Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 322

War War, and Jaw Jaw

Time for some responses to contributors. My refusal to join the religion of the car has got me into trouble again, so I'll make a few general comments on this. I am told that Motorways relieved small towns and villages form heavy traffic. But this argument ignores the question of why they were exposed to such heavy traffic in the first place

Small towns and villages were shaken to pieces by juggernauts because the railways had been pulled up, or had withdrawn from the competition to carry freight. There are many anecdotes from the 1960s of local railways managers being instructed to put in absurdly high tenders for goods contracts, which they then duly lost, with the result that the branch line was closed to freight soon afterwards thanks to 'lack of business'. But in general the railways had been losing the battle against heavily subsidised roads since the 1920s.

So to build more roads because building roads had created lots of extra traffic seems to me to be odd logic. My experience of small English towns and villages is that many of them have now been expensively bypassed ( often in a very ugly fashion) but that this has not by any means saved them from the traffic scourge. I have also observed a curious fact. The old-B-roads ,which one might once have chosen to sue for a quieter journey, are now crammed with traffic driving right up to the 60 mph limit. Whereas A-roads running parallel to Motorways are frequently rather quiet. As a cyclist, I need to know these things when I plan my routes.

My own use of a car, as I have written elsewhere, is very small. I haven't driven one for more than a year and my household's car uses is also kept to a minimum. We use it when circumstances more or less compel it (and it is these circumstances, the whole car-based design of modern Britain, which assumes car ownership for so many activities, which create so much needless car use).

It is true that many modern rail journey can be unpleasant. Particularly since privatisation, the cramming in of seats so that they don't line up with windows, the seats themselves, apparently designed for hobbits, the endless weekend engineering work, the grotesquely high fares and the absence of staff on trains or at stations  sometimes make travelling by rail nearly as unpleasant as travelling by car.  But this is an argument for improving the railways, not for abandoning them.

I am always a bit puzzled by figures on the 'safety' of certain roads. Dual carriageways, which largely avoid the horror of the head-on collision, ought to have fewer fatalities than single carriageways. This includes Motorways. Anyone actually *in* a car is hugely safer than he would have been 40 years ago – because of front and rear inertia reel seatbelts, widely worn, airbags, side-impact protection, anti-lock brakes and greatly improved trauma surgery in casualty department should all of these fail.

Does that mean that the road is safe? Or that a huge amount of effort has been made to make it quite a lot less safe than a railway, which  is also a dual carriageway segregated from other traffic and fenced against pedestrians.

For that is the next point about road 'safety'. It has been achieved largely by driving cyclists off the roads,  and by equipping many urban roads with severe anti-pedestrian defences, fencing and underpasses ( and slow-responding light-controlled crossings)  forcing walkers to trudge hundreds of yards to negotiate junctions. And of course by discouraging children from using the roads at all. I suspect that the number of children cycling and walking to school is a tiny percentage of what it was in my childhood. Now they're all in cars. So are the adults who sued to walk or bicycle to work.  This means that the roads are *statistically* safer.

But they are not really safer. They are just so dangerous that vulnerable people stay off them altogether. We should be careful not to count that as an achievement.

As for the ever-fascinating 'what if' of the Second World War, can we please be spared such tedious comments as 'if we lost the war, why are we speaking English and not German?' ,Appearance and reality are not the same thing, and one doesn't have to be physically conquered and subjugated to be defeated. You could argue that our principal rivals in World War Two were the Americans, and we are now speaking American. But our laws are made in Brussels and Luxembourg, by an organisation wholly dominated by Germany.

I am not only aware of Pat Buchanan's 'Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War'. I have written about it here and suspect the index will throw up a reference, or Google will.

Why do writers assume that Britain was Germany's principal foe? This simply isn't true,. From the start, Hitler's target was the USSR. Had he wanted to defeat and invade us, he would certainly have concentrated more on his Navy and his U-boats, and on amphibious capacity. But he never did, because he never cared enough. Under Hitler, the German Navy was never built up into a serious challenge to the Royal Navy, and was never meant to be. After the Norwegian campaign was over, there was precious little of a fighting German surface fleet left anyway. Though we shouldn't go on too much about ASDIC or convoys. The RN was far too over-confident about its ability to handle U-boats at the start of the war.

Also, why do people assume that all other things would have been equal had we behaved more wisely in 1939? I've touched on this before. But consider: If Britain and France had permitted the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia out of cynical self-interest, rather than in a some naïve belief that they were buying peace for the future, they might then also have been sensible enough to 'betray' the Poles (this thought raises the old question of whether it was better in practice to be a 'betrayed' Czech or a ''saved' Pole). But these 'betrayals' were foreordained by the fact that we didn't have the power to do anything else.

But if Poland had in fact agreed to hand over the territory Germany wanted, would the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact have been signed? And if not, when and under what conditions would Hitler's attack on the USSR have taken place?  He would have had little chance of making the successful surprise assault he contrived in 1941. Would Stalin's attack on Finland have happened, or his seizure of the Baltic countries? Which side would Mussolini have ended up on?  A wise British policy would have been to keep him neutral? What about the Balkans? The imponderables are limitless. As for a refusal by Britain and France to declare war releasing German troops for the Russian campaign, surely this is unlikely? If France had maintained a substantial army on the German border, Hitler would have been compelled to leave major forces to guard against an attack. I don't believe he had such a  problem after the Fall of France.

On the subject of Atomic weapons, I had understood that all the research, especially the famous Farm Hall Tapes, showed that the Germans had got nowhere with nuclear weapons and our fears that Heisenberg was en route to a bomb were unfounded.

All Hell Let Loose – Max Hastings on the 'Good War'

This book comes tantalisingly close to being right. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. But first, a general introduction:

By far the best popular history book of the season is Max Hastings's  'All Hell Let Loose',  his summing up of the Second World War. The book, dealing with the whole war, military, political and social, is deeply informed by several previous works by Sir Max on detailed aspects of the war. There are no doubt small things with which one might quibble. But it is a powerful, tightly-packed and skilfully written judgement which tugs the reader on to the end and actually distracted me, on an uncomfortable and ill-lit aeroplane, from theoretically easier reading.  Unless this is a subject that simply doesn't interest you, this is a book worth reading.

I should note here that I do not know Sir Max, have spoken to him once in my life (in an exchange on the BBC 'Moral Maze' programme), have never worked for him, and have for years disagreed strongly with many of his opinions on domestic politics. Even so I should also note that he is willing to admit to past mistakes and misjudgements, and recently did so, much to his credit, on the issue of the European Union. He has for most of his life been a clear spokesman of centrist, conventional Toryism. But I wonder if his detailed knowledge of the truth about the alleged 'Good War' has caused him over time to wonder about this view.

When I say that the book comes close to being right, I refer to two features of it. First, Sir Max's treatment of the Anglo-French 'guarantee' to Poland is properly contemptuous.

He sums it up thus: 'France promised the military leadership in Warsaw that its army would attack Hitler's Siegfried Line within thirteen days of mobilisation. Britain pledged an immediate bomber offensive against Germany. Both powers' assurances reflected cynicism, for neither had the smallest intention of fulfilling them: the guarantees were designed to deter Hitler, rather than to provide credible military assistance to Poland. They were gestures without substance, yet the Poles chose to believe them'.

I might add that the Germans, more sensibly, treated them as the worthless rubbish they were. A pity it wasn't the other way round, really.

He also notes that the London and Paris declarations of war were 'gestures which even some anti-Nazis thought foolish, because futile'.
The withering account of the betrayal of Poland surely points an accusing finger at those who made a promise they had no intention of keeping. But it does not go deeply into the reasoning behind this disastrous policy or explore the possible alternatives.

Maybe this will happen in Sir Max's next book. The great clay edifice of the 'We Won the War' cult has been eroded into shapelessness, and much diminished, by the downpour of truthful revelations which has washed over it since it was erected in 1945.

But, as readers here well know, it is still historically dangerous to challenge the view that war between Britain and Germany was inevitable in 1939. Indeed, to say this is almost always to be immediately misunderstood and misrepresented by the legions of people who still fear the truth.

For the keepers of conventional wisdom will instantly assert that anyone who says this thinks that Britain should never under any circumstances have gone to war with Germany. They also usually claim that opposition to the 1939 declaration of war implies opposition to Churchill's decision to fight on at all cost in 1940. The unstated implication of these arguments is that people who take my position are motivated by a secret sympathy for German National Socialism, a libel they dare not state openly but seek to insinuate by subtle signals. 

Speaking for myself, I suspect that Britain might well have needed to go to war with Germany in 1941 or 1942, much as the USA did. It would then have been in our interests to do so, and we would have been capable of fighting effectively, which we weren't in 1939. The same goes for France.

As for 1940, once you have started a war then you must fight it to the end. To declare war on a country, and then make peace with it, is to invite humiliation, subjugation and enslavement. The position would have been quite different if we had not started the war in the first place, but as we had, Churchill did the right thing. The choice was pretty awful – Churchill had the sense to see that it would cost us the Empire and most of our accumulated wealth. But he was right to believe that this was a price worth paying to avoid a Hitlerian peace.

As for the unspoken suggestion that conservatives are some sort of National Socialist fellow-travellers, as so many socialists are or were Communist fellow-travellers, it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what conservatives believe and value. And it is also based on a failure to grasp that conservatism is intensely patriotic, whereas socialism has always been intensely internationalist.  It is a false equivalence of opposites.

Sir Max also addresses the question of the bombing of German civilians, fairly realistically. But he makes two classic mistakes, commonly made by defenders of this action. He accuses those, like me, who think the bombing was morally wrong, of arguing that it was *as bad as* and in some way equivalent to the mass-murder of Jews by the Hitler state.

But most rational critics of the Arthur Harris bombing campaign do not think this at all. They think that the bombing was morally wrong on its own account.

It was not remotely comparable to the mass-murder of Jews (and others), a unique crime whose culprits probably caused the excavation of a new pit in the deepest parts of Hell to hold them.

But it was still utterly wrong. 

As for the supposed military argument for it, that it diverted artillery and men from the Eastern Front, this wasn't its intention.

And it must be stressed that a campaign of bombing properly directed at military targets would also have caused this diversion. I doubt very much whether the appalling losses inflicted on his men by Harris would have been much greater if he had followed this course. But, as we know, Harris hated to be distracted from his attacks on civilians and was most reluctant to allow his bombers to be used for anything else.

Such properly targeted bombing might also have done far greater damage to the Reich's war effort than incinerating, suffocating, roasting and dismembering lots of innocent women and children, who cannot conceivably be blamed for Hitler.

In any case, it is pretty clear from Sir Max's account that the Soviet Forces would have won anyway, even without this help. The decisive moment on the Eastern front came in the winter of 1941-2, when we had not begun bombing Germany on a grand scale. After Hitler failed before Moscow, he was doomed to lose in the end.

All kinds of thoughts intrude here, not least about the unspeakable savagery of the Soviet advance into Central Europe, and whether we should have got ourselves into a position where the Soviets were our principal ally.  Their cruelty to each other and to those they conquered must once again be judged to be frightful *in itself*, not in comparison to national Socialist barbarism, but on universal grounds.

I repeat, this is not to say that it was equivalent to Hitler's savagery. It was not. But because Stalin was not as evil as Hitler,  or evil in the same way as Hitler, it does not mean that he was not profoundly evil.

But the overwhelming message from this book is that the comforting fantasy of the 'Good War', with which British people have sustained themselves for so long, is insupportable.
His spare but terrible descriptions of warfare, many of them culled from poignant letters home found on the corpses of dead soldiers, make it clear that for most people, most of the time, this 'Good War' was Hell. It broke lives and spirits,  reduced strong, confident men to whimpering, snot-bedabbled wrecks, voiding their bladders and bowels, tore apart loving homes, compelled gentle people into acts of unspeakable barbarism, laid waste great monuments of civilisation, betrayed most of those for whom it was supposedly fought, was marred by ceaseless incompetence and self-aggrandisement by military and political leaders and was on many occasions futile *on its own terms*. The conduct of the troops of the civilised countries, though never nearly so base as that of the Germans or the Red Army, was often disgraceful.

Between the lines, and sometimes explicitly, Hastings also gives the impression that several major campaigns were fought for reasons of domestic morale, propaganda, diplomatic advantage or plain folly.  They made little difference to the outcome of the war. Those who died or were maimed for life in the course of them might as well have stayed at home, for all the material good they did to the causes they fought for. Those who were bereaved by them, if they knew this, might be even more heartbroken than they already were.

Of course, this is part of the problem. There are still many people living who took part in the Second World War or who were deprived by it of husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. As long as they survive, it will be difficult to confront the truth head-on, for these people need their myths to make their sacrifices bearable.  That is reasonable and right. Personally, I deplore the modern habit of revealing the intolerable truth when our own troops are killed by so-called 'Friendly Fire', that stupid phrase. This is terribly common in all modern wars, and is inevitable as long as artillery and aerial bombing and strafing are employed in war. But who wants to know that a family member has died in this awful way? Leave them at least to believe that they were killed by their enemies. There is some small comfort in that.

A few small quotations serve to remind us of the fact that Man, when he chooses to be, is the most terrible creature on the planet, and also capable of the most extraordinary endurance and kindness. Make what you will of that. I know what I think.

Sir Max quotes a German soldier in Stalingrad who wrote: 'When night arrives - one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights -  the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately for the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them .Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.'

And much later he records an incident in Holland as the Americans clawed their way towards the Rhine.

'Airborne soldier Pfc Bill True was intensely moved when, one evening in the midst of the Dutch battles, a little girl approached the foxhole occupied by himself and another man, and handed them two pillows. Here was a tiny, innocent gesture towards decencies of civilisation which otherwise seemed immeasurably remote.'

I cannot myself read these words without weeping, though when I think about it I am unable to explain exactly why, of all the horrors and dramas of this vast book, this one short passage should have such an effect. But there it is. It took me ages to transcribe, because I kept having to stop and wipe my eyes.

I might also quote this brilliantly economical description of modern war's true, unavoidable cost. During the Battle of the Bulge, 'twenty inhabitants of the village of Sainlez near Bastogne were killed by bombardment that reduced every home to a shell; among them were eight members of one family named Didier: Joseph, forty-six; Marie-Angele, sixteen; Alice, fifteen; Renee, thirteen; Lucille, eleven; Bernadette; nine; Lucien, eight; and Noel, six.'

The bombardment, though this is not entirely clear, was almost certainly ours, the good side's.


There is a strange and slightly guilty pleasure for an Englishman of my generation, in reading books about the Second World War, a bit like eating bully beef sandwiches accompanied by mugs of strong, sweet tea.  For me, it has always been safely in the past, a great saga of valour and justice. To read, in warmth and well-fed safety, about its privations is a little like coming into a warm, firelit room at dusk on a snowy winter afternoon. 

 
I still feel this. But since a long ago December dawn on the Hungarian-Romanian border (why, it must be more than 20 years ago now), when I began a journey that would bring me close to real gunfire and real corpses, more than once,  I also feel something else. It is our duty to imagine this event not as the buried past but as the blazing present, and to question all decisions which might take us back towards it, with all the intelligence and scepticism at our command. Yes, war is sometimes necessary. But the calculation of whether it is a fit price to pay should be made in the knowledge of what that price really is.

This Government, like all before it, will only be happy when we have... The UK No Border Agency

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

If anyone had ever asked us, we would have said that we did not want millions of people from Asia, the Balkans or the dead Soviet Empire migrating to this country.

This would have had nothing to do with bigotry, or racism or any of the other rude words flung at the British people by their ruling class of snooty elite liberals.

It does not take much to see that mass immigration is a daft idea. The most basic argument for it – that it helps the economy – is false.

We rightly complain that young people cannot get work. So why import foreigners to do that work, while paying our own children to take to crime and sit at home smoking dope?
It makes no sense at all, not least because the South East of England is now one of the most crowded places on Earth, and feels that way.

And yet, here's the mystery. Nobody wants it, and it is damaging – but it keeps on happening.

Some people were stupid enough to think that this was just a Labour problem. They were not paying attention.

The Tory Party has been keenly pro-immigration for decades.

It made this view clear as long ago as 1958 when party stewards violently silenced anti-immigration protesters at a Blackpool rally addressed by Harold Macmillan.

Many independent witnesses were shocked at the blood-spattered savagery of the beatings handed out to the hecklers. 

They should not have been. The more liberal the Tory Party gets, the more ruthless it has to be to its own natural supporters. As usual, the amazing thing is that so many of those supporters carry on voting for it.

And so it goes on. I doubt if we shall ever know exactly who is to blame for the latest border fiasco. Theresa May, the liberal, PC Home Secretary, is protected by a mysterious media bodyguard of flatterers and defenders. But the reason for the mess remains the same as it has always been.

The elite wish to pretend that they sympathise with us about the problem.

But secretly they want to change the country for ever, and see mass immigration as the best way of doing this.

Those figures showing that most illegal migrants who arrive here are allowed to stay, or that foreign criminals are not deported, or that passport checks were skimped, are not evidence of government failure. Nothing much will be done about them.

They will be nearly as bad next year and the year after.

They are evidence that the real policy is and always has been to act against our wishes and interests. Everything else is a pretence.

The truth is the opposite of the public stance. It is typical that our major airports have all now got huge new signs proclaiming 'UK Border', just at the moment when that border has more or less ceased to exist.

One day, perhaps, those to blame for this disgrace will be punished. But I think it will by then be too late.

We are too trusting for our own good.

We ALL pay a terrible price for Britain's lethal motorways

If a train crash cost as many lives and hurt as many people as the M5  pile-up, the whole rail system would be paralysed by inquiries and speed restrictions.

In fact, our horribly dangerous roads still see thousands of needless deaths a year, but nobody does anything because all the misery comes in small packets, so that one or two homes mourn, and the rest of the nation carries on unaffected.

We do not see a pattern. The futile attempt to blame a firework display for the motorway horror is an example of this. The real problem is that such roads are unavoidably crammed with vehicles that are much too close together, travelling much too fast.

Just try driving on a British road at a reasonable speed, and at a sensible distance from the car in front. See how long it takes before some moron is nudging your back bumper and flashing his lights, or before another moron cuts into the space you have left.

As for fog, it is not exactly a surprise in November, is it? Yet since motorways were introduced here, people have driven too fast in such fog. It is amazing more people aren't killed.

I'd plough up all the motorways in the country, and rebuild the rail network that Beeching trashed. Motorways are a horrible idea. They have ruined our countryside and our cities, and it's no surprise to me that Adolf Hitler liked them so much.

But as long as we have them, the police should be made to patrol them properly, so that sane people have some protection  against the thoughtless, homidical chancers who currently rule our roads.

Today, maths dunces like me don't stand a chance

I was never any good at maths. Only the dedicated patience of a great teacher helped me get the lowest possible grade at  O-level.

These days I probably would not even know how bad I was at maths. There would be nobody around who could tell.

When Channel 4's Dispatches programme tested 155 teachers in 18 schools, they found that most of them could not do simple calculations.
How could such people have helped me? You cannot teach maths if you are hopeless at it yourself.

And I suspect the same goes, in many cases, for reading, writing and spelling.

Our schools have now been so bad for so long that those  in charge are themselves ignorant. Worse, they may be  unaware of it, or scared to admit it.

Do they fail to correct spelling mistakes because they don't know how to spell themselves?

Do they struggle to teach reading because they are barely literate? It is all too possible. And how can such people have the blazing enthusiasm for books, history or science that makes the young want to learn?

It is useless to blame these teachers. They, like their pupils, are the victims of a cruel,  50-year experiment on defenceless human beings.

That experiment, known as 'progressive education', has conclusively failed. There is no better evidence than the vast disaster of our state comprehensive system that discipline, rigour, authority, selection and tradition are vital in the schooling of the young.

But the mad experiment seems to have smashed common sense, knowledge and thought so completely that there is now nobody left in the education establishment who is able to stop it. And so it goes on and on and on, wrecking lives and hopes.

All this time, the rich and powerful are exempt from it, and don't care.

                                                          * * *                                            

What can I do about the fact that my new mobile phone has opinions and wants to impose them on me? It is a paid-up member of the Global Warming cult.

Instead of just telling me that it is fully charged, it sternly orders me to save energy by unplugging the charger from the wall.  Well, as I don't believe in man-made global warming and reckon the amount of power involved is tiny, I shall of course ignore it.

But how long before it starts reporting me to the authorities?

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Everyone's terribly sweet... but what a festival of drivel!

Every crank, dingbat and fanatic in Southern England has found his or her way to the camp by the steps of St Paul's Cathedral. Given time, every faddist in Europe will arrive.

There are already plenty of North American accents. 

Whatever your cause, it has a pavilion here, especially if it is a lost cause. The poor Kurds are represented. There are lots of those infuriatingly smug, self-satisfied Guy Fawkes masks.

Unimpressed: Our columnist Peter Hitchens visited the protest camp outside St Paul's and concluded it is a 'chaotic, self-righteous festival of drivel'

There's a Buddhist shrine next to an arrow marking the direction of Mecca.
Che Guevara, that old mass murderer, has his image on display.

There's propaganda against the  'persecution of sex workers'. The Socialist Workers Party, those latchers on to every passing procession, have a stall that looks a little too neat and tidy for the occasion.

Bolshevik discipline doesn't really mesh with the world of Twitter and dope.

As George Orwell once said, such things attract the people he jeered at as 'sandal-wearers', 'nudists', 'sex-maniacs' and 'vegetarians with wilting beards' .  .  . the sort who are drawn to 'progressive' causes 'like bluebottles to a dead cat'.

 

 

More...

How the Guy Fawkes masks inspired by a graphic novel became the symbol of anti-greed protests across the globe
Fury as anarchist vandals daub 666 on St Paul's cathedral close to Sir Christopher Wren masterpiece

There really are signs against 'capitalism', a word used only by people who still think you can change human nature, which you sort of can if you have concentration camps and an effective secret police. 

And there are other placards enquiring rather aggressively: 'What would Jesus do?' People who ask this question always assume that Jesus would agree with them. Well, I suppose it's possible. But what would He agree with, exactly?

Stand here long enough and you will be pinned to the wall, or to a pillar, by lots and lots of nice but rather silly people. There's the man who thinks we invaded Iraq to punish it for not having a central bank.

There's the man who thinks the clue to the greed of the City somehow lies in the Channel Islands. And there are dozens of recently fledged experts on the wickedness of the City itself, though it is clear that this is a new concern for them.

They are thrilled to have discovered that the City of London Corporation is so fantastically undemocratic. They had no idea that such wickedness still survived, and that they can be against it. 

There's the slender public schoolboy with the looks of a tragic Thirties poet who, handed a megaphone, emits five minutes of the higher drivel about nothing in particular.

'We are the people,' he claims, adding: 'We have forgotten what and who we are.' He can speak for himself.

I'm sure that if I had waited long enough, I would have been taken to one side by enthusiasts for flatulent diets, speakers of Esperanto, or persons who think that The Key To Everything is to be found in the measurements of the Great Pyramid.

My nostalgic side hoped to run into advocates of opening Joanna Southcott's box, which was supposed to be unsealed at a time of grave national crisis, in the presence of all the bishops (it was eventually found to contain an old lottery ticket and a horse pistol).

Mess: The tents belonging to the anti-capitalist protesters with the glorious backdrop of St Paul's Cathedral

But such enthusiasts are scarce nowadays.

And in these less religious times, battiness takes new forms. A dreadlocked man in a Rastafarian hat and glowing red trousers rages about world citizenship to an audience of perhaps 12, including me.

In the mighty porch of the cathedral, a group of furry people are listening to a man play the guitar. I am reminded of Tom Lehrer's song: 'We are the Folk Song Army. Every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice .  .  . unlike the rest of you squares.'

Later, as darkness and drizzle fall, and a general meeting of stupendous, award-winning tedium gets under way, I am reminded of that forgotten horror of the Sixties, the 'teach-in'.

The people's representatives (if that is what they are, as they don't represent me) take an unbelievable amount of time to approve a bland statement about Egypt.

They are, it turns out, in favour of democracy and against repression.

But this process has a new variant. The old show of hands has been replaced by a strange finger-wiggling gesture, like a guilty mother waving goodbye to her toddler at a day-care centre.

People do this without seeming to be embarrassed, or giggling. It is a bit like a cult.

They're all terribly sweet. Most of them know that I am an evil Right-winger, or if they don't know, someone else tells them. But they still cheerfully engage me in yet more long, earnest conversations from which it is hard to escape.

When I ask one – who has lectured me lengthily about the wickedness of the banks – what his qualifications are in economics, he concedes with a self-mocking smile that he doesn't have any.

Where do they come from? It's hard to tell, though a lot are obviously students with vague timetables. One says he works with autistic children, a rather noble calling. Wouldn't he be doing more good if he went back to that? He doesn't think so. To him, this is more important.

Interesting talk: Peter Hitchens sat with former Canon Chancellor Giles Fraser, pictured, who was among the smokers outside St Paul's

It's impossible to dislike most of them, though I have to admit I carefully avoided the squad of four gaunt men with hollow heroin-abusers' faces, dressed in war-surplus fatigues and kicking a football around.

And I tried not to meet the stern gaze of the astonishing bearded preacher, who strides backwards and forwards across the cathedral steps, expounding his own version of the Gospels, for hours and hours and hours.

If haranguing were an Olympic event, he could harangue for Britain. The only trouble is that – because he is always on the move – you would have to follow him backwards and forwards for several miles to follow his argument. As it is, you get a snatch of it and then it fades away, and then it starts again.

The camp is scruffy, ugly and dispiriting. The last time I saw so many of these bubble tents was in Mogadishu in the middle of a horrible famine, when many of them contained dying babies.

Now you can't tell what or who is in them because they're mostly zipped up tightly. Not having my own thermal-imaging device, I cannot be sure, but in several hours at the camp I saw little sign of life among the tents.

There's a lot of sensitivity over the heat-sensitive pictures which seemed to show that most of them were empty by night. 'They falsified it,' a determined young man tells me, in between thrusting pamphlets at me and giving me a forbidding reading list.

But it is not actually squalid. There's some sarcasm among the campers about claims that the place is awash with urine.

Variety: Whatever your cause, it has a place at the protest outside St Paul's

I can only say that it wasn't when I was there, though nobody made any great efforts to deny that a  lot of cannabis was being smoked. If there really was a war on drugs, I suspect the police could devastate the camp by simply enforcing the Misuse Of Drugs Act 1971. But of course there is no such 'war', and the police aren't interested.

A neat line of portable lavatories is available from dusk onwards, and the campers are plainly trying to keep the area tidy. One, rather unskilfully, as if he has never seen a broom before, sweeps litter from the cathedral steps.

There's quite a lot of smoking of ordinary cigarettes going on, an interesting reflection on a generation that prides itself on not being fooled by corporate greed and consumerism.

So why did they fall for that bit of it?

Among the smokers is none other than former Canon Chancellor Giles Fraser, who appears at dusk unnoticed by the campers. As we sit companionably on the steps, he tells me that everyone has got the story wrong.

He never told the police to let the campers stay. All he did was ask them (and the campers) to leave the cathedral steps on the morning of October 16, to clear the way for early-morning worshippers at a service he was about to take. 

Both police and campers politely did as he asked and Holy Communion went ahead as planned. That is it. He also reassures me, contrary to some accounts, that the cathedral is a kindly employer, and he and his young family are being allowed to stay in his rather nice house until after Christmas.

It was time to go into St Paul's itself. I had hoped for Evensong, the most beautiful and potent service of the Church of England. 

It would have done the campers good to listen to the haunting, 2,000-year-old words of the Magnificat: 'He hath shewed strength with his arm. He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.'

Someone might then have explained to them that this was a promise of eternal justice, not a programme for government.

Alas, it was some other modern service, its bare, plastic language weirdly out of tune with the clouds of medieval incense and the gorgeous feudal robes of the clergy.

And the sermon, like so much of the Church of England, was infected with modern Leftwingery and talk about 'equality', which sounds nice in theory but always ends up very nasty in practice.

From outside the giant doors, you could just hear the bearded preacher roaring distantly, like the sea.

I sat by the great, dark tomb of the Duke of Wellington, wondering what that blunt and unaffected man would have made of the tented city, and concluding 'not much'. I suspect he might have contrived a convenient burst water main on the site, to wash them away without fuss.

And I contrasted the great classical majesty of the cathedral, one of man's most successful attempts to combine reason, science and hope, with the chaotic, self-righteous festival of drivel outside.
Yet there's no doubt which of the two is closer to the mood of the modern world, more's the pity.

 

God, Happiness and Twitter. And what nearly happened in Nottingham

I shall be travelling for most of this week and so will not be posting as frequently as I have in the past fortnight. I'd just like to muse a little about my appearance on BBC Question Time last week (I think it should still be available on the BBC i-player for a while), and on some reactions to it.  On Saturday, under a heavy disguise, I at last penetrated the strange world that is 'Twitter', a place where Stephen Fry is accounted a genius and where I appear to be unpopular. I'll say more about that in a moment.

As it happens, it was not a specially controversial edition of the programme. And the London audience was a good deal less one-sided than the one I met in Norwich a few months ago.  During the unbroadcast warm-up question (on the English diet versus the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish ones) we all had a reasonable amount of fun with deep-fried Mars Bars. The only topic on which I was first up – and so obliged to answer the exact question, as asked – was about the St Paul's encampment. But it was a legal query about whether new laws are needed to shift the tents. Plainly, they aren't. If the Cathedral, or the City Corporation, wanted to use the law to move the campers, then they could do. But they don't. So I had to use valuable time explaining this obvious fact, rather than giving my opinions on the camp.

It was only when Benjamin Zephaniah started telling us what Jesus would have thought  (how does he know?) that I had the chance to come back and give some opinions. As it happened, I'd spent much of Wednesday at St Paul's (I hope my account of this will find its way here at some point) , and so I had some fairly definite views – namely that the camp is silly and self-righteous (though most of the campers are perfectly nice) and they should all go home. This doesn't strike me as particularly controversial. I also mentioned the fact that Jesus Christ rather plainly and repeatedly made it clear that he was not interested in worldly power, a scriptural truth which led many 'Twitter' posters (see below) to chide me for not knowing my Bible. I should have thought 'My Kingdom is not of this World' and 'Render unto Caesar…', not to mention His conversation with Pilate, and His instruction to Peter to sheath his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane all make this perfectly plain. But perhaps there is a missing Fifth Gospel according to St Polly Toynbee, where things are otherwise.

As for my views on public sector pensions, they are positively mainstream. How can the public sector expect other taxpayers, many of them with reduced pensions or no pensions at all, to pay to protect government employees from the problems that everyone in private industry has long been suffering? Likewise on the Euro crisis, I can with some justification point out that I was called rude names by 'mainstream' people for opposing the whole silly scheme at the start. But I cannot in all conscience claim that I have an easy solution to the present mess, and I feel very sorry for the ordinary Greeks who are being collectively punished for the failures and mistakes of their elite.

When fathers' access to their children after divorce came up, I thought the point was that there is too much divorce, and said it was only reasonable that divorce law should be reformed to distinguish between couples who have children, and couples who don't. Once again, this seems to me to be so blazingly obvious that it isn't in the least bit adventurous. Personally, I'm against divorce at all, but I recognise that this isn't a position I can, or should,  force on anyone else. I just hope that one day it becomes the general view again. The people who most need defending are the children, who I think are always the innocent victims of marriage break-up – and also of the general decline of stable two-parent families.

All right, I own up to a piece of slight mischief when the obscure subject of Prince Charles's legal rights as Duke of Cornwall came up. I feel an increasingly need to be frank about my dislike for democracy, a thing far too many people confuse with liberty. At the moment, most people , brought up and brainwashed into believing that democracy has been fought for over the centuries, when in fact it was pretty willingly handed over by cynical politicians who saw its advantages to them. That is, they realised that it gave them the power to bribe people with their own money.

The real foundation of our civilisation lie elsewhere – the Rule of Law, the 1689 Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus Act, and of course Jury Trial, the very core of Anglosphere liberty. Democracy is largely ignorant of these things and often hostile to them. It has certainly been used to undermine Jury Trial and the presumption of innocence, under the pretext of 'crackdowns' on crime or terror.

Two simple points that people need to digest – Hitler's National Socialists came to power through democracy and couldn't have done so without it. And Hong Kong's form of government, hardly democratic at all, is even so far preferable to that in the People's Republic of China, possessing freedom of thought, speech and the press . Why? Liberty and the Rule of Law, inherited from Britain. These facts show that democracy is not invariably good in itself, nor is it essential to the existence of a civilised and free polity. In which case it is surely  possible for civilised people to have doubts about it.

Pure democracy would be mob rule, so I teasingly said that I was rather glad that we weren't a democracy, but that democracy was restrained by law, tradition and constitutional monarchy. Well, and so I am, and I wish more people realised how lucky we were that our 'democratic' politicians, incompetent, inexperienced, power-mad, are restrained by such things. This led to an amusing clash with Ed Balls , during which I won applause for saying I thought I could have done a better job of governing the country than he had. Well, couldn't I?

And at the end we were asked what we thought were the things that led most surely to happiness. I should point out here that we were in Westminster Hall, equalled only by Hagia Sophia (The Church of the Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople (Istanbul if you insist) in its age, majesty and size, full of the past, never wholly light, never wholly warm, immensely disturbing to the modern mind. Outside the small lit area of the stage and the seats, in the chilly darkness, linger the imprints and echoes of almost a thousand years of English history.  Could Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I, have tussled here over the nature of kingship, without leaving any trace behind in the wood and the stones? And what about all the thousands and thousands of others, not so well remembered?

Perhaps that is why I instantly knew what I would have to answer to that question – faith in God.  It was the answer all my forbears would have given, and understood. In fact, all those thousands of ghosts would have been baffled if nobody had mentioned the Almighty.

I also knew that it would earn me some derision. And it was exactly because of that that I decided to say it anyway. Some of you will know what I mean. Others (for whom I feel a bit sorry) won't.

The following morning a colleague told me that I was 'trending',  whatever that meant, on 'Twitter'. Well, I had a pretty good idea what it would mean, as it happened.  And when on Saturday I slipped through a side entrance into the world of Twitter, I found a long list of semi-literate comments expressing the desire to hit me or kick me, commenting on my lack of beauty,  calling me unprintable names, telling me I was stupid. It was rather comforting, because the people involved were all so limited. I know you can't say much in a Twitter posting. But these were hopelessly inarticulate people, who thought it enough to say that they loathed me, and never felt the need to say why. In all cases, the fact that I disagreed with them was enough, and – with a tiny number of exceptions – they could feel sure that their fellow Fry fans would say 'amen', or whatever Atheists say instead of 'amen', to that. 

By the way, I had heard that a certain BBC radio person had posted a number of uncomplimentary remarks about me on Twitter. But I have been unable to trace these. Is it possible they have been deleted? If so, did any contributors here notice or record them, or do they know how to recover deleted tweets? If so, I should be interested to go into the matter, fascinated as I am by BBC impartiality.

Oh, and Nottingham. A few days ago I received an invitation to debate the death penalty at a student society in Nottingham( I shan't at present name the society, or the person involved,  as I suppose the whole thing may have been a prank). It was at very short notice and the writer was very pressing, saying that I was the ideal person etc, etc, so much so that I assumed the original speaker had pulled out at the last minute. Though I have a rather full diary at the moment, I reluctantly agreed. On the grounds that the case ought to be made properly if it was going to be made at all. But a few hours later the student society told me that they planned to 'pair' me with Nick Griffin, of the BNP, who would be speaking alongside me. I said that in that case I certainly wouldn't be there. And I gave the student society a large piece of my mind.

How could they have thought otherwise? Easy. To such people all 'right-wing' persons are equally evil, and I am indistinguishable from the BNP. Such people, like the 'Twitter' mob genuinely believe that I am some sort of National Socialist.   Thus does the BNP help to poison all debate. How I wish it would shrivel away.

We have failed to keep faith with the men who died for us

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Some actions ought to be unthinkable. Even the lowest, dimmest lout ought to know that you do not defile monuments to the dead. Till a few years ago, the worst crook in Britain would have stopped himself from ripping a bronze plaque off a war memorial.

Those who claim that this country is not falling to pieces need to explain why such crimes are now becoming common.

Something has disappeared from the hearts of the people who do this. They are different from any generation that lived before. Let me explain.

Long ago, a retired Serviceman said to me that the least anyone could do, when he saw a war memorial, was to pause and read some of the names on it. It was a tiny thing compared to what the dead had done, but it would in some way help to make their deaths worthwhile.

I have tried to follow this advice. I read the names, often seeing several members of one family listed on a small village cross and forcing myself to imagine what this must have meant.

But above all I recall that these were all the best of their generation at every level, of all classes and all political beliefs, hundreds of thousands of lost fathers who never had children, or never saw their young grow to adulthood, a great legion of lost craftsmen, lost scientists, lost engineers, lost inventors, lost teachers, lost poets, lost architects, lost statesmen, whose absence still haunts this country almost a century later.

I read the inscriptions, which now reach across to us from a time so different that it is astonishing to think that it is in fact so close. Some are reproachful or unsettling – the line 'Live thou for England – these for England died' goes straight to the heart of the matter.

The one that haunts me most of all is in Fleetwood in Lancashire, which states fiercely: 'Principles do not apply themselves.'

Another writes of 'those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom... let those that come after see to it that their names are not forgotten'.

Many are fine works of art – the mud-encrusted soldier reading a letter from home on Platform 1 at Paddington Station is one of the great sculptures of the 20th Century. They were almost all created and paid for by people who belonged to the older tradition of art and poetry, in my view far superior to the silly chaos of what followed.

And now they are being pillaged, demolished, smashed, stripped, overturned and desecrated by people who probably cannot even read what is written on them and would not care if they could.

If that is not a fit subject for a moral panic, I do not know what is. These metal thieves are no better than grave-robbers, and we have bred and raised them among us. These sombre and thoughtful shrines are not glorifications of war, but memorials to beloved people who went to their deaths in the belief that they were saving civilisation.

It seems that they failed.

Easy divorce equals lost children - it's a simple equation

When will they make the connection? More than 40 years of divorce on demand, and nobody can work out how to ensure that the child victims of marriage break-up stay in touch with their fathers or their grandparents.

Nor can they devise a workable or fair system for child support.

As for the laws on custody and property after divorce, it is amazing that any man has the courage to get married when he knows what might happen to him if things go wrong.

And of course there is the subsidy for fatherless families. You don't have to take my word for the effects of this, by the way. Listen to Adele Adkins, the singer, who presumably knows a bit about her generation.

She recently recalled that 'the ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the Government', adding: 'That ain't cool.'

Could this mass condemnation of so many children to broken homes and/or the absence of fathers have anything to do with this week's Barnardo's survey, showing that nearly half of us think the young are becoming feral? I think it could.

Clooney's right: Bullyboy 'fixers' are the real rulers

Why are political professionals so foul-mouthed? The real stars of George Clooney's clever and enjoyable new film about politics, The Ides Of March, are the backroom fixers and spin doctors who turn rather average individuals into TV superstars and propel them into office.

And they swear all the time about everything. I am sure this is completely realistic, from what I have seen of their real-life equivalents here.

I think they do this to prove that they have power over their underlings and can humble them without risking retaliation. Using dirty language to someone who cannot answer back is a form of showing off.

Interestingly, they often swear at the politicians who are supposed to be their bosses. Because, of course, the smiley Blair or Cameron figures who are sold to the public are not really in charge. The backroom fixers, who create them and mould them, represent the real power, which in the U.S. and increasingly in Britain comes from big-money backers. As Bob Dylan sang long ago 'Money doesn't talk, it swears'.

If we want to get control of our country back, we have to devise a way of liberating politics from such people. Nationalising the existing parties, by giving them taxpayers' money, is definitely not the answer.

But doesn't it say so much about the Labour and Tory parties, that if you held a flag day for either of them it would raise a few old Spanish coins and some buttons? They have to rely on big donors because they long ago deserted their roots. Why is it considered so eccentric to say it is time to get rid of them and start again?

Feeble Frank is going to pot

Parents and teachers who want to stop children taking illegal drugs get little help from the Government.

The feeble website 'Talk to Frank' (which we pay for through our taxes) more or less assumes that drug-taking is normal, with lots of matey, slang-infested chat.

A much better resource for parents and schools, 'Drugs – it's just not worth it', is now available from www.cannabisskunksense. co.uk. I strongly recommend it.

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

 

 

 

 

Mr Belisha's Beacons, and the Passing of the Zebra crossing

It seems that the old British Zebra crossing, feebly imitated in the USA with narrow-striped crosswalks, is to disappear almost everywhere. Instead we will have Pandas and Pelicans as they are childishly called.

An increasingly immoral and lawless British people are ignoring Zebra crossings more and more. I know this very well from personal experience. It is deeply unwise to rely on drivers stopping even if you are already in the middle of the road. Last year in the middle of Manchester I was almost run over by a driver who simply did not have a clue that he was supposed to stop. There were two policemen guarding a party conference a few feet away, and I recruited them to explain to the driver that he should have stopped. In my view he should have spent the rest of the day, and possibly the night,  in the cells, and had his car crushed into a cube,  but the police are much too busy guarding the political elite to bother with minor things like homicidal carelessness on the road.

Most of my fellow cyclists, of course, have concluded that zebra crossings don't apply to them at all, behaviour that sends me into red mist territory. Their lives all depend on other road-users abiding by the rules. Don't they owe a similar duty to pedestrians, next down in the food chain?

The alternative is the misleadingly-named 'pedestrian controlled' crossing, where you press a button, and wait for as long as a minute for a traffic light to change to red. In many cases, it is possible to cross well before this long wait is over, so drivers are frustrated to come up to a red light which is serving no purpose. Also, because pedestrians tend to think that drivers are legally obliged to stop at these lights  which of course they are, but so what?) they don't bother to give a wave of thanks and stalk across without so much as a nod. Both these features of modern life harden the hearts of drivers, who grow ever more impatient of stopping without being thanked, or stopping for no good reason. 

I jeer at the name 'pedestrian-controlled' because in fact the old Zebra crossings are genuinely pedestrian-controlled. You have an absolute freedom to step out and expect traffic to stop for you. The new devices take that freedom away from you, and award it to a viable and unpredictable timing device which operates according to no known law. In my home town there are some crossings where the light invariably changes in ten seconds, others where it can take more than a minute, others where it can vary between 20 seconds and more than a minute, for no observable reason. One in particular seems to be programmed to wait until there is no traffic approaching from either direction (quite a while) before uselessly changing.

Also, they bleep to signal the (often very short) time in which the pedestrian has lawful priority. This must be infuriating for anyone who lives nearby.

When these crossings were introduced in 1934 by the then Transport Minister, the odd but interesting Leslie Hore-Belisha, they had only the flashing yellow beacons which came to bear his name, plus some chrome studs in the road. The Zebra stripes were introduced only in the 1950s.  Other countries copied the idea , but with carrying success. I remember being warned before a first visit to Paris in 1965 that in that city the Zebra-like crossings in that city were not to be taken seriously by anyone who wanted to live long.

The French simply did not have the same self-restraint which we then possessed (and have now lost) . In the USA, where walking is a sort of crime against the national religion (yes, the car), crosswalks are largely ignored.  In fact, when I tried to slow down for them when I lived there, I was hooted contemptuously, and soon gave up, like everyone else. By contrast, the 'Stop' sign was universally observed, so proving that Americans do have the capacity for self-restraint, but only towards their equals, ie other drivers in large cars. Interestingly, the USA has the same view of pedestrians as continental countries, that they are a nuisance, and so it is an actual offence to cross the road against the lights, even if there's nothing coming.

On a visit to Canada, I was ashamed and embarrassed when I drove as I would have done in the USA. For there, with the far more British style of manners and self-restraint, crosswalks are (or were) observed. Not realising this, I drove across one in front of some waiting pedestrians, and blushed deeply when I saw in my rear-view mirror the Canadian drivers courteously stopping as they might have done in Pitlochry or Ludlow. My only relief came from the fact that my rented car had New York plates, so everyone had probably assumed the worst anyway.

These details of life are fascinating insights into the real differences between us and others, and the real difference between the past and the present. I'm sorry that the Zebra crossing is dying, but I'm not surprised, given all the other things that are passing at the same time. In Soviet Moscow, there used to be dead pedestrians lying beside the roads, as often as not, sometimes attended by grimy ambulances. In Cairo and Teheran. You sometimes can't cross the road at all, unless you can assemble a crowd to cross with you, or get a local friend to act as a human shield.

We are All Doomed

High up in the Chiltern Hills, looking south across the Thames Valley towards Windsor Castle is the small village of Penn. Readers of the novels of Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one, another one) will know it well from her enjoyable book 'In a Summer Season'.  Mrs Taylor was an atheist, but did occasionally visit its parish church, where she would have seen a rare survival, the remnants of a  'Doom',  or painting of the Last Judgement. It was rediscovered during repair works in 1938 (bits of it were very nearly thrown away) . If you, too, visit this church, you will find that you have to switch on a special light to view it . The plaque by the switch says (or used to say, it is some time since I visited)  'For Doom, Press Switch', which is alarmingly ambiguous.

There are several other similar paintings though only a few of these survivors, like that in Penn, were done on wood. Most were painted directly on the church walls and so have more thoroughly vanished, though there's a startling example in the parish church at South Leigh near Witney . Sometimes the same scenes are done on glass, as in the astonishing windows at Fairford.

These came to mind at the weekend , which I spent in the lovely English cathedral city of Lincoln. Perhaps because I have spent so much time abroad, I'm more and more convinced that T.S.Eliot was right when he said  (in 'Little Gidding') that the end of all our exploring will to be arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. My own country, almost inexpressibly beautiful at this time of year, is illuminated for me by a hundred memories of elsewhere -  Russia, in and around the sad but very moving city of Moscow,  rural Maryland, the Valley of the Elbe, Brandenburg, the Alps, the intimate country of Burgundy near Beaune,  the French and German Rhineland, the high country of Zululand, the Golan heights, Persia between Esfahan and Qom, the extraordinary landscape on the railway line between Rawalpindi and Lahore, Bryce Canyon in Utah,  the bare, hard hills and the long climb on the railway from Kashgar to Urumchi, the lakes and mountains west of Peking, the hills above Mandalay or the impossibly clear air of the Falkland Islands.

For me, a couple of days in Lincoln is as rewarding and as much of an adventure, as a visit to Prague. In fact the two cities have something in common,  narrow ancient streets climbing up a steep hill to a fortress and a cathedral.  But while Prague has its miraculous concentration of baroque buildings, somehow spared from all the wild destruction of the 20th century, Lincoln has in its cathedral one of the greatest buildings on the planet.
I love the English cathedrals and have spent a rather large part of my spare time visiting all of them and then doing it again, and the only thing which worries me about this is that more of my countrymen do not copy me. There are, it is true, plenty of sights to see abroad, and I have tried to view as many of them as possible. But why do we ignore the astonishing treasures we have here? And why, I might add, do we so foolishly resent paying to see them? How else can they be preserved for the next generation?

Earthquakes and storms have destroyed much of what used to exist in Lincoln. Decay and sectarian fanatics have destroyed quite a lot more. Even so, the West Front of the cathedral remains one of the most arresting sights in this country. Floodlit at night or catching the evening sun, or sombre in the mist and drizzle, the immense and loving detail, combined with the vastness of the structure, are an example of what architecture can do when it really tries.

This really is frozen music, and I will leave it to each person who sees it to work out which passage of music it most thoroughly represents - something involving trumpets at one stage or another, almost certainly , but also deep and powerful drums as in Purcell's 'Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary'.


For a large part of the west front, now being rather wonderfully repaired, is a frieze of the Last Judgement, to which you may respond with nervous laughter or serious thought, depending on your disposition. The little depiction of Dives ignoring Lazarus, as the beggar has his sores licked by dogs, is among the earliest parts to be restored, and the sculptor has made a fine job of recreating the style of the long-dead master whose work appears so simple and natural but is of course nothing of the kind. It is easy to look at because it was so hard to carve. 

What are we to make of these things? The same theme is often to be found among the greatest paintings in the greatest art galleries of the world. Do we treat it as a meaningless fairy tale? As a ghost story with no power to touch us ? Or as a real if allegorical warning that what we do here really does matter somewhere else? I prefer the last. The world will end for all of us, not on some hilltop, gathered into a throng by some mountebank preacher, but on the unknown day when we will all die. And then what? We have no idea.

But pass through the great doors of the Lincoln Minster and see what was done by people who believed that their lives were subject to judgement, as we do not, and wonder if it is quite so easy to dismiss them as ignorant, benighted semi-savages.

What remains of the glass of the two great circular windows at the crossing, the Dean's Eye and the Bishop's Eye, is art of the first class, executed with enormous technical skill. Look at the building itself, inside and out, on a scale, and possessing such grace that it puts to shame almost every British structure of the last century (I except the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, which is of course a noble effort to maintain this dying tradition). Look at the carving on the great stone choir screen, and see if you can find it in you to scorn the masons who created such lovingly detailed beauty with tools so simple that we would call them crude (if you have time, travel the modest distance to the nearby Southwell Minster and look at the carving there, for further proof that our dim, clumsy, ignorant forebears possessed skills and devotion that we largely lack). 

If our vain and puffed up assessment of ourselves is true, and the past was such a dark age of ignorance and superstition, why did that age of superstition produce art and music so immeasurably better than our own?

I think we might do well to be rather more modest about our achievements. It is interesting that the modern Britain, of motorways and shopping malls and hypermarkets, largely ignores or sweeps round the old cathedral cities.  In London, people walk past Westminster Abbey without glancing at it, unless they are tourists. The one fully modern city which contains one of these masterpieces is Peterborough, where the Cathedral sits in strange solitude in a city centre that has no organic connection with it at all.

Could it possibly be that the difference between the two worlds has something to do with the fact that our forebears felt there might be a higher judgement than the one of their fellow-creatures, so easily fooled by public relations and smiling exteriors? Maybe doom has something to be said for it.

Judas, the First Socialist, and other issues

I'll get on to Judas Iscariot in a moment. I am asked how I define poverty. I would define physical poverty as severe want – not enough food to eat, no access to clean water, absence of proper shelter either from great heat or from cold, inadequate clothing, untreated sickness and no possibility of medical help, conditions so squalid that cleanliness is impossible, severe overcrowding. These are the features of poverty that I have seen in various forms on my many travels into remote parts of the world.

I had an interesting discussion about this on Nicky Campbell's Radio Five Live programme a few weeks ago, and was interested that a contributor from Africa agreed with me that poverty of this kind does not really exist in this country. But he added that hardship undoubtedly does exist. Of course much of that hardship stems from not having things that others do have, and from a feeling of injustice and rejection.

But this is not poverty, which in my view is an absolute condition of severe material want, not a comparative condition of being worse off than your neighbour.

I would add, as I often do, that I suspect that there may be something very close to absolute poverty among the lonely old people of this country, trying to make ends meet on no more than their pensions, regarding any further appeal to the welfare state as a shameful (and therefore unthinkable) form of charity which they are too proud to accept. Many of these live very pinched and deprived lives, though even they are materially rich beside the rural dwellers of North Korea or millions of the less fortunate in Africa and parts of India.

But the measure of poverty as an arbitrary proportion of average income is just a device by which socialists justify their unending raid on the possessions of the wealthy and productive, to finance the unproductive and penniless state in its vote-buying projects. Some of these projects may incidentally do good. But their aim is not to do good, but to make their authors feel good about themselves, while increasing their power. It also incidentally shrinks the power of the productive middle-class to be charitable in their own right, as they have handed over a large part of their charitable duty to the state.

That is why I am so fond of Christ's rebuke to Judas, and the account as a whole. The passage is as follows:

The Gospel according to John, 12th Chapter, beginning at verse iv; Mary (not Mary Magdalene, but Mary, sister of Lazarus), has just taken a pound – or 454 grams in the Rocky Horror Bible - of very costly Spikenard ointment and wiped Jesus's feet with her hair, 'and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment'.

'Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him : 'Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?'
This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.
Then said Jesus :'Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always'.

As so often, there's a lot packed into this, notably the realistic recognition that there will always be poor people in the world , and those who wish to help them will always have the opportunity to do so. But it is the biting observation that Judas, like so many since, is pretending a concern for the poor to cover up other, less noble motives, that really goes home with a satisfying thud. There is no new thing under the sun.

I'm accused by some of saying that Christianity has no part to play in politics. I've no doubt, as it happens, that it does have a part. But that it is an individual part, in that the man or woman who embraces Christian principle may be involved in politics, in any party which is not actually wicked, and use his or her individual influence to good and Christian ends. But I do not think there is such a thing as a 'Christian policy' or a Christian party', or that any grouping should arrogate Christianity to itself as its own possession. This is because Christianity is not about earthly power, but about love. And if you think about it, power is the opposite of love – and the less love there is, the more power you will generally find.

That's enough religion for this posting (though I plan another contribution on a recent visit to Lincoln Cathedral which may be of interest to the atheist fancy).

On other comments, Mr McDonald (or 'McDonald' as he perhaps prefers to be addressed) is wrong in particular in saying that the MPs' expenses story was offered first to our sister paper 'The Daily Mail' (it wasn't, though I should point out here yet again that I do not write for the 'Daily Mail', but for the 'Mail on Sunday' , a separate paper with its own editor and staff) and wrong in general, that the anti-EU rebels were specially spendthrift on the expenses gravy train ( I believe one of them had the lowest claims of any MP, whereas Mr Cameron himself, as I so often point out, was among the highest claimers – quite legally –for his nice country house, despite being personally rich. There's a book to be written on the selective nature of the coverage of MPs' expenses, and the selective nature of the way in which some were chosen for the public pillory and others exempted). Many of the rebels are, I believe, newly elected since the rules were changed). So the comment is both incorrect and irrelevant.

If people come here to plug the BNP, they must learn that they will earn themselves my utter contempt. I had thought we had got rid of them, but perhaps now the BNP – which is now tiny and very short of money - has emerged from its latest furious inner faction fight, it now has time to start spreading slime again.

This revolting grouplet has been thoroughly dealt with here, and the index is full of clear explanations as to why no civilised person should dirty himself by association with such a spectacularly disreputable organisation. Reminder: It was founded by a Judophobe Hitler-worshipper, so pitifully obsessed with Jews that he once launched an investigation into Nicholas Griffin's ancestry because he thought his (Griffin's) father had rather a large nose, and still peopled with Holocaust-deniers and similar. The BNP's noisy flag-wagging patriotism is wholly opportunist. So is its, er, critique of Islam. Mr Griffin, it might be recalled, once travelled to Tripoli to seek aid from the late Colonel Gadaffi. Not long afterwards he was consorting with the Ku Klux Klan. Is there nobody Mr Griffin can't bring himself to meet? There is nothing to hope for from this squalid and pathetic faction, whose existence does grave damage to every cause it claims to espouse.

As for UKIP, I only attack it when I am foolishly urged to support it. I have explained why( again see the index) and only those who want me to attack it should sing its praises here or pointlessly seek my endorsement of it, which is never going to come. I cannot think of a more certain way of ensuring that opposition to EU membership returned to the braying margins of political, life, for the rebel Tories to have anything to do with this hopeless Dad's Army, a group of people so politically naïve that they thought they could make use of Robert Kilroy-Silk. He tied them up, hand and foot, with their own cravats.

The Gang of Four came closer to succeeding than most people realise. Their failure was not predetermined, though Margaret Thatcher bears some responsibility for it, as I shall one day be free to reveal.

Oh, and to Howard Medwell 'Why *not* "Pestilent"?' It's a good 18th-century pejorative term, much in need of revival.

How these 80 patriots can save us from 57 soppy liberals

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Why are the 80 Euro-rebels still in the Useless Tory Party? They know that they were right, and David Cameron (pictured) was wrong. They also know that if they stay under his command he will carry on treating them like insects.

Some will be threatened. Some will find their seats have vanished thanks to Mr Cameron's creepy reform plan. As long as they submit to him, they have no future. They will achieve nothing worth having for themselves, or for those who voted for them.

The things they believe in will still be scorned by the cold, ruthless liberal clique that runs the Tory Party.

Britain will stay trapped in the burning building that is the European Union, gaining nothing and losing independence, liberty and prosperity.

But look at what happens to the mere 57 Liberal Democrat MPs who voted for the EU on Monday. They are much loved by Mr Cameron and his circle. They need only to whisper a desire and it is granted – the latest being the ghastly plan to make us all live on Berlin Time.

Unlike the principled Tory rebels, these Liberal Democrat MPs stand for very little. They are mostly in Parliament because of what they are not, and what they don't think or don't say, rather than because of who they are or what they believe in.

If 57 soppy anti-British, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-immigration, anti-family nonentities can push David Cameron around with the constant unspoken threat of walking out of the Coalition, think what 80 pro-British, anti-crime, anti-immigration, pro-education MPs could do to him by actually walking out of it.

He would then have to face a proper opposition – after all, David Davis disagrees with Mr Cameron much more than Ed Miliband does, and about far more subjects.

But to have any impact, the 80 must quit the Tory Party, which last week finally and irrevocably turned its back on its voters. As long as they stay inside it they are powerless serfs. Worse, they are a human shield protecting Mr Cameron from the emergence of a proper patriotic movement.

Following the example of the 'Gang of Four', who nearly 30 years ago came within an inch of destroying and replacing the Labour Party, they should declare independence.

From then on, if Mr Cameron wants their support, he will have to ask for it nicely, rather than by threatening, insulting and bullying them. And such a grouping would at last provide a real alternative to the three near-identical BBC-approved parties that nowadays compete for our votes.

My guess is that such a breakaway would do well at any by-election in an existing Tory seat, and by 2015 would be at least halfway to replacing the sordid and treacherous official Unconservative Party. Then we might have something to hope for.

What is there to lose? Its potential leaders know who they are, and how to act. Now is the time to do so.

You wouldn't find Jesus in a St Paul's tent

I back the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, (pictured) against the pestilent rabble that has cluttered up the precincts of St Paul's Cathedral.

St Paul's may be a bit commercial, but I don't see how else it can pay for the upkeep of one of the ten greatest buildings in Europe, recently superbly restored. The Church of England gets no tax money.

And the Cathedral's continued existence amid the soaring towers of mammon is an important reminder of the faith and beliefs that actually sustain our wealth and freedom.

As for the protesters, why are we all supposed to be so nice to them? They seem to think that by brainlessly saying they are against 'capitalism', they automatically become good.

'What would Jesus do?' they ask, with a whining implication that He would be one of them. Tripe. He despised politics, and rebuked Judas Iscariot (the first socialist) for going on and on about the poor to make himself look good. As you'll recall, he wasn't as good as he looked.

Christianity is not about having the right opinions and telling everyone. It is about who you really are, and what you really do, in secret, when nobody is looking.

Is smashing gravestones funny, Fiona?

The BBC forget far too often that they are paid for by you and me. That is why I was so angry last week when they refused to show me a recording of a recent TV news bulletin which had attracted many complaints.

Newsreader Fiona Bruce (pictured) was the focus of the viewers' discontent.

They felt she had been far too light-hearted in her presentation of a rather dark item, in which a callous moron was shown driving a stolen JCB digger through a cemetery, smashing and scattering gravestones.

Some may be unmoved by this, or even think it amusing. But there is a large class of people who, for one reason or another, find the desecration of graves obscenely shocking and grim. I am one of them.

But at the end of the item, Ms Bruce spoke only to the London trendies, and forgot about everyone else. She exclaimed 'Unbelievable!' – as if it was all a bit of fun – while lifting her hands in the air and grinning with apparent amusement. Then, half-laughing, she handed over to the weatherman.

The BBC knew the matter was sensitive because of the complaints they had received. Yet a spokesman – while flatly refusing to allow me to see the BBC's own recording of the programme – had the nerve to insist Ms Bruce's response was 'of pure astonishment at the extraordinary scenes that had resulted from the driver's trail of destruction'. Ms Bruce herself, in my view rather more wisely, declined to comment at all.

For I have now seen a recording of the programme, despite the BBC's efforts to keep it from me, and after watching it several times I think the complainers are right, and the BBC version is severely misleading.

This shows yet again that BBC people move in a world quite unlike the one where most people dwell. And that the Corporation, paid for by a tax levied under the threat of fines and prison, still arrogantly refuses to accept that it owes its paymasters any courtesy, or is obliged to be open when it has blundered.

The REAL tragedy behind the summer 'riots'

Much fuss last week when the Ministry of Injustice released figures about the backgrounds of those arrested after the mass thieving and destruction (the so-called riots) of last summer.

The liberal Left, which fools itself that crime is caused by non-existent 'poverty', seized on suggestions that many of the alleged offenders came from 'deprived' backgrounds (which in Left-speak appears to means 'unable to afford the latest widescreen TV').

Well, they can believe that if they want to. But I am sure that if anyone had checked, it would have turned out that more than 90 per cent of these people came from homes where there was no father reliably present. (NB: it's the absence of the father I am emphasising, not the presence of a single mother.)

This is the single biggest predictor of bad outcomes in any child's life, but it is also one our welfare system vigorously encourages. I expect that is why the Government didn't try to find out the facts.

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