Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 324

The sound of whipping and screams is heard in Libya

I confess I had been thinking of having a go at Amnesty, which last week posted on the web (it's still on the Guardian site) an infantile attack on me. I found this pretty galling, as I have been a member of Amnesty for about 30 years and am currently paying them £24 a year in subscriptions. How then is it right for them to use £400 of their funds on such tripe, which isn't even an intelligent argument against the death penalty? Note also the anti-Israel propaganda attached to it.

But this morning they changed my mind, by doing the job they've always been best at – recounting, without fear or favour, the truth about torture and repression.

Their latest report 'Detention Abuses Staining the New Libya' , answers a question I posed in a recent article here. What was the new regime doing to its opponents?

Here's the answer:

'The new authorities in Libya must stamp out arbitrary detention and widespread abuse of detainees, Amnesty International said today (12 October), as it published a new report revealing a pattern of beatings and ill-treatment of captured Gaddafi soldiers, suspected loyalists and alleged mercenaries in western Libya.

'Since late August, armed militia have arrested and detained as many as 2,500 people in Tripoli and al-Zawiya. During late August and September, Amnesty researchers visited 11 detention facilities in and around Tripoli and in al-Zawiyah, and interviewed approximately 300 prisoners.'


'None of those seen by Amnesty had been shown any kind of arrest warrant and many were effectively abducted from their homes by unidentified captors carrying out raids on suspected Gaddafi fighters or loyalists. Detainees were almost always held without legal orders and mostly without the involvement of Libya's General Prosecution authority. They were held by local councils, local military council or armed brigades - far from the oversight of the Ministry of Justice.'

And then : 'Amnesty says there is clear evidence of torture in order to extract confessions or as a punishment. At least two guards - in separate detention facilities - admitted to Amnesty that they beat detainees in order to extract "confessions" more quickly.
In one detention centre Amnesty found a wooden stick and rope, and a rubber hose, of the kind that could be used to beat detainees, including on the soles of their feet - a torture method known as falaqa. In another they heard the sound of whipping and screams from a nearby cell. The organisation said that detainees appear to suffer beatings and torture particularly at the start of their detention, being given a "welcome" on arrival.'

The report notes that children have not been spared, that 'arrested' persons   are sometimes bundled into the boots of cars or shot in the legs, and jeered at by their captors. It also confirms a fear I expressed:  'Sub-Saharan Africans and black Libyans remain particularly vulnerable to arbitrary arrest on account of their skin colour and the belief that al-Gaddafi forces used African mercenaries to fight forces loyal to the NTC. While al-Gaddafi forces used foreign fighters – particularly towards the end of the conflict – the targeting of dark-skinned individuals is based on widely exaggerated claims about mercenaries made early in the conflict by forces opposed to Colonel al-Gaddafi, and fuelled by discriminatory attitudes in Libyan society.'

There are pictures of lacerated backs, accounts of beatings with electric cable, wrists tied by wire, candles lit on prisoners' heads, all the weary normal catalogue of cruelty that one can expect in the prisons of despotisms.

And the scale of this is obviously large.

One can only wonder what has been happening elsewhere, where Amnesty has not penetrated.  Now, if this is the case, it seems to me that a very large part of the righteous justification for the whole event dissolves. Where now all the utterly biased reporting of the conflict as if it was a straightforward combat between good and bad? Where now the justification that we were 'protecting civilians'? I think I must keep asking if there have been massacres as well as mistreatment? How would we know?

By the way, I have recounted instances , during the conflict, in which it was unquestionably the case that NATO bombs killed innocent civilians.

Oh, all right then, I'll write about Liam Fox, well, almost…

I'm generally uninterested in political scandals. They are a substitute for proper politics, which I think are enjoyed by political reporters far more than they are by voters. To this day, I do not understand the Westland Affair which led to the resignation of Michael Heseltine, and I was working at the House of Commons at the time, surrounded by gossip on the subject. I think my brain just glazes over as soon as I hear the words 'Ministerial Code'.

I have tried, for some years now, to point out that the MPs' expenses scandal was wholly selective in its victims. I don't know if all those who had actually committed criminal offences were prosecuted ( I suspect not). But it wasn't what was illegal that mattered. It was what was legal. If you look at the much wider question, of naked greed, lawfully pursued, some MPs were utterly destroyed and others sailed through the storm unruffled and not even damp.

Some of you will recall the account I gave of David Cameron's meeting with his Witney constituents about his expenses claim, here. I still think it astonishing that this event was attended by only three national newspaper journalists (me, Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail and Ann Treneman of 'The Times') given the scale of the story, and the fact that Mr Cameron was widely expected to be our next Prime Minister at the time. No national broadcaster had its own equipment or staff there (Witney is 70 miles from London). I only knew about the meeting because it had been mentioned in the local newspaper, the Oxford Mail and I live just outside Mr Cameron's constituency. I had then mentioned it to Stephen Glover one day in the lift at Associated Newspapers, who also lives in Oxford. At that time I had assumed that it was already widely known in Fleet Street. It wasn't.  I believe Ms Treneman had been alerted at the last minute by her newsdesk, who had been called by a Witney taxpayer to let them know. 

When I tell normal people (i.e. those not obsessed with the news) the story of Mr Cameron's generous (to himself) housing claims, they are amazed by the information. They know about the wisteria and the chimney (giggle, giggle, how trivial and silly!) but they are completely unaware of the scale of his claims for mortgage interest, among the highest made by any Member of Parliament. If the media flock had seized on this and run with it (Millionaire MP gets you to pay his Mortgage Interest' 'Millionaire MP's taxpayer-subsidised country home' etc) I don't think Mr Cameron would now be Prime Minister.

Why didn't this story ever take off? Well, you will have to guess, but regular readers here, and readers of my book 'The Cameron Delusion' will know my views on the flock mentality of the bulk of British political journalists (from this I very much except my excellent colleagues on the Mail on Sunday, who diligently pursue their own stories and are not part of any flock).  Sometimes they bleat wildly and charge around the field like mad. At other times they gaze soulfully at you as they chomp their jaws,  and refuse to get excited. Peter Oborne, another non-flock journalist,  has also written very interestingly about this, and recently accurately described most political journalists as 'courtiers'.

So scandals can be, and are, selective. And the increasingly tight rules applied to MPs and Ministers are designed to treat them as employees (of whom, exactly? This is one of the most interesting questions in our constitution) rather than independent men and women.

It's a cliché to say that Winston Churchill or David Lloyd George could never have survived the sort of scrutiny politicians now face. But it's a cliché because it is true. And people really should work out the implications of that.  Which would we rather – that politicians had faintly dodgy friends who bankrolled them through periods in the wilderness, or that they were meek, pliable employees of the executive who never dared to speak an independent word?

And if they keep their private lives private, and treat their fellow creatures decently and kindly, is it in our interests to destroy them? I've grown increasingly tired of the scandal approach to politics, not least because I've been involved in it in the past.

When I was a reporter in Washington DC, I got marginally involved in the 'Troopergate' affair, in which Bill Clinton was accused by a rather sweet young lady called Paula Jones of, well, pursuing her round a Little Rock hotel room with his underpants off.  I spent a long time on the phone with Miss Jones, much of it almost doubled up with laughter at her entirely believable descriptions of the then Governor of Arkansas in his semi-naked state. I was never after able to watch a State of the Union address in the same way.

My then newspaper was quite interested in this stuff.  My hopes of concentrating entirely on higher things during my Washington DC posting had been shattered when I found myself living in a rather basic motel in the pleasant town of Manassas, Virginia (scene of two major Civil War battles), covering the appallingly explicit trial of Mrs Lorena Bobbitt , who had removed her husband's manhood with a kitchen knife. This event was obviously interesting, though I think a few years ago we would have hesitated to report it.  Newspapers, as I so often say, stay independent by being commercially successful. They have to follow public taste to some extent. Had I been at home, I'd never have reported on any such thing, as the newsdesk would reasonably and rightly have assumed I was the wrong person for such a job,  but a foreign-based reporter has to do everything that turns up (I once found myself pursuing Princess Diana around the District of Columbia too. She was escorted by a car prominently marked with the words 'Secret Service', a thing that has always made me smile).

And sexual scandal – of the type involving Mr Clinton - is interesting, much more interesting than financial scandal, or conflict-of-interest scandal.  But I have since reflected that Bill Clinton may have invaded the, er, privacy of quite a lot of women, some more willing than others – but he never invaded Iraq.  And which is more important?

Likewise, many of Anthony Blair's Cabinet fell to the scythe of scandal – David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson, and others I now forget. But the really scandalous members of that government, Mr Blair and Mr Brown themselves, remained in office throughout.

What about Liam Fox? I'm not a Thatcherite and find his brand of conservatism unappealing and sterile. I think his review of our defences has been mismanaged and wrongly directed, even on the assumption that most of these cuts were really needed. I don't like his taste in birthday-party shirts.  I've had two conversations with him in my life, the latter a couple of weeks ago when he chatted to me about a recent flight he'd had in an RAF Typhoon jet.  I've heard gossip and rumours about him as I have about many politicians, but I wouldn't pass it on because I have no idea if it's true, or just the usual mildly malicious tittle-tattle that requires no evidence and may easily be wholly false.

What's important is the government of the country. Scandal, in which the occasional minister is forced to resign, is a substitute for our lost power to remove a government and replace it with a different one. If we remove a government now, we get the same one with different faces stuck on it.

Tripoli Revisited

There is a certain smugness about the supporters of the Libyan adventure just now. Are they right to feel that way? I of course have an interest to declare, having opposed the intervention on principle, regardless of whether it did good or not.  I did not think, and do not think, that the internal affairs of Libya are any business of the United Kingdom. I do not in any way withdraw from these positions now. I still think they were right, and I will try to explain why.

But, more to the point, I did not think that the backers of our interference knew what they were doing, or why they were doing it. I strongly suspect that France's President Sarkozy was anxious for a foreign policy success to strengthen his feeble political position. And his enthusiasm, dressed up as humanitarianism, infected the British government too.  They then had a machismo contest. Both governments, in my view, were very lucky that things turned out as they did. But their luck doesn't cancel out the strong arguments for non-intervention. Nor does it show that their initial judgement was right.   Anthony Blair was similarly lucky with the short-term outcome of his bravado in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Because he mistook his luck for judgement, he entangled us in the Iraq tragedy, a disaster so serious that it is hardly even mentioned any more. Who knows what future frightfulness David Cameron will get us into, now he's a war hero?

Who now bothers to look at Iraq, and see how it is governed and who is really in charge, and how free it really is, and what the tensions are between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds,  and what sort of future lies ahead for it? It is as if it no longer existed. Yet once it was so important to us that  it was worth a hugely violent and expensive invasion (one of the main reasons for the economic crisis we're now in, by the way) . Mind you, it's also a while since I've seen much of an analysis of Kosovo or Sierra Leone . Afghanistan, another alleged success, is about to be abandoned , a retreat we will conceal by declaring victory. But everyone knows it has been a devastating, wasteful failure.

I have never been convinced by arguments that our actions prevented a massacre in Benghazi, or that this serves as a justification for the whole business. We have no real idea if such a massacre would really have happened if Colonel Gadaffi's troops had taken the city.  I am, I must admit, a bit short of information on what has really happened to Gadaffi supporters since 'our' side took over, though it is plain that sub-Saharan Africans, accused of being Gadaffi mercenaries, have had very rough treatment indeed, which I think can fairly be described as racialist.

In any case, we (the British government and interventionist lobby)  are not that opposed to massacres. Our attitude to the appalling savagery and repression of the regime in Bahrain has been utterly complacent, if not actually supportive. Our posturing over Syria's unmerciful repression of dissent has been simultaneously self-righteous and feeble.

Personally, my criticism of this position is this . We should not pretend to an outrage we cannot or will not express in action. By doing so, we only encourage people to believe that help will come when it won't, and so make it more likely that they will take terrible risks which they would be wiser not to take.

I know that some people find my readiness to stand back, and my open admission that I do not truly care about repression in the Arab world, hard to stomach. I don't like it much myself. TV coverage makes the world's ugliness all too obvious. Knowledge of horror, without the power to stop it, is an awful burden on us.  I hate to see cruelty and brutality, and I love liberty. But when I am moved by witnessing the plight of people far away, I honestly confess to myself that my emotions are just self-indulgence, especially when there are lonely old ladies and other sad persons living within a mile of my home, about whom I do little or nothing. Essentially, I would be acting, if I supported these interventions, to make myself feel better about myself. I would not be acting to do actual, measurable, unselfish good.

But when I say I do not care, I am provocatively contrasting my position with those who say they do care, but take no effective and consistent action to prove it. If they reply, 'We act when we can', as they do, I reply, 'But when you say you "can" you actually mean, when you like, or when it suits you, or when it is easy,  because it would be perfectly physically possible for the British or US governments to take military action anywhere in the Arab world if they really wanted to. The truth is that they are not prepared to pay the price in blood or money or lost influence that would be demanded.'

True chivalry, the thing they pretend to have, does not pay any attention to such considerations. It acts at all costs.

And so, once again, I point out that anomalies and inconsistencies are signposts to the truth. If someone claims to have a principle, and he does not apply it universally, it is not a principle. Nor is it the reason for the action which he says is principled. There must be another reason.

These days, I suspect that reason is mainly personal vanity combined with electoral calculation.

My very longstanding position, that the nation is the largest unit in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish, is in reality kinder and more sensible. It is kinder particularly because it does not encourage people into futile revolts which will then be crushed amid fire and screams. I might add that Syria's regime, which is unlovely and which I have often criticised in the past when it was not fashionable to do so, may yet be preferable to whatever replaces it. Syria, for example, is one of the last countries in the Middle East in which the Christian Arab minority lives without persecution.  That is why it is host to so many Christian refuges from Baghdad, where our war has led to horrible persecution of the remaining Christians in that country. It is unlikely this arrangement would survive the fall of the Assad dynasty.

My secondary position, that the extraordinarily rare and delicate liberties of Protestant Christian Anglospshere nations, founded on centuries of inviolate sovereignty behind broad seas, cannot be transplanted into recently decolonised Muslim semi-desert states, should also be borne in mind.

Everyone knows this really, but rather than admit it, we close our eyes to the unavoidable lawlessness and intolerance of the new regimes we have brought into being, and concentrate on the empty forms of democracy (elections, parliaments etc)  which we make them adopt as the price of our continued benevolence.

What a lot of rubbish all this intervention is. But we repeatedly solve the problem by declaring 'mission accomplished' and then ceasing to pay any attention at all to what is really happening in the newly-liberated paradises whose revolutions we were celebrating the day before yesterday.  Those who rejoiced over the fall of South Africa's apartheid regime have been particularly good at ignoring the faults of what has followed . Apartheid was of course indefensible, but, while the radical interventionists weren't at all responsible for the nasty old arrangements, they will be partly responsible for what follows. And if there is one day a Mugabe-like despotism in Pretoria, which is by no means impossible,  who will do the accounting to say that we have actually done good there? It is beyond me to make the calculation.

There's a thought-proving since at the end of that clever film 'Charlie Wilson's War', in which this aspect of intervention is explored through a parable. The message is that, again and again, what you think is a good outcome turns out to be bad, and vice versa. If you wait long enough, you find out the truth, too late. It seems to me to be far too early to be describing our Libyan intervention as a success. Please forgive me if I continue to argue that we shouldn't have done it.

So, there is a Plan B after all: saving the reckless at the expense of the thrifty

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The gruesome carnival of the party conferences is now over, so I can stop taking my nausea-suppressing pills at last. Do you have any idea how fraudulent these things are?  They are sealed off from the people by police guards and high fences.

The applause is phoney and stage-­managed. Even the arguments are faked.  The vast halls are half-empty, and reached through bazaars of lobbyists for various forms of greed and folly.

The speeches themselves are seldom ­written by the people who obediently deliver them.  There is no real life. All three major ­parties are living corpses, kept walking by transfusions from the taxpayer, dodgy billionaires or trade-union funds.

Meanwhile, the media coverage has mostly degenerated into pathetic partisan bootlicking of the party in power, matched by equally pathetic partisan savaging of the one that is out of power.

No doubt, Edward Miliband made a pretty dreadful speech in Liverpool the week before last. But it was nothing like as bad as the hogwash that gushed and gurgled out of the Prime Minister's smirking mouth on Wednesday.  As an exhortation to slackers and  grumblers in some public-school football

team, it would have been average. As a statement of policy and aims from the Prime Minister of a middling nuclear power, it was pitiful.

Nor did it see fit to mention that the very next day the Bank of England would embark on a desperate plan (for once the word 'desperate' is justified here) to deliberately provoke yet more inflation.

Let me remind you of what one of our greatest economists, Lord Keynes, once wrote about this awful thing: 'Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency.

'By a continuing process of inflation, governments can ­confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.'

This colossal, unfair stealth tax on the prudent, to pay for the folly of the imprudent, is what we are reduced to. This is, as it turns out, Plan B. We have driven the country and  the people deep into debts that can never be paid. So we will shrink the debt by shrinking everyone's money.

So much for the careful, the thrifty, the provident who foolishly thought the Tories were their friends.

Their savings, their pensions, their long years of caution and restraint all shrivel to a handful of change in a surprisingly short time.

This crisis wasn't made yesterday, or even in the Blair-Brown years. It has been in  the making for decades, as sup­posedly Conservative politicians have refused to get the Welfare State under control, refused to release this country from the chains loaded on to  it by the EU, and risked all  on the bubble of the housing market.

Of these people it has been rightly said that: 'They could  not dig, they dared not rob, and so they lied to please the mob.' I hope I live long enough to see it carved on their tombstones.

Thought Police are still feeling collars

Much more should have been made of the amazing treatment of the Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, a thoughtful and distinguished man. Mr Tyrie made the bad mistake of believing that free speech still exists in his party, and criticised the leadership. He was then taken into custody by a pair of Downing Street thought police officers, and soon afterwards emerged with his mind completely changed. Humiliating pictures of this event then found their way to the newspapers. This is how Blairism operated – and still operates.

Knox deserved to go free –  just like 'Lockerbie Bomber'

As it happens, I don't think the Italian state ever came close to proving beyond reasonable doubt that Amanda Knox was guilty of murder.  So, in a general way, I am pleased that she has been freed.

But compare the frenzy of interest over this rather unimportant case with the strange silence over the equally dubious – but far more important – conviction of the so-called Lockerbie Bomber, the Libyan Abdelbaset Al Megrahi.

One of the key witnesses against him has since admitted to lying in court.

Another, described by a  senior judge as 'an apple short of a picnic', shockingly received a $2 million (£1.28 million) reward after giving evidence that many experts regard as highly dubious.

I suspect Megrahi's release had more to do with the fear of a  final, successful appeal revealing inconvenient facts than it did with ­ British oil interests. If the US had wanted to stop him being freed, they could have. After all, they made us surrender to the IRA.

** DOES Richard Dawkins exist? The noted foe of religion seems set to be absent (despite many requests that he take part) from a planned debate   with William Lane Craig, a leading American Christian philosopher (a number of other anti-God blowhards have also declined to debate with Craig).

To tease Professor Dawkins out of his Oxford lair, organisers of Craig's tour plan to put advertisements on the city's buses next week proclaiming 'There's probably no Dawkins.' In the age of BCE and CE, it's nice to see the other side hitting back.

** IN the supposed 'Catgate' row between Theresa May and Kenneth Clarke, who won? I don't know, but I know who lost. We lost. This country is still subject to the European Convention on Human Rights, and to the views of judges on how it is to be interpreted.

Plenty of people who should never have been here in the first place will continue to be allowed by the courts to stay, even if they behave very badly.

But a lot of voters have been given the entirely fake impression that Mrs May is going to do something significant about this. I very much doubt it. I advise you to check on progress a year from now.

** MEET the new young MPs of the Labour Party and the Tory Party and you would  find it very hard to tell the difference between them, if they weren't actually wearing badges.

They're not very interested in politics, though they know what views to adopt to get them up the ladder of ambition most quickly. They certainly have far more in common with each other than they do with a normal British person of any class.

Searching for any differences between the Labour and Tory parties this autumn, I can come up with only one. I don't think Labour would have dared to devastate our Armed Forces with the disastrous and irreparable cuts visited on them by Mr Cameron.

** IF I have to read another word of praise for the magazine Private Eye on its 50th anniversary, I think I shall feel ill. It was, long ago, part of the cultural revolution that turned Britain into what it now is. These days it is   a smug and very profitable organ of the new establishment, made all the worse by a pretence that it is still brave and dangerous.

We Need to Talk About 'Antidepressants'

If you don't want the plot of this month's most fashionable film release (the week after next, I think) spoiled, don't read another word.  If you've read the book, then please be indulgent to me, as I haven't. Those who have read the book 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' are ahead of me here.  Whatever this article will be, it cannot discuss how faithful the new film ( dominated by the stark features of Tilda Swinton) is to the book of the same name.

In fact I will be most grateful for the thoughts of those who know the book well, if they wish to tell me that the novel deals in a different way with the central subject I wish to address below.

For those who have neither read the book (by Lionel Shriver, the only female Lionel I've ever come across) nor seen the film, it is about the perpetrator of a High School massacre in a fictional American town.

The killer-to-be, the Kevin of the title, is followed through childhood and early adolescence, as he grows more and more sinister and unappealing. Then he kills a lot of people, and is locked up, leaving his mother living a besieged and burned-out life, wondering if it was all her fault. I'm a bit baffled by the way the parents of Kevin's victims persecute her. Is there any evidence that people do this in real life? I should have thought a sort of shattered pity would be more likely than a relentless, vengeful hate.

Not since that brilliantly menacing film 'The Omen' have I seen any child portrayed with such malevolence as is the young Kevin. I do hope the child involved banks his cheque and stops acting now. Playing that role again will surely be bad for him.

Kevin is every mother's nightmare. The book has been described as a long propaganda treatise against giving birth at all.  The one genuinely funny scene in the film shows his sleep-starved mother, haggard and utterly exhausted by the baby Kevin's incessant screaming,  deliberately parking baby and pram next to a pneumatic drill at full volume, presumably so she can't hear the screaming any more. Yet faintly, through the roar and rattle of the drill, Kevin's lusty yells can still be heard. Nothing will stop him. Nothing short of nuclear war can drown him out.

Many parents who have experienced such things will see this as an exaggerated portrayal of the problems of babies who won't sleep and like to scream. Others, whose babies slept sweetly, will not.

Later Kevin spitefully vandalises his mother's beautifully-decorated study, and wages a long, revolting war over what may be delicately described as potty training.

He finally gives in on this matter,  after his mother, moved to rage by his behaviour, lashes out and accidentally breaks Kevin's arm, also scarring him.

This is a very odd moment. The hospital never suspects that the break is anything other than the accident Kevin convincingly tells them it was. He subsequently blackmails his mother at every turn by simply pointing to the scar. Yet the violence changes his behaviour. From then on, he goes to the lavatory in a normal way. This isn't quite consistent, in my view. It may also be an unintentional argument for old-fashioned smacking, that unspeakable sin.

There are various other clashes, including a very nasty set of scenes involving his little sister (realising what was bound to happen next, I squeamishly left the cinema for five minutes during one of these. Those who remained told me that it wasn't as bad as I had feared, but I'm still not sorry)

In the film, we see remarkably little of Kevin's more general childhood. What is his school like? Is he disruptive there?  Is he packed off to nursery at an early age? Is he sat in front of the TV all the time? Does he play computer games a lot? (he's seen doing so once, with his half-witted father, who never seems to grasp how monstrous his son is). At one stage (and this will be important later) he's shown willingly and indeed enthusiastically allowing himself to be read a rather archaic and wordy version of the Robin Hood story, behaviour that doesn't fit at all with the rest of his character.

I ask these questions about his upbringing because – trespassing on an old controversy -  the fictional Kevin strikes me as exactly the sort of child who would be 'diagnosed' with the fictional complaint 'ADHD' or even the five-star version 'ODD' and then dosed into compliance by American or British doctors with methylphenidate or dextroamphetamine, the powerful mind-altering drugs used on either side of the Atlantic to 'treat' this alleged condition , for whose existence there is no objective evidence (see index under 'ADHD') .

There's no mention of any such 'diagnosis' in the film. And in the one scene that addresses the subject, it's left unclear whether Kevin (who is 15 when he commits his crime) has been taking illegal drugs in his early teens. I'd guess from the scene that we are supposed to think that he has been, but the makers of the film don't think it that important. I glanced at the book to see what it said about the subject and it appeared to suggest that Kevin's parents had been pretty relaxed about illegal drugs themselves.

However, we are left in no doubt that Kevin has been taking SSRI 'antidepressants' - though we do not learn this (as I'll explain) until he is in custody after his crime.

During a visiting-time conversation with his mother, she suggests, and isn't contradicted by him, that he has made cynical use of this fact, in his trial, to plead diminished responsibility. We also learn that his mother regards this as a smokescreen for the boy's wickedness.

He is said to have come up with the correlation between SSRI drugs and rampage killings, in conversations with his defence attorney, and to have had all the case histories at his fingertips. This suggests that this pre-cooked excuse might even have been part of his plan for the massacre. The whole implication of this is that it has nothing to do with his crime, which has its origins in his character – which has its origins, perhaps, in his parents or their way of life. It is not for a moment suggested that he might have been impelled from mere nastiness into mass homicide by taking mind-altering drugs. That, of all things, is more or less ruled out.

I've mentioned here before (see index) the extraordinary correlation between such killings and SSRI 'antidepressants'. (Yes, I know correlation isn't causation. That is precisely why I call repeatedly for a proper investigation into the apparent link). I've also mentioned the growing doubts (see index, under 'antidepressants')  among doctors about the nature and real effect of these drugs, notably the powerful articles by Dr Marcia Angell, of the Harvard Medical School, recently published in the New York Review of Books.

It seems to be to be a great shame that this film lightly dismisses Kevin's acknowledged use of SSRI drugs as no more than a cheap defence attorney's get-out. Once again, is there any evidence that this has ever happened?  There seems to me to be more evidence the other way. Whatever other feelings I may have about this sombre, gruelling but potent film, this seems to me to be its greatest fault.  

Still Useless After All These Years – the Tory Party's amazing survival

A reader scolded me last week for bothering with the party conferences. Why, I was asked, did I waste my time at these empty events with these empty people?

Well, I have an excuse. For me these occasions are a little like a period of truce, or one of those diplomatic quirks which allow one to venture for a few hours into hostile territory. Under a sort of Safe Conduct provided by my valued colleagues on our political staff , I can meet and assess politicians who would almost certainly never consent to speak to me if I approached them individually.

I will admit that these days I seldom enter the conference hall itself, and when I do I seldom linger for long. My memory still echoes with the raucous but genuine debates that used to rend the air of Brighton and Blackpool when the Labour Party was still a real party, rather than an election machine for metropolitan trendies.

Even Tory conferences had their moments. They were always so tightly controlled that we would joke that they were like the Supreme Soviet of the USSR ( later I was to attend this body, and it was rather more lively than any British party conference of today).  I came years too late to witness the great thrashing administered by Tory stewards to the Empire Loyalists (described in my 'Cameron Delusion' ) who still believed publicly in policies quite recently supported (in private) by the then  yet-living Winston Churchill. But you could often feel the tension between the assumptions of the urbane, socially liberal platform and the raw, lower-middle-class patriotism that came in waves from the floor, and which would be assuaged, year by year, by empty 'law and order' and 'strong defence' speeches from front benchers given the task of at least appearing to be conservative.

I myself once presented Kenneth Clarke with a Labour Party membership application form, in an unsuccessful publicity stunt after he had made one of his wilder pro-EU speeches.

Watching Mrs Thatcher coping with the disaster of the Cecil Parkinson scandal  was quite instructive, in a Blackpool swept by enormous autumn rainstorms and overhung with black skies.  Likewise the pitiful last days of Iain Duncan Smith, whose slow-motion assassination by his own party and the media was one of the most ruthless things I've ever seen. And then there was the tory conference where Ann Widdecombe tried to set out an effective anti-drugs policy, and was immediately torpedoed in the bars of Bournemouth by the drug confessions of her front-bench colleagues.

There was a period, from about 1980 till about 2005, when both major parties were undergoing revolutions, reveolutions in which their traditional supporters were told to get lost, and in which they were taken over by machine operators and political professionals, smooth, merciless and utterly uninterested in open debate.

Now that's over, the 'debates' are as exciting as a convention of tractor salesmen in Omaha , Nebraska, and perhaps less so. Even the fringe meetings, once a chance for dissenting thought to express itself, are now patrolled by the whips, and other sneaks and talebearers, , intent on ensuring that nobody does anything out of turn.

It was at one such meeting, organised by the Bruges Group, in Manchester two years ago, that I warned a stony-faced audience of 'right-wingers' that David Cameron would betray them utterly, and that the Tory Party didn't merit their support. Some of those there who gave me the cold shoulder that afternoon have since written to me,  to say how right I was, and I'm grateful. But the delusion persists, that Mr Cameron has some sort of secret 'right-wing' agenda, which he is waiting to unleash if only Nick Clegg would let him, or if only he could get an outright majority.

There is no evidence whatsoever of this supposed plan, and plenty of evidence that Mr Cameron would have governed like this with a majority. But the utter feebleness of the Tory 'right', whom I have many times compared to those loyal black Labradors who totter trustingly into the master's car, as they are taken to the vet to be put down, ensures that it isn't tested.

Indeed when, as I have predicted, the coalition stages its split in 2014, there will be a series of empty gestures to the 'right', to reinforce this impression.  A few appointments of 'right-wing' MPs to junior ministerial posts for the fag-end of the government; a few doomed pieces of 'right-wing' legislation, destined to fail noisily as the Liberal Democrats vote them down (they will also benefit from this panto,  by appearing to regain their left-wing credentials). The 'right' will be taken in by them because they want to be. The alternative, a claws and teeth fight against the intolerant and spiteful liberal leadership of their party, doesn't appeal. It's not in their nature.  Is the same true of Tory voters?  I do hope not. The Tory Party, despite is recent acquisition of lots of unappealing millionaire supporters, is organisationally decrepit and close to extinction. It only needs a bad defeat to bring it all tumbling down. And then those who want a conservative, patriotic government will have to recognise, in many cases for the first time, that they are friendless at Westminster and must build a proper party to speak for them if they want to be heard .

A couple of other points:

1.I plan to write at some length about the forthcoming film 'We Need to talk About Kevin', quite soon. I've seen a preview.

2. And I should say to the person posting as 'Vegetarian' that free speech demands responsibility and respect for truth on the part of the speaker. It is not a licence to spread, er, mistaken information.  This person posted 'I don't think he [Jesus Christ] would have sat like Hitchens while a man was electrocuted, boasted in a book about how he "smelt the human flesh burning", and then gone back for more. ('He liked it so much he bought the company!').'

Well, I can't argue with 'Vegetarian' about Christ's attitude under such circumstances. We can only speculate. But as for the occasion to which I think he must be referring, this is presumably the execution in April 1995 of Nicholas Lee Ingram in a prison in Jackson,  Georgia,  for the particularly vicious and cruel murder of J.C. Sawyer,  many years earlier. Ingram *did* boast, during the crime,  that he liked to torture people, and was as good as his word. This didn't stop various persons from campaigning for his reprieve, though they must have known he was guilty. There was eyewitness evidence against him from Mrs Mary Sawyer, who had feigned death after he shot her too. He had tied them both to the same tree.  I am not sure how  I can be said to have 'boasted' about this execution, though I have described it in print more than once, believing it to be part of my job as a reporter.

And so it is. Many US reporters regularly attend such events, and two of them were more than willing to pass the task to me when I asked them. As a British reporter working in the USA, I considered it my job to describe that country as it is, and to experience things that I could only experience there.

George Orwell also witnessed an execution, about which he wrote very memorably. So did Charles Dickens, and (I think) Emile Zola as well as Arnold Bennett, who graphically described a public guillotining in 'The Old Wives' Tale'.  Many other reporters have done so. Perhaps it is all right to witness an execution if you disapprove, but not all right if you approve. I cannot say. The experience is chastening whatever you think, as I have written.  I certainly dispute having written about how I 'smelt the human flesh burning'. I in fact recorded that no such thing took place, having had it many times suggested to me that it did.  My account of the event, I like to hope, conveys some of the solemn, fearful dreadfulness of the occasion, even in the absence of such horrors.

As for 'going back for more'  I have not subsequently attended an execution and do not intend to do so again.  I had, however, attended an execution by lethal injection, of Larry Anderson , in Huntsville Texas, about a year before the Ingram case. Anderson had abducted and murdered Zelda Webster, stabbing her 15 times before dumping her body by the roadside. He was arrested while still spattered with her blood, and still carrying the knife. He said he was bloodstained because he had been 'skinning rabbits' but eventually told police where Zelda Webster's body could be found.

I have also described his execution. But I do not believe I have 'boasted ' about it.

This is why I object to what I regard as the insinuation and  inaccuracy of the post by 'Vegetarian'. I've told him or her that he or she must either substantiate the assertion made ( I do not think it can be substantiated, but I must provide the opportunity). If not, he or she must withdraw and apologise unreservedly.  'Vegetarian' has replied with a rather petulant outburst (this is all on the 'What Labour Won't Do' thread). Well, this is my standard response to allegations of this kind.  If he or she neither substantiates nor withdraws and apologises unreservedly, then he or she will no longer be welcome here.  I don't believe this is an attack on freedom of speech. I think it is perfectly proper chairmanship.

PETER HITCHENS: Caring for our sick relatives IS 'someone else's responsibility', nurse... it's yours

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Here we go, full speed ahead into the Third World. In the poor countries of Africa and Asia, people move into the bare, harsh hospitals where their sick relatives are being treated, bringing food and clean sheets and taking on much of their care. If they don't, those relatives will die of neglect.

Now Dr Peter Carter, the General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, wants us to start down the same path.

He thinks we have somehow 'sleepwalked' into thinking that taking an elderly relative to the lavatory, while he or she is in hospital, is 'someone else's responsibility'.

From now on, it's going to be up to us. 'The services need to gear themselves up to make people aware, "You are very welcome to come in and look after mum, dad, husband, wife, etc." '

I like that 'very welcome'. What if we don't welcome this arrangement ourselves? Will we then find 'mum, dad, husband, wife, etc' lying moaning in a pool of urine, afflicted with bedsores and unfed when we finally get away from work and struggle our way to the hos¬pital through the jammed streets and the predatory, expensive car park? I suspect so.

Sleepwalked? Someone else's responsibility? The gulf between this character and the rest of us is too wide to bridge. Hospitals in civilised countries exist precisely because the care of the sick is a specialised activity.

People go to hospitals because they are too ill to look after themselves, and because their own close families lack the skills to do the job.
Gigantic sums of money are spent on building, staffing and equipping these places. Yet they cannot do the most basic tasks any more.

It is not because of lack of money. All these billions cannot replace the conscientious Christian spirit of selfless service that once motivated the nursing profession, and which has now been replaced by smarmy platitudes and meaningless degrees.

In the hospitals of our liberated, non-judgmental, equality-and-diversity Brave New World, the most basic tasks are not done, or are done badly. People are beginning to dread going to them.

This is where we are, and where we are going. No wonder that the 'right' to be put down like a sick pet is becoming a popular cause. If the country plans to commit deliberate suicide, then it's not surprising if many of its inhabitants feel they might as well join in.


You should have thrown cabbages, Ed, not shaken his hand

I've never understood why we should be keen on young people getting involved in politics, itself a form of mental illness.
Since they've never earned a living, paid tax or been parents, they are generally insufferable self-righteous 'idealists', full of fancies about how to spend other people's money.

They should be booed off the stage with old cabbages and howls of 'Why aren't you at school?', not indulged and fawned over by party leaders.

It's for their own good. After all, look what happened to William Hague.

In any case, what was so great about Labour's new child star, Rory Weal? His whingeing delivery and urgent finger-jabbing looked and sounded as if he had attended the Ken Livingstone School of Speech and Drama.

And what drama it was. The poor mite, formerly dwelling in opulent luxury, has been forced to live in a four-bedroom semi and attend a grammar school. He disapproves of them, of course, but not enough to commute to one of his beloved comprehensives. Truly, it would take Charles Dickens to do full justice to this tragedy of our times.

I am not sure quite how he owes his salvation from poverty to the Welfare State, but even if he does, that Welfare State has been lavishly supported by all major parties since the Thirties, and has never been the sole property of Labour.

He doesn't know what he is talking about, and he proclaims it like a trainee commissar. Come back in

40 years, Rory. Then you might have something interesting to say.


Squalid Britain, seen from a corner shop

Anyone fooled by the brief flurry of 'toughness' after the so-called riots should study the following case, which could be anywhere in Britain. I won't say precisely where, as it might make things even worse for the victim.

The owner of a small corner off-licence (let us call him Frank) is 60. He works 15 hours a day, every day. He had a major heart attack two years ago and is waiting for knee replacements. The shop is also his home.
When he opened it 23 years ago, the neighbourhood was res¬pectable. Now it has fallen under the shadow of our moral decline (the one I am always told I am panicking about). Bit by bit, the consequences of our mad school and social policies, and our unhinged subsidies for fatherless households, have borne their grim fruit.

Frank says: 'One house, near my home, has 11 feral children, nearly all from different fathers. Most are barred from school and they run riot by day and by night. I have had to ban them from my shop because of the thieving and abuse.

'My shop windows have been broken three times. My van – vital to my business – has also been attacked. Its wing mirrors have been torn off twice, it has been scratched deliberately
50 times and has bodywork dents from kicks and punches. The cost of fixing this damage – the van is leased – will bankrupt me.'

So Frank called the police. You would, wouldn't you? They have proved most reluctant to act, fobbing him off with the 'What do you expect us to do?' attitude that has become infuriatingly familiar to so many ¬victims of this cruel anarchy.

One defeatist officer has actually told Frank that he doesn't understand why he doesn't pack up and move. His persecutors know this and have said to him: 'We can do anything we like and you can't do anything about it.'

As I read Frank's graphic, terse letter, I suddenly noticed these words: 'Such has been my despair, I sank to the level of trying to end it all last week – but I failed.'

Since then the police have finally acted for justice, order and the rights of the free British subject to live unmolested in his home.

They have threatened Frank with prosecution. Why? Because when one of his tormentors called him a 'fat faggot', he put his arm across the teenage monster's chest. That's all. I feel a moral panic coming on.

*************
What would you call a society that made adoption incredibly hard and abortion incredibly easy? I'd call it sick at heart.

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

Bombs and Morals

Slipping out of the Labour conference for a break from politicians, I tried to look at some of the less obvious parts of Liverpool – not the sparkling new waterside developments or the majestic, endlessly astonishing Anglican Cathedral, but the bits in between.

It is obviously still a city in some difficulty. A favourite café, which used to serve a rather good breakfast, has closed for good. Even in the renovated centre there are streets of shuttered shops, or downmarket pubs once grand, now melancholy. There are also traces – not obvious at first glance – of the terrible bombing which Germany perpetrated here in the Second World War.

I believe that about 2,600 non-combatants died in this homicidal, criminal fury, deliberately aimed at civilian morale. But to this day it is not as well-known as it should be because strict censorship kept it hidden from the rest of the country and the world, whereas the London Blitz was impossible to hide and was instead turned into a propaganda victory of sorts, one which still succeeds, though the extent of its misery, fear and horror is beginning to become clear.

My mother, who spent her teens in Liverpool, did speak of the bombing once or twice, but only in that 'Oh, we just managed. If it had your number on it, then that was it. If not, then you got on with your life and enjoyed what you could' way. This was the defiant response to mortal terror of many of those who were young and unattached in those days. I rather admire this jaunty view, compared with our solemn self-congratulation over how calm we stayed when terrorist bombs went off in London a few years ago. Actually the authorities came close to panic, and we now know that the emergency services, penetrated by the fear of lawsuits and the absurd caution which accompanies political correctness and the culture of rights, in many cases failed to respond as well as they should have done.

But I am not sure that anyone with children or the responsibility for a family could have been quite so jaunty about bombs. as soon as you have anyone else to care for, this doesn't work.  Also, the young think they are immortal, and proof against injury. When I was young, I lacked the imagination or the  knowledge  to work out what it must have been like to be in a city subjected to repeated night bombing. Until I managed to injure myself in a motorbike crash soon before my 18th birthday, I believed that wars and injuries happened only to others.

Oddly enough, one of the most telling descriptions of aerial bombing from the receiving end is entirely fictional and was written before the bombing even began. It is Nevil Shute's 1938 novel,  'What Happened to the Corbetts' (published in the USA under another title that I can't recall) . This dwells on the dislocation , squalor and selfishness that follow bombing of advanced civilisations, as well as on the devastation caused by bombs in the happy, ordered homes of normal people, and the almost casual death they bring to previously happy, safe people. Len Deighton's 'Bomber' is also helpful in understanding such things.

Anyway, in the course of getting deliberately lost in central Liverpool, I found myself looking at a series of window displays , near the shell of a bombed out church. These were, I think, in an abandoned department store, and provided many distressing pictures of the dispiriting destruction of decades of human endeavour by aerial bombing. The scenes were of parts of the city that are still quite recognisable, and – as so often in bombed places – fill the heart with grief that so much carefully ordered beauty was lost, as well as so many lives. How often local authorities failed to restore what was destroyed, but instead just filled in the empty space with replacements not nearly as good. Some even took advantage of the wreck to destroy old buildings that could have been saved. Coventry, until 1940 a miraculously preserved English city, as lovely as anything in Europe, was the victim of this sort of opportunism. Only in tiny corners of it can you see the lingering traces of lost beauty.

As well as these pictures, there was a revelation which was somehow more striking than the destruction itself.  We are inclined to forget the gloomy practical details of war. And here was one. What was to be done with the rubble?

In Berlin, they piled it up into miniature mountains, the only high ground in the city. In Liverpool, they carted it to the coast to bolster the sea defences against tidal erosion. On certain beaches, you can find yourself walking on smashed pillars, pediments, broken sculptures, doorsteps and other recognisable fragments of the buildings blown to pieces by German high explosive 70 years ago. They are all washed clean by the sea now, but I should not care to swim or picnic anywhere near them. These are smashed lives and hopes beneath your feet.

There were also descriptions of orphaned children weeping on top of the piles of bricks that had been their homes (one who saw this said he hoped that he might be able to forget this, above all the other terrible sights he saw in those times). There is much more, understated as you might expect from the England of seven decades ago, but scorching the heart all the same. How angry it still makes me that anyone could have considered it right or just to do this to the modest homes of the powerless.

Some way away from this memorial, in the waterfront churchyard of Our Lady and St Nicholas, there is another poignant and disturbing monument to those black, cold, frightening times - 'The Spirit of the Blitz', a sculpture by Tom Murphy.

I am not sure I like it as a work of art. But it delivers a great punch to the mental solar plexus. A young mother, with an infant in one of her arms, is following her small son up a spiral staircase. Her other arm is flung out, as if to try to call or pull him back. He, oblivious to the irony, is playing with a toy aeroplane. I think it is meant to express above all the howling, inconsolable pain of a parent who has lost a child (Rudyard Kipling expresses something similar in a verse in the 'Just So' stories about how his lost daughter has run ahead of him in the woods, 'too far ahead to call to him'. When the true meaning becomes clear, it strikes you as hard as a ten foot freak wave on a quiet beach).  The father, of course, is absent at the war, not even able to be sure that his family and home are safe, as would have been the case in almost all previous wars.

Now, some of you will know what is coming next, and some of you won't. But I said, a few lines above, these words : 'How angry it still makes me that anyone could have considered it right or just to do this to the modest homes of the powerless.'

And it does. And I absolutely cannot see how I can feel that about Liverpool and not also feel the same about the cities of Germany and Japan. Plenty of people have come up with 'strategic' justifications of this filthy and unChristian method of warfare, which they would reject in an instant as the casuistry they are, were they used to justify or excuse similar obliteration of Britain. Liverpool's destruction, though appalling, was as nothing compared to the fate of its German equivalent, Hamburg – see A.C. Grayling's 'Among the Dead Cities' for the German casualty figures. And Hamburg was one of many. 

Others will say of the Germans (or the Japanese) that they somehow deserved to be baked alive, suffocated, disembowelled, slowly incinerated in front of their families, shorn of their limbs and so forth , because they had 'supported' the awful regimes which had led them to war. This has always seemed to me to lack historical knowledge or understanding. Many in both countries disliked, even hated,  their governments. the working class areas of Germany which endured most of the bombing were the strongholds of the Social Democrats who offered the last principled opposition to the national Socialists until they were savagely destroyed and suppressed as a party.

 

They were compelled by terror to be silent. Would the makers of this excuse, that they deserved to be bombed,  be prepared to furnish us with a guarantee that under the same circumstances they would have spoken out? 

And what about the German children, so many of whom died in ways too distressing to describe? Was Hitler their fault? Our country will not have grown up properly until it can admit that this form of warfare was wrong. I am all in favour of commemorating the aircrews who went out into that war. It was not their idea. They believed the assurances of their political leaders and commanders that the task was necessary. Their bravery is unimpeachable. They faced a horrific death themselves if shot down. Nor was such a death unlikely. The casualty levels tolerated by the unlovely Sir Arthur Harris (known to his men as 'Butcher', not 'Bomber')  were comparable to Earl Haig's profligate expenditure of other people's sons, fathers, husbands and brothers on the Somme in an earlier war. It is the men in charge who must be criticised, and ought to be.  

Please Use The Index - plus The Long, Odd Silence of 'Wesley Crosland'

I'm sorry that I haven't been able to do much cut and thrust here lately.  I have been spending quite a lot of time attending the party conferences (not yet over) and nearly as much time reaching them via Britain's endlessly torn-up rail network with its 'engineering improvement work' that leaves the trains slower and more unreliable than before, its fragmentation and its padded timetables, which cause travellers to spend long minutes sitting at stations for no other reason that the rail operators aren't willing to risk being late, and being fined.

Once these are over I plan to return to responding in some detail to those comments which merit it (some just don't – and may I ask some contributors, who manage to comment perhaps five or six times a day, generally saying very little, and that incoherent and ill-spelled, to restrain themselves a bit, or I shall have to consider a daily maximum number of comments from anyone person to avoid it? Such things bore and repel other readers, and they bore and repel me too. The British Boring Board of Control has been in touch, and I do so prefer self-regulation).

I'll only take this opportunity to point out that 'Wesley Crosland' has still failed to reply to the personal letter I sent him on 1st August (about which he went public, jeering that the questions in it were childlike in their simplicity). The letter concerned his belief that everyone who doesn't accept the vague speculations of the evolutionists about the distant past as unchallengeable fact is obviously stupid and ignorant. Before anyone tries to bracket me as an 'ist' or a 'phobe' or a 'denier' or some other sort of outcast in our supposedly tolerant society, I should say that in the letter I merely asked him to justify and explain certain statements he had made, in his usual confident manner, on this subject. I myself, as I often have cause to say, have no idea of the truth of the matter, believing we have insufficient data on which to theorise.

In the subsequent two months, despite the allegedly childlike simplicity of these questions, Mr 'Crosland' has not found time to answer, though he has found plenty of time to sneer loftily and rather repetitively at evolution sceptics with extraordinary frequency. He has generally done this without any real pretext,  on threads where this subject has little or no relevance to the matter under discussion.

The childishly simple phrases 'All mouth and no trousers' or 'Big hat, no cattle' spring to my mind.

 

In the meantime, may I make a plea, especially to new readers who come here, as it were, in the midst of many long-running debates

This blog is unique, as far as I know, in having a full index of topics discussed, going back to its very beginning in February 2006.  Perhaps that is why people don't expect it to be there, and so don't use it as much as they might. I spent many laborious weeks compiling this, and the subjects are helpfully listed on the right hand side of the page. New readers wishing to know my view of the Tories, or my advice on voting or on UKIP, or on grammar schools, or the Iraq War (for example) may look them up here. I acknowledge that there are inevitable imperfections, but it is still a very useful archive.

In many cases they may also be able to look up reports I have sent from various countries around the world. Also available are the subsequent discussions I have had with readers. I am willing to answer questions about such things, but only after readers have searched the index.

 

 

 

 

 

What Labour won't do, and ought to do

It's impossible to believe it now, but many members of the Labour cabinet voted to retain the death penalty when there was an attempt to abolish it in 1948.  Good for them. They were being true to their voters, and protecting them from harm. That was when Labour was still a working class British party, and had yet to be taken over by modish cultural revolutionaries.  Even as late as 1970, all the working class members of the Wilson Cabinet voted against the effective decriminalisation of cannabis that would end up as the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. It was a close vote. A pity they lost.

Richard Crossman noted this in his diaries, as the only occasion when the 1964-70 cabinet split entirely along class lines, with the working class members of course being the social conservatives, and the Oxbridge snobs the let-it-all-hang-out liberals. There had been other moments, during the Roy Jenkins/Tony Crosland cultural revolution, when working class ministers objected, but these were almost all  dressed up as 'Private Members' Bills', on which the cabinet had no need to decide.  Roy Jenkins just got on with it and ensured that they had plenty of time and drafting help. They got through, but Labour couldn't be punished for them at any election, since the government had officially been uninvolved.

Labour's Drugs Bill fell because of the June 1970 election. But – and this is such a telling detail of modern British politics - the Tories passed the planned law almost unchanged, an amazing piece of bipartisanship. If there's one thing the two party leaderships can always agree on, it's debauching the morals of the nation.

There's nothing specially socialist about this debauching stuff, though it does fit in with a certain type of Marxism. One of the most articulate and ferocious defenders of morals and justice in recent times was the great sociologist Norman Dennis, who sadly died a few years ago. His denunciation of the absurd Macpherson Report was devastating and pungent. I also still relish the memory of his confrontation at a think tank lunch with a bunch of 'conservative' free market drug legalisers, who seemed to think John Stuart Mill would have supported the decriminalisation of dope. They had to be scraped off the walls afterwards.

Yet he remained an active Labour Party member till his dying day.

With facts such as these in mind (not to mention R.H.Tawney's support for Grammar Schools, and the Christian self-discipline of so many Labour people when our country was going through very hard times)  I feel that social conservatives should never entirely rule out the possibility that
salvation may come from the left as well as the right.

Oddly enough, it could be Labour's salvation too.

I am not sure if 'Blue Labour' has now been wholly buried. But if I were in the Shadow Cabinet ( and , yes, I know I'm not)  I would say to Ed Miliband  (or more likely to Ed Balls, who seems to me have a real seething desire for power)  that Downing Street could be his in 2015 if he returned his party to its patriotic, Christian roots.

Labour already has a better record on the European Union than do the Tories – Gaitskell's great 'Thousand Years of History' speech was prescient and right. The party campaigned for an exit in 1983 (the only one of its pledges that year that hasn't since been enacted in one form or another, despite the conventional wisdom that the 1983 manifesto was 'the longest suicide note in history') .

There'd be nothing outrageous in returning to that position.

On law and justice, I doubt if they could get the death penalty past the existing MPs. But a return to the  principle of punishment, and a real war on the use and possession of drugs, would be of huge benefit to Labour voters in the big cities, who suffer most of all from the horrible crime and disorder which now go unchecked.

As for immigration, it's once again Labour's supporters who suffer most from the huge numbers of migrants now arriving from Eastern Europe. Its their public services that are overloaded, their communities that are altered, their wages that are lowered.

It's also Labour's supporters who would most benefit from a Divorce Reform Act that made it harder to break up a marriage, especially one with children, than it is now.

And of course it's Labour supporters who would gain most from the return of discipline, rigour and academic selection in state schools. I was talking the other day to someone who lives in Kent and one of whose children has just won a place at a grammar school.  It's a marvellous school, offering a fine education to all its pupils. And you get into it by passing a fair examination. Imagine if every town, every county in the country had such schools, how it would transform so many lives.

We've established quite clearly in recent years that the Tories don't love Britain, or even England. We've established that their voters will carry on voting for them however many times their hopes are betrayed and their concerns mocked by their 'own' leader.

Is it even remotely possible that a combination of ambition and desperation will persuade Labour to try to prove that it really still loves the poor?

You're right. It's most unlikely. But forgive me for dreaming. The idea, though far-fetched, is no more so than many of the turns in the other direction which our political leaders have taken in recent years.