in the post about the *fact* that parties seeking parliamentary majorities, whatever their stated policies on the subject, tend to shy away from such actions, and themselves to marginalise their members who take such actions.

Mr 'W' asks :' You describe homosexuality as a 'lifestyle choice'.Does one 'choose to be gay'?'
This is the result of clumsy wrtiting on my part. I should have made it clear that I meant that publicly proclaiming a homosexual orientation was a lifestyle choice. Nothing could induce me to get into the argument about how sexual orientation is determined (though Matthew Parris did once write something rather interesting about that, which I quote in'The Cameron Delusion' ).