Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 323

An Evening without Richard Dawkins

This is a light-hearted diversion for the God-hating adherents to this site (to whom I occasionally fling hunks of bleeding flesh, so that I can watch them come flapping from afar to feast on it).

Maybe it will also be a rest from the tedium of responding (yet again)  to the various lame and exploded 'arguments' of the drug lobby, for making their selfish habit even more legal than it already is. If just one of them ever paid any attention, or engaged seriously, it would make it seem worthwhile. But they never do. It's all mechanical, destructive rhetoric they've got off the telly, or learned in PSHE classes.

Now, serious engagement was exactly what we got in the uplifting surroundings of Sir Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre (named after Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon, since you ask, and one of the great buildings of Europe,  superb inside and outside but perhaps most astonishing of all up in the mighty roof-beams that make it possible) in Oxford on Tuesday night. The Sheldonian is one of a group of buildings which in largely embody English history, as well as expressing the Royal grandeur of the restored Stuarts. They look pretty startling now, but set amid the small and muddy town that was Oxford at the end of the 17th century, they must have seemed almost impossibly majestic.

Next to it is Bodley's Great Library, and beyond that Radcliffe Square dominated by The College of All Souls, a monument to the dead of the Hundred Years' War, and the soaring church of St Mary the Virgin, scene of Thomas Cranmer's great trial and renunciation of the Pope. Next to the Sheldonian is the Clarendon Building, once the headquarters of the University Press, and built thanks to the profits of the 'History of the Great Rebellion', the first great account of the English Civil War, written by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Sheldon, a courageous Anglican who had to be ejected bodily from All Souls, by the Cromwellians, was a close ally of Clarendon, so it is fitting that buildings named after both of them stand next to each other. Three hundred yards away is the spot where Cranmer, (and before him Latimer and Ridley) were burned to death for their Protestant beliefs.
But I digress.
The American philosopher William Lane Craig had offered to debate Richard Dawkins's book 'The God Delusion' with its author, in his home town (and mine) . Dawkins is around, because he has his own event in another Oxford location on Friday. But despite being in the midst of promoting a new book, Dawkins refused to come. He came up with a series of silly excuses, none of which holds water. And an empty chair was provided for him at the Sheldonian on Tuesday evening, in case he changed his mind and – yes – to mock him for his absence. Details of this controversy are all over the web, and I was impressed by the behaviour of another Oxford atheist, Daniel Came, who said Dawkins should have turned up, and had the guts to be there himself . I might say that I thought his contribution was serious, thoughtful and properly modest about the limits of what we can know. The bumptiousness and raillery of Dawkins and some other anti-God preachers was entirely absent from his discourse, and it was all the better for it.

I have to confess here that I don't find Craig's debating style or manner very attractive. It is too smooth and American for me – and his best moment (again, for me) came when he dropped his salesman's manner and said, in effect, that  he was sorry if he seemed too certain, and that his fundamental claims were modest ones – that the Theist position was scientifically tenable.


The most moving – and most enjoyable – contribution of the evening came from the marvellous Dr Stephen Priest, simultaneously diffident and extremely powerful. I won't try to summarise it because I'm sure I'd fail.  I hope it will eventually make it on to the web. It reminded me of why I had once wanted to study philosophy, a desire which faded rapidly when I was exposed to English Linguistic Philosophy and various other strands of that discipline which made me wonder if I had wandered into a convention of crossword-compilers, when what I wanted was to seek the origins of the universe.

Many of you will know that in his failure to face William Lane Craig, Professor Dawkins was not alone. Several other members of Britain's Atheist Premier League found themselves unable or unwilling (or both) to take him on.

The important thing about this is that what Craig does is simple. He uses philosophical logic, and a considerable knowledge of physics, to expose the shallowness of Dawkins's arguments. I would imagine that an equally serious Atheist philosopher would be able to give him a run for his money, but Dawkins isn't that. He would have been embarrassingly out of his depth.

For what Craig achieves is this. He simply retakes an important piece of ground that Christianity lost through laziness and cowardice, rather than because it lacked the weapons to defend it.

He doesn't (in my view) achieve total victory over the unbelievers. He simply says : 'In this logic, which you cannot deny, and in this science, which you cannot deny either,  it is clear that there is plenty of room for the possibility that God exists and made the universe'. No scientifically literate person, who is informed and can argue logically, can in truth say that he is wrong.

The trouble is that so many 'official' Christians have more or less conceded this ground, not being very firm believers themselves, and lacking Craig's training in logic and science.

He is the antidote to the lazy belief that in some way 'science' is incompatible with 'religion', and to the idea that all believers are unlettered morons who think the earth is 5,000 years old and that there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark.

This is, I'm afraid, all too often the tone of the anti-God people who come here to post. It's settled, you're stupid, why not give up?

It's not settled. We're not stupid. We won't give up.

(NB: A note to Mr 'Crosland'. I won't respond to any queries he posts here - and I have a small bet with myself as to what form they will take this time - until he replies to my 'childishly simple' private letter to him, which he has had since August).

For the Avoidance of Doubt – I do not work for MI5

I am publishing this as a free-standing post because I feel it must be resolved properly, and want to be certain that the person involved is aware of the risks he runs.

Some days ago, in a response to my column of last Sunday ('This is no SuperCam'), a Mr 'Harold Stone' posted a comment. I should say here that some of his comment was edited for legal reasons but - according to the rules which operate here - his direct personal criticisms of me were not edited.  All may say what you like about me, provided it is true, or just hostile and abusive. Untruths, however, are not acceptable. The editing process also led to a delay in his words being published. But they were published.  This is what he said:
He first quoted what I had said  :'It occurs to me - though of course it isn't true - that if MI5 wanted to discredit any honest movement against mass immigration, the cleverest thing it could do would be to set up something called, say, the 'British Patriotic Party', and staff it with Jew-haters, racialists and Holocaust deniers.'

He then wrote: 'And it occurs to me – since of course it is perfectly true – that an MI5 anxious to ensure we continue to believe we live in a society which protects free speech would almost certainly staff newspapers with faux-conservative "assets" to lead people up blind alleys about the effectiveness of the party system, or oppose repatriation on "moral grounds" because the other deception they peddle, about the irrelevance of racial differences, allows them to insist that an Englishman can come from Tunbridge or Timbuktu. You'd scarcely be the first newspaper journalist to be run by the security services (think Ian Fleming and a score of others less well-known). Speaking as a racialist myself, that is to say one genuinely led by the facts, by observation, by reason and the lessons of history rather than pretending to be, I'd say it's how all security services operate to discredit truth-tellers. Trotsky ordered the cadres to ignore rational argument and to make truth-telling distasteful to people. Equalitarian dogma (disguised as Christianity?) could thereby pass itself off as 'authentic' conservatism which, because of its ideologically driven repudiation of biology, would fail to conserve a damned thing. Again I must ask if you know what a nation actually is Mr Hitchens, you who boast about your grasp of history, and wonder what on earth gives you the right to sneer at Cameron when you display not a shred of integrity yourself on this subject, since it's plain you know the truth deep down?'

Mr Stone is welcome to his opinions, much as I dislike them. But he appears to suggest that I am an employee or servant of the Security Service, engaging in systematic dishonesty on their behalf. He uses these pretty direct words: 'You'd scarcely be the first newspaper journalist to be run by the security services' and  'it occurs to me – since of course it is perfectly true – that an MI5 anxious to ensure we continue to believe we live in a society which protects free speech would almost certainly staff newspapers with faux-conservative "assets" to lead people up blind alleys'.

I must ask him either to substantiate this allegation with facts, or to withdraw it and offer an unreserved apology. If he does neither then, under the usual rules, he will no longer be welcome here. I think a week should be enough. In case he has not so far seen this warning (first posted yesterday on the relevant thread) I will date that week from the publication of this posting.  I will listen to any reasonable request for more time but given his confident tone, I imagine he has the evidence at his fingertips and should rapidly be able to back up his claims. Or perhaps not.

The Barmy Logic of the Drug Legalisers

Sometimes one sees the vast gulf of understanding which lies between oneself and other people brought up in an entirely different world.

'Andrew' writes (on an earlier thread) first quoting me:

'"Anyone who accepts the death of innocents as a possible if unintended consequence of any policy which he supports - any policy - cannot logically advance the 'innocents might die ' argument as a case against any other policy. It is inconsistent." -Peter Hitchens 4 October 2011 '

My reply: So far, so good.  I said that.

He continues 'The first policy that you support is capital punishment. You acknowledge that the death of innocents would be an unintended consequence of this policy - as you still support the policy you must therefore accept the death of innocents as an unintended consequence.'

My reply, so far, so good, though I would say it *might* be an unintended consequence of a death penalty, not that it would be, as it happens.  I also said (and will repeat later) that all conceivable steps should be taken to avoid such innocent deaths. Recognising their inevitability is not the same as being indifferent to them.  It is certainly not an argument for not taking steps that could prevent innocent deaths. The steps that I advocate (to ensure that innocents are not executed) are comparable in aim and effect to the enforcement of the drug laws that I advocate.

There is a multiple misrepresentation of my *purpose* in advancing this argument.  I am not saying that we shouldn't care about innocent deaths, and only a person consumed with furious hostility towards me could imagine that was what I was saying.

I am saying that those who advance the danger of innocent deaths as a sole argument against capital punishment (and there are many Tory and other politicians who do so, while claiming to accept arguments about deterrence) are not restrained from other policies by similar or greater dangers of innocent deaths. Therefore this cannot be their real objection.  Either they have another objection, which they conceal because they are ashamed of it or know it to be feeble. Or they have not thought about it. Or they are avoiding the responsibility which falls on any government, to protect the people from harm.

He continues:'The other policy that you support is keeping illegal drugs illegal, or in other words, not introducing a third poison when we already have two. You advance the "innocents might die" argument as a case for this policy.'

Do I? Where did I advance that argument, precisely? One small part of my argument (in this instance, though I have been conducting it here and elsewhere for many years on many differnet fronts )  is, I rather thought , that people who took such drugs in the belief that they are 'soft' or 'safe' might well fall victim to irreversible mental illness,  thus  ruining their own lives and the lives of those who loved them and/or depended upon them in any way. There are, on occasion, deaths from drug abuse, but these -though avoidable and tragic -  are exceptional and not in themselves the burden of my case. Nor, as it happens, is the question of mental illness. This is just the part of my case which my pro-drug opponents cannot deny or avoid.

They are entirely relaxed about this country's adoption of a third-world pleasure-based morality – of which legalised drugs are a major feature - which will destroy its culture, its society, its freedom and its economy if unchecked. They either think this is a good thing, don't believe it is a problem or don't care. I am not concealing this argument. I make it all the time to anyone who will listen.  I'm just not wasting it this week on morally corrupt cultural revolutionaries (and self-interested drug lobbyists)  whose reaction will be 'So what? I want to join the Third World, provided I can stay rich and comfortable'.  For them, I point out that their selfish pleasure is bought at a high price –the risk to the sanity and happiness of others. I hope that by doing so I will at least make them ashamed of their greedy, self- centred contempt for their fellow humans.

Whereas if there were properly enforced laws against possession, these people, and many others besides,  would in many cases not be so stupid as to ingest a drug which is in truth hugely and unpredictably dangerous. This is a simple policy matter - where a policy reduces damage to innocents. It is not in any way a policy which accepts an increase in innocent deaths as the price of its success, as it happens. Cannabis rarely if ever kills those who use it. A law properly punishing possession of cananbis does not risk innocentt deaths. Worrying about mental harm experienced by guilty deliberate criminals - for cannabis users are by definition criminals under law – is rather different form worrying about deaths among the innocent. It is also not my sole argument

He adds:' In the case of cannabis specifically, whilst innocents would not die, they might suffer from serious mental illness, which is a consequence that you have previously stated to be just as serious. You accept that innocents might die in policy 1, which you support. You then use the "innocents might die (or come to serious harm)" argument to support policy 2. That is, as you say in your own words above, inconsistent.'

No it isn't. I am sorry, this silly-clever stuff is too ingenious for its own good, because it is founded on mischief rather than serious reason, and so misses the fundamental point of what I am saying. That is why I could not when it was first presented, and cannot now, see how anyone could honestly believe it to be a serious point.

I am only dealing with it here because the drug lobbyists are apparently so desperate that they have, pathetically, persuaded themselves that it is a serious point.   To say that the 'innocents might die' argument is generally inconsistent, and therefore useless *as a sole argument against capital punishment* and as a sole argument *advanced  by people who accept innocent deaths as the price of other policies they desire*,  is *not* to say that it is never justifiable to advance the reduction of pain and death as a justification for any policy.

Nor is it to say that the law should be indifferent to the deaths of innocents. Obviously diligent steps should be taken to ensure that innocent persons are not executed, as I have said time without number. Would it then be 'inconsistent' for me to say that diligent steps should be taken to stop people going mad from smoking cannabis. ?

To say that the argument 'innocents might die' does not work as a sole argument against the death penalty is *not* to say that we should not be concerned over reducing the deaths of innocents – indeed, the death penalty itself,  in my view, reduces the deaths of innocents, and that is one of its many purposes.

Finally, my argument concerns the faults in objections to the adoption of a law which might have the consequence of innocents dying.

It does not concern objections to the non-enforcement of a law, whose non-enforcement undoubtedly leads to harm to innocents, if not deaths.

So tell me again, where my alleged 'inconsistency' is.

I note that this absurd diversion has taken the pressure off the drug-legalisers, who until it was introduced were struggling to explain why the existence of two legal poisons could justify the legalisation of a third. I suspect that is the point of it. They are beaten yet again, so rather than admit it, they have changed the subject.

Black Labradors Bite Master Shock

Regular readers here will know that I often scornfully refer to Tory MPs as 'Black Labradors', those hopelessly loyal dogs who endure all things from their masters and then, tails thumping and eyes shining with love and joy, are crammed into the station wagon for their final journey to the vet.

Well, I suppose you could say that on Tuesday night we saw the revolt of the Black Labradors.

But it was all the wrong way round. There they were, nearly 80 Tory MPs, all representing the views of their constituents as they are supposed to do, and they let themselves be defined as 'rebels'.

It was they who were threatened with punishment and the ruin of their careers (should MPs have 'careers'? I do not think so. The whole idea is all wrong ) .

The man doing the threatening was an individual elected to the leadership of his party on false pretences, on subtly spread untruths about his true feelings which enabled so many Tories, members, MPs and voters, to harbour ludicrous delusions about his true beliefs.

And he had then become Prime Minister thanks to a similar subtle hint, never made explicit, but spread through the media by willing toadies, that he was 'sound' on the issues that really concern conservative British people.

By contrast, the 79 'rebels' were merely doing what they had said they would do and what they were elected to do, and, in a way, what they are paid to do.

It is Mr Cameron whose 'career' should be threatened. It is Mr Cameron who should be facing 'discipline' for behaviour which, even according to his loose Public School code, is fundamentally shameful – namely pledging to be one sort of Prime Minister to gain office, and then being another sort when he got there.

Now, I'm not very sympathetic to those who were fooled by this. It was plain to me that Mr Cameron was always what he now is, and I used a lot of effort, patience and time in explaining this to wilfully deaf Tories before 2010.

 (By the way, I much enjoyed myself on Tuesday evening at a meeting of the Bruges Group in London, where I was able to say repeatedly that I had told them so, in October 2009, and they had then welcomed me with a response so chilly it made me believe in man-made global cooling. Last night was different. My calls for the death of the Tory Party were met with warm applause. Meanwhile, the rather absurd David Campbell-Bannerman, who has incomprehensibly returned to the Tories from UKIP, while still claiming to be pro-independence, at the precise moment when the Tory Party has rededicated itself at the altar of Brussels, must have found the whole occasion a sore trial. Too bad.)

And now I say to these 'rebels', that their 'revolt' on Tuesday night will be worthless if they do not now move rapidly towards leaving the party which dares to punish them for following their principles and representing those who sent them to Westminster.  If this breach is not the occasion for such a split, then they are indeed Black Labradors. A brief spell of whimpering, even an uncharacteristic nip at their master's silk-socked ankles, does not fundamentally alter a relationship in which the good are servile, and the bad are triumphant.

Mourning in Mexico

Mr Scott, who still hasn't remotely answered my question about how the existence of two legal poisons, both disastrous, justifies the introduction of a third, tries to change the subject by going on about Mexico.

Mexico, like all other countries where the growing of illegal drugs has become a lucrative industry, is the innocent victim of the immorality of pleasure-seeking Westerners. It is their willingness to pay high prices for their brain-frying substances that has given the drug-gangs the power they possess.

The root of the evil, lies in the decadence of these rich and selfish criminals. To bring it to an end, therefore, we must discourage drug-taking by punishing it.

Oh, and the constant raising of the Portuguese 'experiment' is of little use here. Many of the claims made are at least disputed, and the word 'treatment' is a flat falsehood. To call it a euphemism is too polite.

It is nothing of the kind, as drug-taking is not an illness but a wilful crime, and 'treatment' does not stop drug use, but instead subsidises and encourages the habit. It is merely a polite way of saying that the state takes over the role of drug-dealer and thief, robbing the taxpayer to provide free pleasure to parasites, who for the most part make themselves incapable of productive work through their voluntary, pleasure-seeking habit. I wonder how long Portugal will be able to afford such a crazy response.

That way lies the end of civilisation. No proper country can afford to behave in such a way for long, as it will destroy its economy and poison its moral system. Nor is it moral to levy tax for such a destructive purpose. That road leads to an impoverished and exploited Chinese-dominated (and probably Chinese-ruled) Europe. Or perhaps to an Islamic Europe, as the Chinese may not much want to take responsibility for the mess we are making.

Referendum? No thanks

Just a second, but I have to point out that the current 'revolt' by Tory 'Eurosceptics' has no hope of achieving anything. Well, it has achieved one thing, to remind those who had forgotten, and tell those too dim to have realised it so far, that David Cameron is in fact a keen supporter of the EU project.

I do try to restrain my use of sarcastic inverted commas, deploying them mainly for such things as knighthoods granted to rock stars. People like me, brought up on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Sir Nigel' and 'The White Company', think chivalry is not attained by making lots of money from cheap music. So we find most modern knighthoods ridiculous. I've never really understood why people who despise tradition and the older virtues would want such archaic handles to their names.

But this 'revolt' is no such thing. It will not shake the power elite of the Conservative Party, a near-mediaeval group of courtiers beyond the reach of any sort of accountability. As for the word 'Eurosceptic', it is largely meaningless, as well as being ugly and clumsy. The two things are connected. For it is a word that seeks to hide the truth, rather than state the truth.

The 'Sceptics' may offer many doubts and criticisms of the European Union. But they continue to belong to a party which has the EU in its DNA. And they must by now realise that nothing they do will change that party. Yet they remain inside it, making the occasional gesture of exasperation or defiance, as they are doing tonight.

Even if they succeeded in getting their referendum, and even if they succeeded in winning it – near impossible without at least one major party calling for a vote to withdraw -  it would not bind the British government. The only real solution is for a general election to be won by a party committed to secession.  And with the Tory party in the way, bed-blocking the position that ought to be occupied by such a party,  that will never happen.

And here is why – the miserable fiasco of the Suez expedition, an explosion, 50 years too late, of British resentment towards the American takeover of our position as top nation.

After Suez had failed, largely but not wholly because the USA had wrecked it (it was a stupid plan anyway),  the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told Guy Mollet, Prime Minister of France, 'France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States and the Soviet Union. Nor Germany, either. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world, that is to unite to make Europe. England is not ripe for it but the affair of Suez will help to prepare her spirits for it. We have no time to waste. *Europe will be your revenge*.'
This is recorded in the memoirs of the then French Foreign Minister, Christian Pineau.
Adenauer and Mollet were meeting in Paris that day (Tuesday, 6th November 1956) to finalise the founding arrangements of the Common Market, which as we see here is, was and always will be an anti-American project, though the US State Department and the CIA have never, it seems, been able to work this out.

As for Britain not being ripe, I should hope we would never be ripe for such a thing. I doubt very much whether Konrad Adenauer had much understanding of Britain – few continental politicians do, Charles de Gaulle being a rare exception. The two men, for instance jointly attended Mass in Rheims Cathedral, their continental Roman Catholicism binding them together just as it excluded the Protestant British islanders from their world.

There were at that stage many British patriots so outraged by America's behaviour that they too felt the need for revenge. And they began to the Common Market as the vehicle for this, perhaps not caring about the price and being themselves too disillusioned with their own country's traditions to care much about preserving them.

It still amazes me how much reasonably well-informed people care about empty - and indeed often dangerously misleading - trinkets such as universal suffrage,  and so little about jewels of great price such as Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, jury trial and the English Bill of Rights.

Ted Heath, perhaps the least pro-American British prime minister of modern times, was also the most pro-EU. And it also seems to me that he was the one least moved by the grandeur of our separateness, the unique liberties secured thanks to our Island position and all that followed from it.
It is absurd to imagine that any of these people, or indeed anyone deeply involved in the British politics of the late fifties and early sixties,   did not know what the Common Market really was. In fact it has always seemed to me to be the worst argument against this project, to say that we were told it was a free trade agreement and it turned out to be a plan to absorb us into a superstate, and we never knew.

Those who didn't know, chose not to know. Although Ted Heath and the pro-Brussels faction did not wish it to be discussed, the opponents of the plan noisily proclaimed that it was what it was.

They were 'maverick and marginal' because we – people and politicians and media figures alike – proclaimed that they were marginal and stopped our ears to the blatant truth. Among those who did so until very late was Margaret thatcher herself who – never let this be forgotten- campaigned for a 'yes' vote in 1975 in a sweater patterned with the flags of the Common Market nations.

Opposing Maastricht, or the Single Market, or the social Chapter, or every other accretion of Brussels power up to and including the Euro and the Lisbon Treaty, is just so much shouting in the street if it is not allied to a recognition that each of these things is in fact a necessary and logical part of the European project. And also let us strip ourselves of the illusion that the EU could, had we joined it earlier been designed to suit us better. Its needs and aims conflict with ours because it is continental, and we are not. That is why we have ever been able to form any lasting alliance against the Franco-German heart of the project, with any other member of it.

You can't oppose them without opposing the project as a whole. You can't do that from within a party which is completely wedded to that project, and which contains no mechanism through which you can influence its policy.

The logic of this seems to me to be quite clear, and quite inevitable.

Now, I am sorry that we ceded our global supremacy to the USA. How could any child of a naval officer, born and brought up in a succession of naval harbours, as they emptied of warships and sank into decrepitude or became museums, not feel that way? But I do not see why Britain, or England if it comes to it, has to choose between being a superpower or a province. Nor do I see why we must choose between the USA and the EU.

It seems to me that there is a large space between the two conditions, and between those two powers,  in which a powerful, wealthy, mature and civilised nation might sit quite happily, if it wished to do so.

Though I can truly say I voted 'No' in 1975, I must admit I did so because, as a junior reporter on the Swindon Evening Advertiser, I uncovered a nasty piece of dishonesty by the pro-Market campaign, and  had my story suppressed on polling day by a pro-Market executive -. I took my revenge by going out and voting 'No', though I had until then fallen for the very seductive idealism promoted by the pro-EU campaigners, and been unimpressed by the cut-rate Churchillian rhetoric of (for example) Peter Shore.

I don't suppose I thought about it again for nearly 30 years, being diverted by what seemed to me to be the more urgent matter of the Cold War. But in recent years, especially since the end of that Cold War, it has forced  itself on my attention, and I have moved from indifference to concern to alarm to a certainty that, if we wish to survive as an independent state, we must secede.
Any fool can be 'sceptical' about an institution or a policy. He can be sceptical about it while in fact supporting it in practice. He may do this either because he doesn't really care, but has been put on the spot by constituents, or because he cares a bit, but not enough to risk his political career.

These are both perfectly reasonable human positions with which we can all sympathise, but they are not politics.

If we are not prepared to fight this properly, and to wreck the Tory Party to save the country – plainly more essential than ever – then we might as well go home, and accept that our country will henceforth be ruled from abroad. Which is it to be?

This is no SuperCam - just Ted Heath Mk 2 (... complete with his own Thought Police)

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Two Tory MPs are so scared of David Cameron's pro-EU thought police that they have hidden their identities when giving radio interviews on the subject.

One said that wanting to leave the EU was 'the love that dare not speak its name'. The other attacked Mr Cameron's broken pledge for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Both knew that the Tory whips would destroy them if their names became known.

So their words were spoken by actors, as if they were dissidents in some foreign dictatorship.

This extraordinary behaviour, broadcast on BBC Radio 4's ultra-respectable Analysis programme, tells you all you need to know about the Conservative  Party's real position on Brussels, and plenty of other things.

For of course, this isn't just about  boring old Brussels. The EU is symbolic of all the other great issues that divide Mr Cameron from Tory voters – mass immigration, crime, disorder, education, marriage and morals.

I have known since I first spotted him trying to weaken the anti-drug laws that Mr Cameron was not a conservative. I have spoken to former colleagues who have concluded that he believes in nothing at all, but I think it is much worse than that. I think he is an active, militant elite liberal, who despises our country and its people, just as much as any Islington Marxist does.

What I could never understand was how so many men and women with the usual complement of eyes, ears and brains (and nostrils) managed to fool themselves so completely about him.

How many times did I read weighty commentators (weighty because of the huge number of lunches they had eaten with their political insider chums) proclaiming that Mr Cameron was a 'sound Eurosceptic'? Or that he had 'deep conservative instincts'? I seem to remember one such even praising his cricket.

Well, it was bunkum and balderdash, wasn't it? I wouldn't know about his cricketing skills, but his performance on the EU issue has been dishonest and treacherous from the start.

I still remember the look of rabbit-like fear on his smooth face on the day he broke his pledge of a Lisbon referendum. He was too cowardly to take a question from me, while that pathetic burst balloon, William Hague, sat silent in the front row of the press conference, endorsing his chief's poltroonery.

But still the Tory loyalists wouldn't see it, fooling themselves with a babyish dream that Mr Cameron had a secret plan, that once in office he would tear off his outer garments and reveal himself as SuperCam, a real patriot and conservative.

Well, now he has torn off his outer garments, ordered his cringing followers to vote against an EU referendum and revealed that he is in fact the reincarnation of Ted Heath, the man who betrayed Britain to Brussels and got his way by bullying and shameless dishonesty.

Nobody is making him do this. It is his own true self speaking. I told you so. I was right. And I am now enjoying myself telling you again.

But when will you do anything about it?

New Libya, same bloody way of doing business

Colonel Gaddafi was cruelly murdered by a mob. This disgusting episode, which no decent person can approve of, is typical of the sordid revolution which our Government has decided to endorse and aid.

Nearly as bad, most of our media reported the barbaric spectacle in gleeful tones. God preserve them from ever being at the mercy of a lynch mob themselves is all I can say.

Shame, also, on those who referred to this squalid crime as an 'execution'. Why is this word these days applied to its opposite? An execution follows lawful due process. It is not another word for a gang slaying or a lynching, such as happened to Muammar Gaddafi.

Any new state that begins with such an event will be poisoned and polluted by it ever afterwards, just as the communist world was blighted by the Bolshevik massacre of the Russian imperial family in 1917.

The nebulous new Libyan regime is already torturing its prisoners, who in many cases have been seized without formal legal procedure. From now on, all those who supported this ill-advised intervention will share responsibility for every lynching, whipping, unjust detention and miserable dungeon in the New Libya they helped to make.

Doesn't anyone know any history? The day that Colonel Gaddafi overthrew King Idris in 1969, Tripoli was full of rejoicing crowds, no doubt similar to those who celebrate today.

 * * *

I am pleased to say that a planned march against immigration in Boston, Lincolnshire, has been called off. The organisers rightly feared that it would be taken over by sinister and creepy factions.

It occurs to me - though of course it isn't true - that if MI5 wanted to discredit any honest movement against mass immigration, the cleverest thing it could do would be to set up something called, say, the 'British Patriotic Party', and staff it with Jew-haters, racialists and Holocaust deniers.

And then these people could latch on to every decent protest and wreck it.

By contrast, look at what is happening in Switzerland. There, a mainstream political party isn't ashamed to oppose mass immigration on perfectly civilised and reasonable grounds.

The Swiss are on course for a referendum that will almost certainly vote to close their borders after a failed experiment with leaving them wide open.

Drugs wreck lives: A lesson Mr Dodgeon's finally learned

If you doubt the terrible dangers of illegal drugs, look at the miserable fate of Brian Dodgeon.

Mr Dodgeon, pictured right, calls himself 'an old hippie'. He is an academic and former social worker. He is all too typical of the demoralised English middle class, a type of liberal bigot common in the media and among teachers and social workers.

In their tens of thousands, they fried their brains with dope in the Sixties and Seventies, so becoming even more stupid than they already were.

Now they form a noisy, powerful lobby against proper enforcement of the drug law today, lying that there is a 'war on drugs'. Ha ha.

If only there were such a war, a schoolgirl might not have died after taking drugs Mr Dodgeon had left in his house during a teenage party. And he himself might not have been badly injured later while trying to end his life by jumping from a flyover.

Thanks to his selfishness and stupidity (the man is 61 years old), all these things happened.

No doubt the drugs lobby will try to put the blame elsewhere. They will be wrong to do so. As it happens, I am rather sorry for Mr Dodgeon, whose pitiable attempt at suicide shows that he has suffered true remorse.

But I am not sorry for the rest of his generation of idiots, who by their own bad example and irresponsibility - and by their unceasing calls for weaker drug laws - are endangering the health and even the lives of today's young.

* * *

I don't normally think of Dame Joan Bakewell as an ally in my campaign to re-moralise Britain. I tend to feel she did her bit to de-moralise it in the Sixties. But I think she should be praised for pointing out what is missing in our country.

She said: 'Religious commitment to charity and kindness has declined. Nobody learns that. They don't learn it in their homes, they don't learn it in their school, it's seen as soft. It's not what you're about.

'You're meant to stand up for your own individual personality, make your way in the world and good luck to you. Kindness, empathy, generosity are all in short supply and people used to learn it from the churches – I learnt it at Sunday school. Where do you learn it now? I don't know.'

Nor do I.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A little glimpse of the Liberal Elite, and some general remarks

Once upon a time I really, really wanted to work for the Financial Times. I thought (as a left-wing Labour supporter, as I then was) that to work on the FT's renowned Labour Staff would be the best possible opportunity to help the socialist cause. And I came quite close to getting aboard – I remember to this day my interview with the then editor, 'Fredy' Fisher (That's not one of my typing errors. He spelt his Christian name like that, though his actual name was Max, and he had done an amazing thing , a Berlin-born,  grammar-school educated German rising to edit a major British newspaper) , in his marvellous office in the handsome old FT headquarters, looking out on to a floodlit St Paul's Cathedral.  I thought I'd acquitted myself reasonably well but I didn't, in the end, get the job.

Who knows what might have happened if I had? It's often said that newspapers work on people just as much as people work on newspapers. On the FT I would have been surrounded by left-wing graduates like me.  I certainly wouldn't have had the extraordinary remedial education in reality I received at the hands of the old Daily Express, which, when I finally made it to Fleet Street to join it in January 1977, was a broadsheet with a daily sale of more than two million, run almost entirely by non-graduates, Fleet Street hard men (many of them Scottish) who had done their time in the provinces and often done gruelling stints in Manchester or Glasgow. Higher up the scale were real veterans of the many small wars of the end of Empire, from Suez to the Congo, men who had been reporters in the days when stories had to be sent by cable.

Why this digression? Well, this morning I went to an awards ceremony. The only real benefit of this was that , as it took place at breakfast time in London, I had to leave my provincial home before dawn and bicycle to the railway station by starlight, and was able to see the silhouette of Windsor Castle outlined against a blazing red sunrise from my Paddington-bound train. If they introduce Berlin Time, I suppose I'll be able to do that almost every day in Winter, and it may grow stale. But once in a while is quite a treat.

I had been shortlisted, as I sometimes am, for an award I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get. But oddly enough, as the ceremony ground on, my hopes rose. Almost every single award went to someone from….the Financial Times (one of these was given by mistake, and had to be re-awarded to its real recipient) . Then a few went to an old left-wing trooper from the New Statesman, and to a selection of Cameroon (or even more leftist than that) figures from 'The Times', a paper which no longer has a single proper conservative writer, as far as I can recall.  The organisers of the breakfast had been so keen that I should come that I began to wonder if in fact I was going to be the figleaf for the occasion, the one 'right-wing' recipient to prove that the whole business wasn't just the Liberal Elite patting itself on the back.

But no.  This rather silly hope was dashed. When the shortlist was read out, the compere made various weak jokes about how 'right-wing' I am (though he had the grace to mention one or two other things about me) and there were the usual patronising titters.  The award went to  some teenage Cameroon who went on and on about Gordon Brown's trousers..

I might as well have stayed in bed, not least because I loathe such events at the best of times, being slightly more misanthropic than Mr Badger in 'The Wind in the Willows' , and shrivel with foreboding at the mention of the word 'networking'.

One thing  struck me about the occasion,  apart from the complete failure to avoid bias, or the appearance of it.  One was the relaxed and unembarrassed use, from the platform in front of a mixed audience, men and women, all ages, of four-letter words.  Some of these were uttered by a prominent BBC reporter, himself a former Financial Times staffer.  I am more and more convinced that the public use of such words (when not being used to get cheap and easy shock laughs,  by 'comedians' and other public performers who can't think of proper jokes) is a demonstration of power. Those who have to listen to them are being told they haven't the power  to object, those who are the direct objects of them are being personally humiliated.

Reflecting on yesterday's posting, there's something very pagan about this development. I did wonder, amid the rather splendid surroundings, what these people would have thought if the people who actually made the occasion work had followed their example. What if  the pretty girls serving their breakfast had responded to a request for more coffee with "**** off and get it yourself, you ****", or the cloakroom assistants had refused to find their coats afterwards, saying "why the **** do you think I should remember where your ****ing coat is, you ****".

I'll tell you how they would have reacted. They would have been righteously furious at being spoken to in that fashion. And it might have gone further than that.

And here's what I would have said if I'd won the award for which I was shortlisted  (the number of awards to FT staff had become a bit of a running gag by then)

'You may not believe this, but I too once almost worked for the FT. Perhaps if I had I too would have learned to use four letter words in public and be wrong about almost every major issue in our recent history . But luckily for me I found my way to the less-respectable end of Fleet Street.'

Cannabis etcetera

A few quick responses to contributors.

'Lenny' comments: 'I'm not sure what 'many silly members of the British liberal establishment' have to do with it, take a look at many discussions on cannabis in your 'Right Minds' section and I'll think you'll find an overwhelming majority are in favour of legalisation, left, right, liberal.'

Well, when major 'conservative' unpopular newspapers, influential among politicians, academics, lawyers, doctors, teachers, police chiefs etc.,  back cannabis decriminalisation (and I am thinking here very much of Sir Simon Jenkins , formerly editor of The Times, and of Frances Cairncross, formerly of the Economist, and the former Cabinet Ministers Peter Lilley and Robert Ainsworth, plus a very silly senior doctor whose name escapes me but who above all ought to know better)  it is not surprising if general opinion shifts a bit. That is what silly members of the British liberal establishment have to do with it. And I think 'silly' is really rather mild. And I call them silly because they're old enough to know better ; old enough to know that the 'harm principle' as set out by John Stuart Mill is not in fact a very good argument ; old enough to know that all crime is, in effect, caused by law – but that is not an argument for getting rid of law; and old enough to know that there is no 'war on drugs' in this country, as they absurdly continue to claim.

Mr Wooderson (does he actually come here to read, or only to write?) maintains a fiction: 'since the Home Offices of successive governments have refused to even consider it.[by which I think he means legalisation of cannabis]  They just continue spouting the same old circular justifications for the 'war on drugs'. Well, that's for the gullible, Mr Wooderson, as I have so often said here, and I only wish he'd pay attention.

People and governments should be judged by their actions, not by their rhetoric. And this government and its predecessors have steadily reduced the penalties for drug possession to such a point that back in February 1994, John O'Connor, a former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad declared that cannabis had been decriminalised 'for some time now'. Mr Wooderson will also have seen (but perhaps not observed) my many postings here about the 'cannabis warning' (the non-penalty which is the usual police response to this ex-crime)  and my recent figures on the real state of the law for users of so-called 'hard drugs'. The British government cannot actually legalise cannabis possession, because of its binding treaty commitments to have laws against it. It is however free to enforce those laws so feebly that they are (as they are) a dead letter.

Given the immense damage that their efforts have already done.  You'll have to search quite hard, these days, for any medium prepared to host- let alone make – the case against legalisation. That's not because it doesn't exist, just because , as in so many other areas, liberals and leftists have seized the commanding heights of media and culture, and are using their power to exclude contrary views. A majority is not an argument doesn't decide a moral question, or even a practical question. There are plenty of examples in 20th and 21st century history of wicked people and bad ideas achieving majorities.

I'd stick to my view on this if I were the last man alive who held my opinion, because I believe my view to be morally and practically right.

Grant Higgins (who so far as I can tell wasn't present in Salford on Tuesday) writes : 'Hitchens lost the debate HAHAHAHAHA well done Peter Reynolds. I would wish you luck in the next debate Mr Hitchens but, let's face it, cannabis should be legal.'

I'd only point out that to lose a vote (by six)  isn't necessarily to lose a debate. As I may have pointed out, the great majority of the audience declared themselves as users of cannabis at the beginning of the debate. I do remember some drug legalisers jeering on this site when this debate was first mentioned (and that was long, long ago, to those who complain that I didn't advertise it) that Mr Reynolds would 'slaughter' me and that I would be foolish to engage with him, etc., etc. Well, I respect Mr Reynolds as a debater, but I don't think it can be said that this took place.

Those who doubt me may turn to the generous and thoughtful comment from Sanj Chowdhary, who doesn't agree with me, but has the grace and sense to disagree in a civilised fashion.

I'd repeat here the point I made to him during our pleasant and affable conversation, that I would be much more interested in the case for medical cannabis,  if its advocates didn't lend their support to campaigns to decriminalise cannabis as a recreational drug. As long as they do that, they are my opponents. The two issues are separate. If cannabis does have any medical applications they are quite unconnected to its use for self-intoxication. And there remains the unpredictable  risk of irreversible mental illness, surely a worrying side-effect for any drug, however good its other results may be.

The tiresome 'Haldane' resurfaces, with another of his thought-free, unresponsive 'makes you fink, dunnit' postings.  Just as Mr 'Bunker' never notices when he is himself debunked, Mr 'Haldane' repeatedly proclaims the virtues of thinking while not troubling to do so himself.  It obviously doesn't make *him* think, as in all his many contributions here, he has never shown any sign at all of noting or responding to anything I have said.  Here he is: 'A few days ago the government's advisers on drugs recommended that heroin use be decriminalised. This is the reconfigured committee that eighteen months ago saw seven of its members resign in protest at the sacking of Prof. David Nutt, who led his committee in recommending the declassification of cannabis. So we now have a new group of advisers recommending further relaxation of criminal penalties. To be consistent, I presume, Mr. Hitchens, that you would want all these experts dismissed - and so on - until we have a body made up of right minded people such as your good self and the former communist postman.'

Mr 'Haldane' and Mr Wooderson should obviously get in touch with each other. Here's poor Mr Wooderson, convinced that the establishment is dead set against decriminalising drugs. And here's Mr 'Haldane', triumphantly pointing out that the establishment has been completely suckered by the legalisation argument (more silly establishment liberals, whose qualifications in their scientific fields do not seem to have armoured them against groupthink conformism, false logic and irresponsibility). If Mr 'Haldane' is right( and he is), Mr Wooderson can't be.

But, as I say, the fact that they all agree doesn't make them right. I don't know who this ex-communist postman is, to whom Mr 'Haldane' refers. But were I Home Secretary, I wouldn't merely sack the lot of them. I'd repeal the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act which set them up, and reinstate the 1965 Dangerous Drugs Act, which a) didn't give cannabis a special 'soft' status, b) punished possession as severely as trafficking and c) punished those who allowed their  premises to be used for consumption of illegal drugs. . Whatever they're expert in , it plainly isn't the urgent task of preserving our civilisation.


Roy Robinson a) mistakes the Christian church *as an organisation* for the Christian ethic among ordinary people. All human organisations (as Christianity states) are controlled by fallen, sinful human beings; and b) he neglects to mention that the churches, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, were severely persecuted by the German Nazis and the Soviet Communist states, can show many examples of courageous resistance to them, warned against their dangers ( see the encyclical ''Mit Brennende Sorge' – can any other body in Germany show any more courageous and well-organised attempt to attack the Hitler regime once it was in power? , or indeed match the incredible courage of Cardinal Archbishop von Galen of Muenster in standing up to extermination policies and to the Gestapo? Many Christians also took appallingrisks across occupied Europe, by sheltering Jews from murder and persecution. The murder and the persecution were, by contrast, the settled and deliberate policies of a secular and anti-Christian government. The courage of that government's opponents may often have failed, but I do wonder how Mr Robinson might have responded to the first whispered threat from the Gestapo, had he been in their power.  The amazing thing is that anyone resisted at all. Among those who did, Christians are to be found in great numbers.

As for the Christian brothers etc.,  no doubt they are rightly open to much criticism, now I think accepted by their successors, and I do not defend or excuse them  – but does Mr Robinson know or care about what happened in the orphanages of Soviet Russia, vigorously defended as a new civilisation by people such as him at the time? Or about the child-snatching policies of the East German state, likewise defended by anti-Christian bien-pensants until its fall. ?  One need only look at the sycophantic rubbish still written about Castro's Cuba by the modern western secular left to see that they are prepared to actively *defend* hell on earth while it is taking place, and to learn nothing from it. Nobody can say that the Christian churches have not learned from their mistakes.

Hitler loved his dogs. I can well believe it. But Hitler didn't *personally* kill his victims. He found others to do that. I wonder if they were kind to animals?

Did I eat any of the Eid meat in Kashgar? No, I ate nothing more than an omelette and some toast all the time I was there, plus one very non-Islamic Chinese meal involving beef and noodles. Not sure why this matters.

'Elaine' inquires(first quoting me) : ' "In Chinese Turkestan but still (just) inhabited by Turkic Muslim Uighurs, it crossed my mind that a man who had slit a sheep's throat would be bound to find it easier to do the same to a human, if it came to it). "
'If this deduction is based on the chosen method of animal slaughter then I wonder if the same deduction would be made of a Jew slaughtering a sheep following the kosher rules, since the two methods are almost identical.'

My answer to this is as follows. Perhaps it could. But here are a couple of points. There is, so far as I know, no modern Jewish equivalent of Eid, though the original Passover must have something like it, and Kosher slaughter is carried out by a minority of professional slaughtermen.  I would however point out that in Kashgar at Eid (known locally as Korban) the slaughter of sheep is not done by professional slaughtermen, but in each home by the male members of the family (all of whom are taught how to do it).

She continues 'If the deduction is based on the assumption that this method is particularly cruel, then I suggest more investigation be done because you would learn that studies actually indicate that this method actually causes less suffering to the animal. In fact that is the whole point.'

No, that is not my argument. I am dealing with the effect on the person, not the effect on the animal (though I am not wholly convinced by the claim that this form of slaughter is less distressing to the sheep. You'd have to ask some sheep). I'm no fan of modern slaughterhouses, but in Kashgar tethered sheep awaiting slaughter could clearly see, hear and smell the fate of their fellows before being killed, and some, especially the big rams purchased by the richer families, put up a fierce fight before dying.

'Elaine' continues : 'But if this deduction is based on the fact that some Muslim terrorists have slit the throats of other humans to terrorize other people, then I would hope you would not be so prejudicial.'

Elaine is extending what I said further than I said it, and then criticising me for what she thinks I might mean. I said what I said. No more, no less. It was based on direct experience and on observation. Whatever it may or may not be, it cannot be called prejudicial.

Saint Joan? Plus, my jolly evening with Mr Cannabis

I must admit to having been a bit rude, from time to time about Dame Joan Bakewell, the former Thinking Man's Crumpet and more recently the official Voice of Older people. Dame Joan has now stood down from this official post (the Voice, I mean, not the Crumpet, which I think she was happy to relinquish many years before). It was her chirpy reminiscences of the relaxed days of the 1960s BBC, when the studios smelt of weed, that particularly annoyed me.

But today I must praise her. In  far-too-little-noticed interview, after the most recent scandal over neglect of the old in hospitals, Dame Joan said the following very interesting thing: 'I think….religious commitment to charity and kindness has declined. Nobody learns that. They don't learn it in their homes, they don't learn it in their school, it's seen as soft. It's not what you're about. You're meant to stand up for your own individual personality, make your way in the world and good luck to you.
'Kindness, empathy, generosity, are all in short supply and people used to learn it from the churches, I learnt it at Sunday school. Where do you learn it now? I don't know.'

No, nor do I. Interestingly enough, the great social commentator Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose work on Victorian virtues (The Demoralisation of Society) is so valuable, also credited Sunday Schools for much of the advance in civilisation which took place in our country during the 19th century.

This is of course slightly slipping round the real issue which is why there were Sunday schools, and what it was they taught. I look forward to a snappy intervention from Mr Embery here, but of course the thing they taught was Christianity. This was not Christianity as an anthropological curiosity, a series of curious rituals practised by our ancestors who had not been enlightened by Darwin, Huxley etc. It was Christianity as truth, a living religion, hot to the touch, capable of inspiring the good and scaring the bad.

Well, I may be mistaken here, but I haven't seen anywhere that Dame Joan has embraced the faith. Please correct me if I am wrong here. But if she hasn't, she (and Mr Embery and others) are left with the problem of what, if anything, can replace it if we wish to encourage kindness in a society increasingly devoted to self-worship and self-satisfaction.

Together with this, I'd like to mention the horrible story from China of the little girl. Yue Yue,  run over twice in a hit-and-run accident in Foshan in southern Canton, and of the extreme reluctance of anyone present to do anything about it.

China, I very much fear, is the model for our own future. Its achievement of prosperity without liberty is grim news for those of us who hoped that prosperity would always be the reward for liberty, so encouraging people in the ways of freedom – which is ultimately based on self-restraint, itself founded on conscience, itself founded on faith.

I would add that what I have seen of the new Chinese prosperity has a horrible empty feel to it, all glitter and no heart, the promise of the advertising man which is always unfulfilled by reality. It is also deeply insecure,  and set amid an unsettling vastness and anonymity. And it will be at a far lower level, in many ways, than the sort of prosperity achieved in this country and the USA in the second half of the 20th century.

My own recent experience suggests that in Britain such an incident would bring people running. But for how much longer will that be true, as the older Christianised generation fades away and the new feral go-getters become more common? 

What was unimaginable twenty years ago is commonplace now, in so many ways. Why should this not also be true in the chillier, more competitive world which we are entering, via this economic crisis?

A small memory of China sticks in my mind, one which made me realise just how far I was from home one autumn Saturday afternoon in the rather lovely tree-shaded French Concession in Shanghai (it's neither French nor a concession, but in the great thundering monster-city of Shanghai it is a refreshing refuge from the vertical modernity and endless rush. The picturesque, pleasing, intimate street was lined with market stalls. As I rambled among them, I saw a mouse. It wasn't one of those worrying filthy, bedraggled mice you see scuttling among the rails in London Underground stations late at night.  It was a clean, healthy-looking little rodent with large pink ears, doing nothing in particular. An English child reared on Beatrix Potter would have thought it sweet. One of the stallholders saw it as soon as I did. It was nowhere near his goods, whatever they were, and doing him no harm. Yet he ran urgently towards it and angrily stamped it to death, not stopping until well after he must have been sure it was.

I thought, and still think, that this small incident did have something to tell me about China as a whole. Unkindness to animals often prefigures unkindness to humans ( I confess that when I witnessed the mass slaughter of sheep for Eid in Kashgar, In Chinese Turkestan but still (just) inhabited by Turkic Muslim Uighurs,  it crossed my mind that a man who had slit a sheep's throat would be bound to find it easier to do the same to a human, if it came to it).

No, I'm not saying that all Chinese people are unkind and ruthless. That would be absurd and in any case I know it to be untrue from personal experience. And it's easier to be kind and generous when you are yourself ( as many of us are)  more comfortable and prosperous than most Chinese people have ever been, or ever will be. But I am saying that a society almost completely bereft of any force which argues for selflessness and kindness will be crueller in general than one which has such a force. And not just crueller. It will be indifferent, when it ought to care, as I think is exemplified in the hospitals where the old are neglected.

The Dope Debate

Regular readers here will be familiar with Mr Peter Reynolds, leader of the Cannabis Law Reform Society, who has tried to take me to the Press Complaints Commission for being rude about Marijuana, and has from time to time turned up at public meetings to heckle me.

Some months ago he challenged me to a debate on cannabis legalisation, and when I accepted, the excellent Salford University Debating Society swiftly stepped in to offer a venue for our titanic battle.

This took place on Tuesday evening, and – though I'll leave it to those who were there (apparently a televised version will find its way on to the web) to give their own impressions,  I would say in general that it was fair, courteous, thoughtful and educational for all involved, and that the audience was intelligently receptive to the arguments of both sides.

I lost the vote (as I usually do, though I did once win the vote on the same broad subject after a tremendously high-octane clash with Howard Marks, of which I fear there is no recording ) but rather more narrowly (the margin was six votes) than anyone had expected.  All of which , I think, goes to show that the case for legalisation is not as clear cut as many silly members of the British liberal establishment think it is.

Harold Wilson Day passes unnoticed again

For me, the 15th October is always a date to be remembered. Not to be recalled with any special pleasure, rather the opposite. But definitely one to be marked. The more I examine the recent history of our country, the more the 15th October 1964 seems to me to be a dividing line between one sort of Britain and another.

For it was on that day that Labour won the 1964 election by an eighth of an inch, and so we entered the age of Harold Wilson, the most underestimated Prime Minister of modern times. By underestimated I don't mean that people are wrong, if they recall him at all, to think of him as a rather shallow chancer without many redeeming qualities. By the standards of his time he was a pretty unscrupulous creature, especially when set against his rival, Alec Douglas-Home, a gentleman if ever there was one.

I once served under a political editor of the Daily Express, in the days when it still sold two million copies a day and had some standing, who was a man of great experience and wisdom and on first-name terms with most of the leading politicians of the day.

'All Prime Ministers go mad', he would say. 'It would be kinder to take them out and shoot them when they retire, like injured horses'. He had two exceptions to this rule. One was Alec Douglas-Home, who remained level-headed and sane till the day he died; and the other was James Callaghan, a premier for whom I find I have more and more time the more I know about him.

Maybe if he had been Home Secretary rather than Roy Jenkins, the great permissive society revolution of 1964-70 would not have happened, or would have been far more restrained. He certainly is the only major Labour politician to have spoken explicitly against the permissive society, while resisting (alas unsuccessfully) the Wootton Report on Cannabis in January 1969. He was also genuinely concerned about the decay of state education, being permanently embittered by his own failure to get to university, entirely because his family were too poor.

For it was Jenkins, in alliance with a  crew of socially and culturally liberal Tories, who revolutionised the country. Incidentally, it was that same cross-party alliance –which has now taken over all three parties – that ditched the laws against pornography and got us into what was then the Common Market. Roy Jenkins is the father not only of the SDP, and of New Labour, but also of the 'modernised' Tory Party which now sits so happily in coalition with Jenkins's own party.

The thing was that the Jenkins revolution happened just as the fabric of the country was changing too. Tower blocks and motorways were being built. Ocean liners were being scrapped. Jet planes were beginning to be common.  Steam engines and railway branch lines were disappearing. Bus-conductors were being abolished. Public phone boxes were being modernised and direct dialling introduced; primary schools were chucking out their stern old rows of desks;  people were starting to buy imported cars in large numbers; colour TV began.  As I look back now on my own childhood, 1964 offers a clear dividing line between one sort of country – in which I had been brought up much as a child might have been brought up in the 1930s , and the utterly transformed place in which I would experience adolescence.

It smelt, felt and looked quite different. And, as I often say, it is my great good fortune to have seen personally the world that existed before, so that nobody can lie to me about it – and also so that I know what was wrong with it, and don't idealise it. I did actually see small boys, the same age as me, diving for big old copper pennies in the mud of Portsmouth Harbour near the Gosport Ferry. And I mean diving, they went head first into the slime and came up coated in it.  What is most striking about this memory is that they looked perfectly happy in their disgusting occupation, and that passers-by, as they chucked their pennies into the mud, thought it all perfectly normal.

Like the whiff of coal-smoke, or the occasional sight of a mainline express steam excursion, or the glowing window of a proper old-fashioned toyshop on a late winter's afternoon, walking up the ramp of the old Gosport Ferry ( as I did quite recently) and hearing the whoop of its hooter can trigger that extraordinary mixture of memories, including the disgusting food we used to eat (or in my case not eat), the unsatisfactory washing arrangements, the brutal dentistry  and the perpetual stink of tobacco, or the gusts perfumed with stale beer that came out of the dark and faintly sinister pubs around Portsmouth Hard ( whatever happened to Brickwood's Brilliant Ales?).

And oddly enough I can remember the dark early morning of 16th October 1964, in a chilly prep-school dormitory on the edge of Dartmoor, when the result of the Wilson election still wasn't clear, and hearing the burble of the radio from one of the masters' rooms, and knowing that something momentous was going on, and being excited by it. I was right to be excited. But I might also have been a bit more worried than I was.

Would it all have happened anyway? Would the Tories, had they won, have wrecked the grammar schools and launched the permissive society? Quite possibly. But then again, quite possibly not, or not as quickly. But the railways would have been ripped up, and the concrete blocks built (that had already begun), and I expect someone would have banned the Portsmouth Mudlarks too. But my life, and a lot of other lives, might have been very different. Labour governments in this country generally *make* radical changes. Tory governments *accept* those changes, but only rarely do they embark on destructive urges of their own. If we had had a Japanese-style permanent rule by one dominant party,  we might be a bit better off. Not much, but a bit.

 

Some Conversation

I'm sticking with Amnesty for a while longer, because it still fulfils an important purpose – the Libya report being an example of that – which nobody else can or will do. Of course I recognise its severe imperfections and actual wrong doing, by my own standard. But I haven't time to mount an internal political challenge to these policies, and I'm not sure that if I did have the time I'd much care to use it that way. The good that they do outweighs the harm. I am free to criticise them while being a member. It is all part of the age-old problem of how one can engage with the world. Either you are too pure to act at all; or you are so involved in the wickedness world that you become part of it. Somewhere between these two poles lies the narrow pathway we ought to tread.

I feel for Mr Doyle in his argument with Mr 'Bunker'. I will refrain from taking sides in their dispute (Mr Doyle does seem to me to be more scientifically informed than most contributors here, but maybe that is because he has not met his match on the evolutionist side. I'm not qualified to say. And, by the way, I'm still waiting for the reply from Mr 'Crosland' to my childlike questions on the subject, submitted to him in August).

But Mr 'Bunker' has an absolutely infuriating style of debate, made all the worse by the self-congratulatory tone of it (and the self-congratulatory character of his pseudonym, fortunately undermined by the demonstrable  fact that if anyone debunks him he doesn't notice it has happened). He simply will not stick to defined terms, and at the slightest whiff of any attempt to pin him down, he will squirt ink into the water like a nervous octopus.  I would say to Mr 'Bunker' that his contributions would be a lot more interesting to other readers, and a lot more educational for him, if he would try to correct these faults. I personally would rather eat a plate of congealed tapioca than engage with him again.

Mr Cunningham asks 'Cannot Peter Hitchens understand the consequences of turning a blind eye to politicians who behave inappropriately in either private life or public life (and the two are always linked in some way). No matter how 'trivial' Mr Hitchens may think Liam Fox's transgressions are, to ignore them, or worse, to actively discourage the press from investigating them, would embolden (some of) our politicians to engage in corruption far worse than anything hinted at in the Dr Fox case.'

Well, yes, Peter Hitchens can, I can't see where I've said I'm against the press in general pursuing these things. I'm just expressing a personal regret that I was diverted by such stuff in the Clinton years. Morality, as I say sometimes, is for me.  My only wider moral purpose is to help create the conditions in which other people can make the right moral choices, or at least aren't pressured to take the wrong ones.  I'm talking about what I think I shouldn't have done, not what other people should or shouldn't do. In fact I can make an argument (and have done) for such exposures. And I am sure there will be people who are happy to pursue them.  Newspaper offices contain many different kinds of people.

On the Clinton matter, people who ought to have been pursuing more serious matters got obsessed with Mr Clinton's trousers. One result of this was that they thought they could destroy a bad liberal Presidency through scandal. And, when they failed, they had prepared no other weapons. They should have been developing a proper conservative alternative, not hoping for a mixture of reheated Reaganism and patriotic waffle to do the trick. Similar, but not identical criticisms should be levelled at the conservative media in Britain during the Blair period, constantly chasing after individual scandal, never grasping what New Labour was really about, and shrivelling in the end into a pathetic and hysterical personal attack on Gordon Brown, who for all this thousand faults, was the man who saved the Pound Sterling, along with the equally maligned Ed Balls.

Mr Cunningham also says on the Fox matter : 'I wonder if Mr Hitchens' lack of interest in exposing the transgressions of Liam Fox has something to do with the fact he (Dr Fox) is on the Right of the Conservative Party and is also strongly sympathetic to the Zionist cause.'

No it doesn't. I don't care who's in the cabinet of a government I despise. And I long for the collapse of the Conservative Party. I suspect Mr Cunningham is new here. Dr Fox's idea of 'right wing' and mine are quite different. I am not, as Dr Fox is, a Thatcherite economic liberal. Indeed, I'm not a Thatcherite at all and have no plans to invite her to my birthday party (this is a joke, by the way. She wouldn't come if I did. Apart from anything else, she knows I once had a beard, and gave me a steely disapproving look when I tried to escape from one of her interminable harangues on board her personal plane back in the 1980s. I thought she'd finished. She had in fact just paused for breath. I half-rose from my cramped seat, bottom in the air as I got ready to be the first out. She glared at me so ferociously I thought my trousers would catch fire, and so I meekly sat down again and endured another half hour).

I hadn't even realised Mr Fox had Zionist sympathies until the recent revelations. And it doesn't make any difference now I do know. The British government definitely doesn't have any such sympathies, whatever any individual minister may think,  and it won't unless and until Israel discovers a lot, and I mean a lot, of oil. Mind you, the recent gas discoveries off Haifa may test that proposition, eventually.

I wish to record my gratitude to Mr Stephenson for doing the spadework and responding devastatingly to silly allegations made against Sir Winston Churchill. I am myself critical of Churchill, as I think anyone has to be in hindsight, but the idea that his mind, tongue and pen were for sale is absurd.

A small piece of good news: Those of you who like to do your own research may be pleased to know that if you put the words 'Millbank Systems' into any good search engine, you will arrive at a wonderful new online version of Hansard, which puts many decades of important debates at your fingertips.

 

A nudge and a wink... what the Left are really saying about Liam Fox

Hypocrisy isn't what it used to be. Once, Christian preachers would thunder about the virtues of marriage and then be discovered canoodling with women who weren't their wives. Everyone would laugh.

Now, pious politically correct persons seek, by innuendo and hint, nudge and wink, to damage a Cabinet Minister by suggesting that he is a secret homosexual. And nobody laughs at the slimy dishonesty of it all.

Everyone pretends to be very concerned about the 'Ministerial Code', and about various boring meetings in hotels which may or may not have been attended by some youth.

They even discover, with feigned horror, that the Ministry of Defence is sometimes approached by people who want to make money by selling weapons. Gosh.

But none of this serious, detailed stuff is the real point of what's really being said. Everyone knows it. Nobody admits it.

Here's what is really happening. The modish Left know deep down that the  public don't agree with them about homosexuality. In private, they themselves may not even believe the noble public statements they so often make.

And so, without ever openly admitting what they are up to, they destroyed a Minister they disliked for allegedly doing something they officially approve of.

I am no friend of Liam Fox. I know nothing about his private life and care less. But I think it is a very dirty business that Left-wing newspapers, which claim to believe that homosexuality is no different from heterosexuality, behave in this way.

It's particularly striking that this came almost immediately after the Prime Minister deliberately teased what is left of the Tory Party by saying he favoured homosexual marriage.

I suspect that Mr Cameron was trying to goad the enfeebled Right wing of his party. If they had reacted, he would have crushed them to show who's boss.

The Left – and Mr Cameron is of the Left – have done this for many years. Moral conservatives have foolishly lumbered into the trap by objecting. And so they have allowed themselves to be smeared as the cruel persecutors of a gentle minority.

But the events of the past week show clearly that the Left, for all their noisy sanctity on the subject, are far from free of prejudice against homosexuals, and quite ready to use such bigotry when it suits them to do so.

Protecting the wrong flock

How typical of the furry Archbishop of Canterbury that he can stand up against the persecution of Christianity in Africa, but isn't aware of it here.

We shall see in time if he did any good by sharing tea and scones with the sinister Robert Mugabe.I doubt it.

But his behaviour is typical of a church which has been so obsessed with the Third World for so long that it has forgotten the country of its birth, where legions of bureaucrats – often aided by soppy vicars – are quietly strangling the Christian faith.

My guess is that there will be a thriving Anglican church in Africa several centuries after Canterbury Cathedral  has been converted into a mosque, and  St Paul's into a museum.

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A worrying film of a worrying book, We Need To Talk About Kevin, is about to open in this country.

It concerns the culprit of a school massacre, and – though the fictional killer is on SSRI 'antidepressant' medication, as almost all such killers are – neither book nor film grasps the significance of this. They minimise it. What a pity.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the alleged culprit of the latest rampage killing, Scott Dekraai of Seal Beach, California, is said to have been suffering from 'Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder', which in the USA is often 'treated' with SSRI pills. He is also said by his ex-wife to be 'a diagnosed bipolar individual who has problems with his own medication and his reaction to same'.

Eight more people are dead, quite possibly at the hands of someone who had been taking 'antidepressants'. Isn't it time the authorities looked into this connection?

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Rock superstars such as 'Sir' Paul McCartney are the new aristocracy.

Normal human beings bow and simper in their presence, their path is cleared through life, and their dull, unoriginal thoughts are treated with respect.

They also exude a tremendous smugness, these vegetarian, animal-loving, charity-supporting types who cram their unfortunate children into state schools to prove that a billion pounds hasn't turned them into conservatives.

But when it comes to basic neighbourly behaviour, they are as yobbish as the over-rated music that made them rich and famous. Council officials had to be called to the McCartney wedding party in London in the small hours of last Monday to get him to turn down the racket.

If he's so nice, why didn't it cross his mind that others have jobs to go to and might need to sleep?
 

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In a prison in 'liberated' Libya, Amnesty International inspectors report having seen instruments of torture and having heard 'whipping and screams' from a cell.

There is also clear evidence of racial bigotry in the savage treatment of non-Arab Africans. So, if we intervened there to 'protect civilians', why aren't we intervening now?
Call off this risky demonstration

Street demonstrations are usually a waste of time at best. But they can also be dangerous or harmful. And I must appeal to any readers I have in Boston in Lincolnshire to stay away from a march against immigration planned to take place there next month. I also appeal to the organisers of the march to call it off. And I'm hoping for sleet, and a strong east wind off the Wash, on that day. Let me explain.

Some weeks ago I described the damage that stupid Government policies have done to Boston, which now has a huge migrant population mainly from Eastern Europe.

I did not blame the migrants, whose enterprise I admire, or those who employed them. I hoped to illustrate the wrongness of our open borders, and of the EU membership that forces us to keep them open. I also wanted to assail the terrible schools, the dim welfare policies and the family breakdown that have left so many British-born young people unemployable.

Some concrete-headed councillor in Boston chose to attack what I had written, and cast doubt on its truth, reasonably angering many Bostonians who knew that what I had said was correct.

But a demonstration in such a place can do no good, and may well cause tension and bring undesirable political chancers to the town. Already, an outfit called 'Unite Against Fascism' (what 'fascism', by the way?) is planning a counter- demonstration on the same day. Just imagine the stupidities that could lead to.

If there is trouble, it will only damage the cause of those who want common sense to prevail in this country again.  Call it off.