Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 325

Dave vs Nick: As fake as Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks

This is Peter Hitchen's Mail on Sunday column

There used to be a sport called 'all-in wrestling' which was funny because it was faked. Despite all the grunts, squeals and crashes, as huge bodies were slammed, gasping, on to the canvas, we all knew it wasn't serious. Of course, it must have hurt a bit. And occasionally the giant grapplers must have truly lost their tempers. But the louder it was, the phonier it was.
I do hope people realise that the same is true of the current alleged row between Nicholas Clegg's Liberal Democrats and David Cameron's Liberal Conservatives.
Mr Cameron is far closer to Mr Clegg than he is to his own voters. He loves being manacled to him, and much prefers Coalition to governing alone.
Mr Clegg helps David Cameron ensure that the Government remains pro-EU, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-tax, politically correct and pro-immigration. But he suffers from the bottomless stupidity of his Left-wing members and voters, who can never see when they're well off.
Anthony Blair had the same difficulty. The Left were too thick to see that New Labour were the most revolutionary Leftist British Government since Cromwell. They thought – and still think – that Mr Blair was a traitor. Stupidity explains a lot in modern British politics. But that's democracy for you.
So we have the ludicrous position we have now, where the real traitor, Mr Cameron, still commands the loyalty of his party.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, who have allowed Mr Cameron to ignore his voters and run a Leftist Government, have lost most of their Leftist support.
This is the reason for the silly fake fight, in which Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron pretend to be at odds about the 50p tax rate, or Human Rights, and various senior Liberals call the Tories rude names.
The Tory conference in Manchester next week will contain quite a few matching attacks on the 'Yellow B******s', which will be just as empty.
But the biggest fake of all will be the stage-managed split between the two, which I predict will take place by the spring of 2014.
There will be some pretext or other – probably spending cuts. The idea will be to make the Liberals look like principled Leftists and the Tories look like principled conservatives. The media will, as usual, play along.
The Liberals will then noisily leave the Coalition but quietly agree to maintain a minority Tory Government on the basis of 'confidence and supply'.
Mr Cameron will then find ministerial jobs for some of his friends. Mr Clegg may possibly go off to the European Commission – a seat falls vacant in 2014.
If he does, I suspect Vince Cable will become leader, a change worth many votes to his party. The Tories will try and fail to get a few 'Right-wing' measures through Parliament.
And at the 2015 Election, ¬voters will be asked to choose between Liberal Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Liberal Labour candidates, pretending to disagree with each other.
The Liberal Democrats will then form a coalition with ¬whoever gets most seats. And your wishes, hopes and fears will continue to be ignored.
Unlike the wrestling, this fraud isn't funny.
It is deadly serious, and we shall all pay for it.

Words that have no place at Downton

I have finally forced myself to watch Downton Abbey. Oh dear. It's the usual problem, of microscopic attention to cars and clothes and no attention at all to what people were really like.
Edwardians did not use the phrase 'as if' to express scorn for a suggestion. Nor did they say 'ta da!' when they successfully baked cakes. As for the much trumpeted realism of the trenches (pictured right), I've seen children's play areas in urban parks more menacing and squalid than these neat, dry diggings.
But at least Downton is entertaining. This cannot be said for the awful, miserable cadaver that is the new film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I have explained just how bad this film is, and why, on my blog.
Anyone who has read the book or seen the Alec Guinness TV version will be deeply disappointed. And anyone who hasn't will be baffled.

Advice nobody needs

We learn that David Cameron has been entertaining Anthony Blair at Chequers, supposedly to get his advice on foreign policy.
Several questions arise. First, how did he get him to leave once he arrived? Gordon Brown spent ten years trying to evict him. Second, of all the people in all the world to ask about foreign affairs, Mr Blair is the last counsellor any sane person would choose. Not only was he responsible, personally and deeply, for the worst British foreign policy blunder of the past 50 years, the Iraq War, but he is so ignorant he doesn't know they speak Portuguese in Brazil. He has been the despair of foreign policy experts brought in to brief him, and recently revealed he had never even heard of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the leader of Iran famously overthrown by a joint MI6-CIA putsch in 1953.
Mr Cameron's self-promoting speech about his Libya intervention is another worrying sign that he is turning into another Blair. Could Libya be Mr Cameron's Kosovo – an apparent success (actually not as nice as it looks) that gives him a taste for bombs and bullets? 

                                                        * * *
My article last week on mass immigration in the lovely old town of Boston in Lincolnshire was denounced as 'insulting' and 'inaccurate' by the town's council leader, Peter Bedford. I hadn't, as it happened, criticised either him or his council and I stand by every word in the article. Mr Bedford has made a great palaver of 'inviting' me to revisit Boston, as if he in some way owned it or controlled access to it. He doesn't. I'll come and go as I please, thanks. But perhaps the people of Boston – several of whom have contacted me to endorse what I wrote – might ask whether Mr Bedford and his officials have better and more urgent things to do than issue silly public denunciations of truthful articles.

                                                        * * *
War on Drugs Latest. Despite the alleged savage persecution of cannabis users, I observed a book of recipes for cannabis cakes on sale, very prominently displayed, in Blackwell's highly respectable bookshop in Oxford. Believe me. There is not, and never has been, any war on drugs.

                                                         * * *
I am grieved to have to tell you that the plan to make us all live by Berlin Time is not yet dead. The horrible scheme, apparently buried by the Government many months ago, has escaped from its coffin and thrust its stiffened fingers through the earth heaped upon its grave.
Millions of people would have their lives made worse by this plan to make us go to
work and school in the dark in winter, and postpone darkness till 11pm in summer. Yet
parliamentary opposition has come only from Scotland, where the problems would be even worse than in England.
Are there no English MPs prepared to defend our freedom to set our clocks by our own meridian, instead of a German one?

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

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Travesty

In a minute, I will say why the new film of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is absolutely unforgivably awful, giving full details. But first I will give some background (and those who don't want to have the plot spoiled can safely leave off reading here).

When John le Carre (David Cornwell) first began to write about the secret world, I was among millions who were overwhelmed by the power of his writing.

These books were thrillers, but also thrillingly potent 'state of the nation' novels about the decay of a country , the doubts of its governing class, the illusions of greatness which still clouded the minds of so many.

He knew exactly how his people spoke. He was a trained listener, and his conversations in dusty Whitehall attics, basements registries, safe-houses, committee rooms and clubs are so spot on that you can hear them in your head (though I should add that he cannot do male-female relationships).

I reckon he gained his amazing powers of observation during the alarming, chaotic, hilarious and tragic childhood which he more-or-less describes in 'A Perfect Spy', which I suspect is as near to his autobiography as we are going to get.

I have always loved his use of the word 'actually' in conversation. He had spotted that when a British public servant employed this word, he was (actually) saying 'Oh, shut up, you blasted fool'.  It has gone now, and Mr Cornwell's continued use of this device in some later books rings false, rather like the extraordinarily formal speeches which P.D.James gives some of her modern characters.

In those days, when someone ended a statement with 'actually',  it was a very bad sign, as it is now when an American official addresses you as 'Sir!' (when this happens, freeze).

His bottomless scorn for deluded sorts who could not see how much we had declined is savagely expressed in 'The Looking Glass War', a book so sad and full of rage that is painful to read decades after its targets retired and went to their graves.

'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold', likewise drawn from the life, explores the matching cynicism of East and West, and first introduces us to Cornwell's conviction that a country's spy services are microcosms of its whole society, and that there is an alarming equivalence between the secret services of East and West. There's some truth in this. Much of the Cold War was a choreographed dance in which both sides told their peoples that things were worse than they were. But it was not as true as Mr Cornwell thinks it is, in my view. It is this conviction which has gradually turned him into a rather silly anti-American and which has made several of his more recent books disappointing and flat. I still buy and read them. But only once.

Whereas I could not say how many times I have read 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold', or seen the superb film which was based on it. Or 'The Looking-Glass War'. As for what is in some ways my favourite, 'A Small Town in Germany', if I had a long journey to undertake, I'd pick up my tatty old copy of it and read it with joy yet again - holding my breath as the long-jammed lift ascends from the basement with its cargo of unwanted memories. It's not in the Smiley sequence and is only marginally about spying. But it is marvellous about British embassies, diplomatic dinners, British decline, the aristocracy, the failed hopes of 1945 and the black German past. Mr Cornwell is that very rare thing in modern Britain, someone who knows and likes Germany and understands it. I often wonder if he privately thinks this book is his masterpiece.

As for 'Tinker, Tailor', I was thrilled when I learned that it was being made into a TV series for, as sometimes happens, I longed to know if others shared my own imagined idea of what the people were like. I was also annoyed, because I had for some years refused to have a TV set in my home, and knew that I couldn't really watch the whole series by going round to friends' houses (I tried, but it obviously wasn't polite or sensible).

And the makers of the BBC series did share my imagined idea. In fact their pictures were better than mine. This is most unusual for me. The only other instance I can think of is David Lean's 'Great Expectations', which I think Charles Dickens himself would have loved. My re-reading of the book since it was televised has always been enriched by what I saw back in 1979.

So when I heard that a new film of 'Tinker, Tailor' was to be made, I knew that I would have to see it, but expected I would be at least mildly irritated by it. I love going to the cinema for its own sake. I sometimes walk out of really bad or unexpectedly violent or coarse films, but in general the experience is pleasing enough to make for an enjoyable evening. There's a bit of ceremony about it, and an audience to share the drama with (I've written a little about this, and its difference from TV, in 'The Abolition of Britain').

When I saw the trailers, I was a bit peeved to see the (to me) familiar vista of Budapest, a rather dull city whose charms are over-rated and which doesn't feature at all in the book 'Tinker, Tailor' (from now on, when I say 'the book', I mean 'Tinker, Tailor', and when I say 'The TV series' I mean the Alec Guinness version).

Also I couldn't work out what they were doing on an airfield. And Istanbul was a bit of a shock, though as I shall explain later, there are excuses for this.

Still never mind. Let's see what they have made of it. (By the way, though I came out of the cinema muttering imprecations, and may have upset those sitting nearby with various groans and snorts, I am greatly encouraged in my apparently isolated view by a gloriously excoriating attack on the film in Tuesday's  'Times' by Roger Lewis - sorry I can't link – who said among other things that it was 'absolutely terrible').

First of all, they have *needlessly messed it up*.  Of course there couldn't be another Alec Guinness. But Gary Oldman? Smiley is famously described as being owlish and fat with short legs and ill-fitting clothes. Gary Oldman just has heavy glasses. And also he wastes great portions of valuable time swimming in Hampstead Ponds, something the Chelsea-dwelling, bookish, unathletic Smiley would never have dreamed of doing. Why? You might as well show him doing Pilates.

Then the sequence is tossed about all over the place. As I know the story backwards, it didn't trouble me too much, but I don't know if a newcomer would have been able to make it out at all.

For no reason I can think of, the crucial entrapment of Jim Prideaux is shifted from a forest in Czechoslovakia to a café in Budapest. The whole point of this event is that it should go spectacularly wrong, in a remote and inaccessible place rather than slap in the middle of a relatively open city, and be misrepresented as a British attempt to kidnap a Czech general. The book also contains a terrifying sequence during which Prideaux becomes keenly aware that he is being closely watched, but goes ahead with the mission anyway. All we get in Budapest is a walk through the streets of Pest and a very sweaty waiter. Plus, we see some of the gore that the makers seem to think is necessary. I might add that the pointless transformation of Jerry Westerby from Fleet Street old-timer to furry-faced junior spy (a merger of two different figures in the drama) is a sad waste of a character. In the time spent by Gary Oldman ploughing up and down the weedy waters of Hampstead, this gap could have been rectified.

Then there's the vital scene in Istanbul. Actually (that word again) the original event on which this story is based did happen in Turkey, when the atrocious Kim Philby told his Kremlin masters about a Soviet defector in Turkey, and the man was last seen being carried on a stretcher into a Soviet transport plane. And, though in the book the events take place in Hong Kong, they could happen in any cosmopolitan major city. The TV series set them in Lisbon.

But you do just wonder if the crew didn't fancy a few weeks in Istanbul, the way they let the cameras linger on the night clubs. The supposedly exotic city on the Bosphorus, much of it in fact quite banal and some of it rather grim,  has a strange charm for film-makers, as shown in the more or less idiotic scenes set there in 'From Russia with Love'.

The meeting between Ricki Tarr and Irina is actually much more interesting in the book than it is in the film (check it out) and would have made better cinema. And it happens without any need for a long-distance shot of Russo-Turkish Rumpy-Pumpy. As for her delivery of the vital secret, I'd be amazed if any newcomer to the story had the faintest idea of what was going on. But while we don't get much of an explanation, we do get gallons of wholly unnecessary gore, including the incomprehensible murder of Tufty Thesinger who, despite being a  retired officer of the King's African Rifles speaks with an Oop North Accent (hardly anyone in the film speaks as such people really did). Perhaps Karla killed him for not speaking proper. I don't know.

Sorry about all these details, but it sometimes looks as if someone has gone through the book changing things for their own sake. Smiley's London refuge is moved from Paddington to Liverpool Street (where as far as I know, faintly shady hotels are uncommon). Peter Guillam has his orientation changed from sturdy heterosexual with a lovely, enigmatic musician girlfriend to clandestine homosexual. Why? The comically appalling meal, during which flakes of white fat congeal on the ghastly food, is transferred to a Wimpy Bar. Why? Jim Prideaux is made to be needlessly cruel to Jumbo, the unhappy boy he befriends. Why? Prideaux is also supposedly listed as dead, while teaching *under his own name* at a prep school in England. Why? Prideaux shoots Bill Haydon in broad daylight with a rifle, rather than climbing into Sarratt aftr dark , sharing a bottle of vodka with him and then breaking his neck. Why?  Irina is murdered by a KGB interrogator during the interrogation of Jim Prideaux, who couldn't conceivably have met her or know anything about her. Why? Ricki Tarr, a cynic, hoodlum and trickster so hard-boiled he once passed as a gun-runner and then shot all his confederates, is turned into a sentimental idiot who thinks Irina can be rescued from Karla, and is in love with her. Why? He would have known perfectly well that she was dead and never greatly cared for her anyway.

Oh, and Smiley claims he 'can't remember' what Karla looks like. Is this because they're hoping to make a sequel 'Smiley's People' (more swimming?) and haven't cast Karla yet? Smiley remembers very clearly what he looked like, and describes him.

Oh, and that's another thing. Does Smiley really say that Karla had been 'tortured by the Americans' and that they had pulled out his fingernails? Or was I dreaming? This is such an absurd departure from the book, and so far from all likelihood, that I hope I was dreaming.

Percy Alleline, the smooth and pompous Secret Service Chief, cruises his way through Whitehall, associating with 'golfers and Conservatives',  speaking orotundly of 'My brother in Christ, the Chief of Naval Intelligence'(to give a sample of his speech).  He simply has to be tall, pin-striped and slightly well-padded, with the trace of an Edinburgh accent. Instead he is a short ginger baldie who sounds and looks as if he has recently given up being a Glasgow bus conductor.

As for Control, is it possible to believe that the director of the Secret Intelligence Service (at one point Cornwell says that he was so secretive that his own wife believed till the day he died that he worked for the National Coal Board) would have left his London flat full of charts and notes about a mole hunt in SIS, and that it would all still be there, untouched, months after his death?

That's just an example of the unlikleiness ofthe re-worked plot, and of the miscasting. There's a problem in general with casting. Colin Firth is technically old enough to play Bill Haydon who, having been up at Oxford in 1939, would have been in his mid-fifties at the time the action is set. But like so many people of the post-war generation, who escaped wartime privation, post-war rationing and the age of cold baths and suet puddings, he doesn't look old enough or ravaged enough. This applies to lots of the cast, but perhaps it only matters to those of us who know what the past really looked like.

As for Connie Sachs, well, what can I say? Not many women would want this part, basically an enormous squeaky, gushy schoolgirl, fat, lachrymose and boozy, but also brilliant, a hangover from wartime in more ways than one.  But the idea that she would tell George Smiley that she is 'un****ed' is just absurd. Her voice is, once again, hopelessly wrong.  And her amazing piece of detective work on Poliakov, the Soviet mole-runner, is hopelessly skimped.

As for the final, churning scene in the safe house as the Mole is uncovered, I cannot for the life of me work out why the director has removed all the drama from it. But he has. I'll leave it at that for now, but might say more in response to comments.

Boston Lincolngrad: The troubling transformation of a sleepy English town after mass immigration from Eastern Europe

 

**Note: The following article was published on Sunday 18th September in the Mail on Sunday. It has aroused a certain amount of controversy in Boston itself. The leader of the Borough Council has attacked it as 'cliched, jaundiced, inaccurate and one-sided'. I have also received messages from Boston residents endorsing its message.

Obviously it has a wider application, as many parts of Britain are now experiencing very large scale migration. I have posted it here so that it can be more easily found by those who are interested in discussing this important subject.PH **

You cannot get much deeper into England than you do under the huge skies of Lincolnshire, where land and sky and water meet and the impossibly beautiful tower of Boston's ancient church reaches towards the clouds.

I came here first nearly 30 years ago and had a sense of penetrating a sleeping, utterly undisturbed part of the country. The Sixties had not really happened. There were no motorways. Life was slow, a little shabby, but untroubled by the fake urgency of more modern places.

I half-expected to meet Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers' aristocratic detective, on his way to solve the mystery of The Nine Tailors, set in this haunting countryside of fens, dykes, floods and bell towers.Respectability was still strong, and so was the sense of belonging. Because I was from outside Lincolnshire, they rather charmingly called me a 'foreigner'.

How shocking it is, then, to return and find Boston so strangely and unexpectedly transformed. In the past few years this place has seen drunken street battles between locals and migrants, some nasty assaults and a continuing air of suspicion and dislike that it is hard to miss – yet which cannot be openly expressed.

At one major road junction, a huge poster demands a ban on the public drinking of alcohol. Knowing that rowdy street-drinking (and public urination) is one of the main local complaints against migrants, I cannot help wondering if this is not some sort of covert protest against their presence.

If you look carefully as the train from Grantham rolls into the station, you can see the blasted, scorched lock-up garage where, a few weeks ago, five men died in an explosion that could be heard five miles away across the great fields of leeks, sprouts and beetroot that surround the town. We may say with some certainty that they were trying to make illegal vodka, and that they came from Eastern Europe. Police investigations are still continuing into the background of this nasty business.

But another, slow-motion explosion has also hit Boston. Here, of all the unlikely places, a somnolent and kindly town has been upset, alarmed and riven by mass immigration in its hardest and most uncompromising form.

Note here that I use the word 'immigration', not 'immigrants'. All the people who have been hurt, uprooted and upset by this rather cynical piece of social engineering are pretty much free of blame. Who can honestly disapprove of the poor person from Lisbon, Riga or Bucharest, with a family to house and feed, tempted to uproot his or her life by the promise of wages unthinkable at home? There is something brave and commendable about their willingness to live in crowded, shared lodgings, eating cheaply and saving hard; an experience we should all go through at some time or another.

Who can frown on the farmer who welcomes the fact that he suddenly has a reliable source of hard-working young men and women ready to lift his crops for long hours without complaint? And who can blame the people of this ancient place, nervous, baffled and disquieted by the sudden arrival of hundreds of people who do not speak English, who are ignorant of our customs, who move among us like interplanetary visitors, so cut off that they could not even understand a shout of 'Help!', let alone laugh at our jokes?

If you seek a villain, you'll need to look elsewhere, in warm and comfortable rooms occupied by complacent, powerful people whose only experience of immigration is cheap, exotic restaurants and cheap servants. Here in the English fenland, everyone involved is a victim of enormous, irresistible powers. Those abstract ideas called 'market forces' and 'free movement of peoples', so beloved of academics, politicians and journalists far away in London, come to life and stalk the streets.

Like most grandiose ideas, they are not as nice as they sound. In Boston, what they mean is this. On a 20-minute walk from railway station to bed-and-breakfast, I meet and see almost nobody who speaks English. Most of the few I do see are the kind of people nobody wants to employ: the only players in this sad melodrama who might conceivably have chosen a different outcome. In the shadow of the great church, big enough to be a cathedral and now absurdly large for the mainly Godless town at its feet, the home-grown English youths are there with their cans of lager and their hoodies, shouting and cackling. I have to mention this because there is also no shortage of young Eastern Europeans who end up in court here charged with urinating in public places, obviously drunk.

The difference is that the British louts are the end-product of decades of social tenderness, child-centred education and welfare. But the newcomers, emptying their bladders where they stand or driving drunk and uninsured after an evening of illegal hooch, are the end of 70 years of miserable communism, deliberate demoralisation and a culture of desperation and drunken oblivion. Both systems have more in common that you might suspect.

I came to Boston at the invitation of a man I shall call Ted. He wanted me to see at first hand a place that cannot really cope with what is happening to it. He tells a disturbing story about strange events soon before the migrants arrived, around the turn of the century. A small advertisement in one of the local papers asked people who were worried about immigration to contact a phone number. Ted did. He describes what happened.

'The advertisement read, roughly, "Are you concerned about large numbers of migrants arriving in Boston?" with a mobile phone number to contact. I felt very concerned with the number of immigrants being talked about at that time, 5,000 Portuguese! We little knew that was only the beginning of a much greater number from all over Eastern Europe, Iraq and Russia who would be arriving in their thousands.

'I phoned the mobile and was only given a Christian name, "John", I think. He was quite vague and would not give more information, only to say he was a concerned resident and was looking to meet anyone who felt the same. He said he was going to organise meetings etc and would be in touch and asked for my contact details, which I gave.

'As I had not heard from him or seen anything in the paper, I rang the mobile again. He suggested we meet up in the Red Cow pub in the town at midday. He was about 5ft 10in to 6ft, short fair hair (not skinhead), looked fit, casually dressed but smart. He definitely did not have a Lincolnshire accent.

'He bought half a pint of bitter and we sat in a quiet corner. He asked me what I did, and would I be prepared to go on a demonstration march through Boston; what were my thoughts on the proposed mass immigration into Boston and how far would people be prepared to go to register their disapproval.

'I told him how I felt, that a small community like Boston should not be swamped with immigrants. It is not about race, it is about keeping things in proportion. Nothing materialised, no leaflets no demonstration, nothing. So I rang him again, and got a very short answer that "he would be in touch". After that, the number was not in use.

'I am fully convinced the guy I met worked for the Government and was sent to Boston to see what the public reaction would be. Not long afterwards, there was a public meeting on the subject. Among the listed speakers was a representative of the BNP.'

As Ted, a mainstream, conservative-minded businessman, says: 'If you want to kill off any political opposition to any issue you invite the BNP.'

I include this story because I have long been haunted by the extraordinary and astonishing revelations of Andrew Neather, a former New Labour speech writer who worked for, among others, Jack Straw. He wrote in a London newspaper in 2009 that the huge immigration increases in the past ten years were at least partly caused by a desire in government to change the country and 'rub the Right's nose in diversity'. He said Labour's weaker border controls were a deliberate plan to 'open up the UK to mass migration' but that Ministers were nervous about discussing this openly, for fear of losing working-class votes.

So instead, they just went on and on about the supposed economic benefits of welcoming more migrants. Boston, interestingly, is a mainly Tory area, where Labour did not need to worry about lost votes. Well, as Boston shows, there definitely are benefits to immigration. Thousands of hard-working young men – no one seems to know how many thousands – are helping to harvest the dull but necessary vegetables that Lincolnshire grows. Local landlords have no trouble in renting property, and Boston is going through a small housing boom, with lots of new blocks of flats and housing estates, as well as some pretty dispiriting caravan encampments close to the farms.

Officially, Boston's population is 61,000, but the borough council believes the true figure is more like 70,000. The immigrants are paying their council tax and their income tax, and spending a bit in some of the local shops – but I'll come to that. Their children are now arriving in the schools. At one, Park Primary, just over half the pupils do not have English as a first language.

We might expect this in London's Tower Hamlets or parts of Manchester or Bradford. But in Boston? I've spoken to teachers who are actually quite pleased by the new arrivals. Their presence has forced the local authority to pour money into schools that were previously at the back of every queue and at the bottom of every pile. In some classes there are now as many as four expensively hired adults trying to overcome the language barriers caused by the presence of children who speak Russian, Polish or a Baltic language at home.

Teachers insist that all is well. How would you prove it wasn't? Parents may suspect otherwise but they will have learned, like everyone else in Britain, that it is all too easy to be dismissed as 'racist' if you make a public fuss about such things.

And as usual, the parts of the town most affected are the poorest streets, where people are least equipped to protest. Of course 'race' has nothing to do with it. Boston's migrants are white-skinned Europeans. What separates them from us is culture: upbringing, manners, tastes in food, history and language. A few dozen such people in any place would be easy, even beneficial. But thousands of them, all at once, in a small town, mean the creation of a great invisible barrier, snaking down every street and cutting through every district and many lives.

On West Street, known by locals as 'East Street' for obvious reasons, there are half a dozen independent shops selling Baltic, Polish and Russian food, an internet cafe used mainly by Eastern Europeans and a Polish restaurant. Nearby there's a rather inviting Latvian pastry and cake shop. Almost certainly, without the migrants, these places would be boarded up, or charity shops.

But what consolation is that to born-and-bred Bostonians who see parts of their home town transformed into a foreign zone? Enter these shops and you will find them selling vodka (one brand rather tactlessly named 'Boom'), and the pickles, spicy salami and smoked meats that are the staples of the Baltic diet. The brands of cereal, biscuits, beer and sweets are all unfamiliar. They are a little piece of Eastern Europe. I suspect I am the only English-speaking customer most of them have seen. In one shop I find a middle-aged Polish businessman who is happy to talk to me. I ask what brought him here. His answers may surprise you.

'Britain is the best country in Europe to work in. You are more open-minded, more helpful, more friendly to newcomers than anyone else in Europe.

'I like this country . . . I like to live and work here.'

He compares us most favourably to the unwelcoming, prejudiced Germans who are far closer to his home region in Western Poland. But – and I have to press him to talk about this which he says is 'a very delicate matter' – he is baffled by the unwillingness of the British to take the jobs on offer.

'Many of you just don't want to work. You take incapacity benefit [he knew the exact English phrase]. You just assume you'll get money from the Government.'

He finds this attitude unbelievable. It wouldn't be possible in Poland.

'It's just not true that we take your jobs,' he says emphatically, 'I've been working here for a long time now, and I know this – that all businesses want reliable, friendly, helpful workers. That is all we do. You can do it too.'

Of course, there are British workers who complain with justification that they have been undercut by cheaper East European rivals – and are then asked to go round and fix the mess that they have made. But in the end such people face the horrible truth, well known to the British Government and the EU, that one of the purposes of mass immigration and open borders is to push down our wages.

Perhaps if TV presenters and MPs could be replaced by cheaper Polish immigrants, they would be more concerned about this. As it is, they just rejoice that nannies cost less than they used to, and restaurant meals are cheap. But there is another reason the locals may be failing in this competition. It is summed up in a smart and obviously well-financed little establishment, paid for by taxes, itself not far from a flourishing business specialising in providing interpreters.

Slip inside this 'Resource Centre' and you find it full of advice on how to poison yourself with illegal drugs. There is information on nine different types of syringe, and warnings not to mix your drugs with lemon juice; to rotate your injection sites, and to angle the needle correctly. There are posters threatening unconvincingly that, if you sell the methadone provided to you by the taxpayer, you could face penalties 'up to life in prison'.

The very existence of this establishment, with all that it implies, helps to explain why young men and women growing up around here have been so easily supplanted by strangers who do not even speak the language of our country.

No, it is not that they are all drug-takers. It is that our welfare state assumes that any weakness, any failing, any bad habit, requires help and public money rather than moral guidance and stern limits to behaviour. The same is true in the classrooms, and in thousands of homes. The newcomers have been in a harder school. They have grown up in a cold grey world where if you don't learn, you fail your exams, if you don't work, you go hungry, and where if you don't obey the law, it lashes out at you with a club. Offer such people free entry to Britain, and they will think they have come to paradise, even if they have to sleep ten to a room and work until their backs break for the minimum wage.

Sooner or later they, too, will be corrupted by it. There is nothing here for our comfort. I came away from Boston wanting to tell the truth about it, without making it worse. It is easy to understand the frustrated resentment of decent people whose friendly, known world has been destroyed by distant politicians. It is not hard to sympathise with a young man or woman with the guts and energy to come hundreds of miles to find work that locals do not much want to do. But it is impossible not to be angry with the politicians who either couldn't imagine what their policies would bring in practice, or did not care.

The destruction of familiarity and security cannot be measured in money. And I suspect they encouraged this vast migration because they lacked the courage or the will to confront the huge problems of broken families, feeble schools and welfare dependency: the real causes of the so-called labour shortage.

By doing so, they have done deep and lasting damage which has already led to bloodshed and hatred, and which could easily lead to more in the years to come. Yet nothing will bring them to admit it, or to change their minds. They never visit their own country and I do not think they give a damn about it.

An Orwell Pilgrimage

Among all the many festivals and gatherings that now make British life so much more entertaining, it is rather surprising that –until now – there has never been one devoted to George Orwell, incontestably one of our greatest and most influential writers.

This year, in Letchworth Garden City, that has been put right. There's a very good Orwell Festival, or rather was, as it has just finished, in and around Letchworth in Hertfordshire. With a bit of luck, there will be another one in two years. I do hope they repeat the performance of 'The Last Man in Europe', a one-man show about Orwell's life that I didn't have the chance to see.

I like Garden Cities, mainly because of their slightly Edwardian art-and-crafts feel , relics of the age before the First World War, high-minded and benevolent, usually teetotal.  The paternalism is slightly worrying(though it's much stronger in company towns such as Port Sunlight). But there are, as we all now know, many worse things than paternalism.

Letchworth had a raw deal from Orwell himself. His famous explosion against sandal-wearers, polysyllable-chewing Marxists, escaped Quakers and bearded men in shorts is supposed to have been written after he encountered just such a group on a bus in Letchworth. He thought they agve socialism a bad name ( alas for him, they were true representatives of the cause, a fact he couldn't quite cope with). Garden Cities are also mocked as centres of weedy pacifism by John Buchan in one his least satisfactory Richard Hannay books, 'Mr Standfast' . This name is also used by George Smiley in 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier , Spy ', though I wonder how many modern readers realise it comes originally from 'The Pilgrim's Progress', a book once known and read in almost every English home, and now almost completely forgotten. (So, by the way. Does 'Vanity Fair' , which most people think is a magazine or, if they are reasonably well-educated, a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. They are right. But they are also not right, just like people who think that 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' is a novel by Ernest Hemingway).

So when I was invited to talk about what Orwell would be writing about now, at the Orwell Festival in Letchworth, I very willingly said 'yes'. This wasn't one of those speaking engagements I sometimes lightly undertake, months in advance, and then regret later. It was fun to do, especially because among my fellow-panellists were Gordon Bowker, author of a biography of Orwell, and the Ukrainian journalist Vitali Vitaliev, who has embraced England so thoroughly that he has become a keen student of Orwell and is deeply knowledgeable about him and his writing.

Vitali kindly offered to drive me out to Wallington, the village where Orwell lived ( and ran the village shop) before the war, and where he wrote 'The Road to Wigan Pier' and 'Coming up for Air' – and where he is also thought to have had the original idea for 'Animal Farm' .But I was able to take my old bicycle up to Letchworth on the train, and road out there myself. I had wrongly thought the landscape was flat, but still managed to wheeze my way up and down the chalk downland (beautiful in the clear early autumn light, which gives a pinkish glow to these low hills as evening approaches).  The  village is still  much as Orwell knew it - though far more prosperous, and of course far less truly rural, its pubs and its farm labourers and its school all gone. The great barn, in which a key scene of Animal Farm takes place, is still there. So is Orwell's house, now attractively restored and thatched. In his day it had a corrugated iron roof, and the doors and windows didn't fit, so it was freezing cold and his weekend guests couldn't wait to get back to London, so uncomfortable were the arrangements.

There is also a particularly lovely church, one of so many beautifully proportioned, light-filled churches still to be found, tragically under-used in village England, full of the Holy Ghost and populated by centuries of prayer and song now coming, it seems to an inevitable end. Not that Orwell would have thought that, even though he was married there. He claimed to be Godless, as men of his type and era so often did, though he was in a way quite fond of the Church of England.

Copies of his marriage certificate are on sale, if you like that sort of thing. There is, I am glad to say, no Victory Tea Shoppe (or should that be 'The Chestnut Tree Café?), just a modest plaque and feeling of being very deep in the England Orwell loved above all things. If you do visit it please go, as I did, by bicycle, or on foot (there are good bridleways all around) so you won't wreck the peace you've come to experience.

Then I headed back to Letchworth, to what I believe is Britain's only vegetarian school, St Christopher's, to take part in the debate.

I did say at the beginning of my contribution to the discussion that I thought Orwell would have seen straight through the humbug of man-made global warming. And I also suspect , not just because it suits me, that he would have been very suspicious of the European Union's secretive and authoritarian nature. And we covered a lot of other ground, from toads and tea to the Internet. But what follows, is more or less what I said that night, for those of you who are interested.

What George Orwell would write about today.

There's a temptation here to say that Orwell would have been just like us.  Or, to be more specific, just like me, me,  me.

Many modern writers would greatly like to consider themselves to be the New Orwell.

However, reputation, like truth, is the daughter of time. Best not to make any hasty judgements.

In any case, there were many Orwells. There was the pacifist Orwell, now forgotten. There was the nostalgist Orwell of 'Coming up for Air', in my view by a long chalk his best novel, once you have excluded the mighty works of 'Nineteen Eighty Four' and 'Animal; Farm'.

Then there was Orwell the policeman and anti-imperialist, Orwell the tramp and the Paris  plongeur,  Orwell the voluntary slum-dweller of the 'The Road to Wigan Pier' Orwell the literary reviewer and admirer (bafflingly to me) of Henry Miller and James Joyce's Ulysses.

And then there was the Orwell of the POUM Militia, who discovered at first hand the horrible truth about official Communism – and the even more creepy truth about how many people, from Victor Gollancz to T.S.Eliot, would find it politic to suppress criticism of Moscow.

And on top of that there was Orwell the Old Etonian, and Orwell the author of 'Politics and the English Language', a sermon on purity of writing so severe that no honest scribbler can read it without recognising some of his own recent faults in it.

And finally there was Orwell the lover of England, paradoxically revolutionary, with his batty dreams of Red Militias billeted in the Ritz, but his view of this country as a family, with the wrong members in control, of railway cuttings choked with wildflowers, red pillar boxes, blue policemen, all of them sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England – and a capital so peaceful and civilised that a blind man could cross it from side to side without being molested.  There's the Orwell who instinctively disliked the metric system, who liked proper pubs, strong brown tea and the magical appearance of toads in the English countryside in the early spring. And the Orwell who couldn't abide Scotsmen.

Finally, there's an Orwell I have always objected to – the Orwell who completely misunderstood the relationship between sexual freedom and real freedom, and who imagined that a future left-wing dictatorship would have an Anti-Sex League and raid illicit lovers in their bedrooms.

 

To give an honest answer to this question, I have to consider which of these Orwells would have most disliked me, if we both lived at the same time.

 

Might he have approved of liberal intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya?

I suspect he might. After all, he himself took part in the prototype liberal intervention in Spain.

Might he have approved of the sexual revolution? I am sure he would, at least to begin with.

Would he have looked down his nose at conservative popular newspapers such as mine?

I am more or less sure of it. An Etonian revolutionary could hardly be expected to do anything else.

Would he have supported comprehensive education? Yes, I think the man who wanted London's squares stripped of their railings would have seen this as a liberating measure.

Would he have favoured large-scale immigration into this country? Very possibly. He would have instinctively sided with the person he regarded as the underdog, perhaps not seeing that when mass immigration comes to a country, both migrants *and* hosts are underdogs.

Would he have supported relaxed drink licensing laws? I think so. He viewed such things as silly and puritan.

Would he have fervently opposed smoking bans? Without a doubt. His generation viewed smoking as a normal human activity.

In all these matters, it is only right to consider him as a whole, as a man of his place and time, the very things which forged the steely core of him.

But there are one or two issues on which, willy nilly, we would have found ourselves on the same side. I believe that the man who wrote so cleverly about Newspeak would have seen the speech codes and inclusive language of political correctness for the sinister linguistic prisons that they are.

I believe he would have loathed the attempt to introduce identity cards.

I believe he would have supported Steve Thoburn and the metric martyrs against concrete-headed attempts to prosecute them for selling bananas by the English pound.

And I think he would have hated motorways, and the devastation of the railways, and the grisly new liturgy of the Church of England, and the insane massacre of healthy trees by health and safety fanatics.

And he would have absolutely loathed Anthony Blair.

None of us here would ever have found him entirely convenient, or comforting, or a certain ally. He had that genuine independence of mind whose unfailing magnetic north is a love of truth and a loathing of humbug and which scorns all conventional wisdom. That's why, knowing that he would probably have scorned me and everything I ever wrote or said, I'm still very proud to be associated with his name here today.

 

Read the awful story of Fiona... THEN accuse me of 'moral panic'

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Many modern radicals sneer that my warnings of coming chaos are 'moral panic'. They say that I exaggerate the problem, that Britain remains a perfectly civilised country with nothing much to worry about.

This is the politically correct view. Yet it cannot easily be squared with a dispiriting report this week on the treatment of disabled people.

The survey was made by the HQ of Political Correctness, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. It concerns a group of people that Political Correctness claims to care about.

And it shows that our treatment of many such people, especially those who look or sound a bit different from the rest of us, is as cruel and cold as the Stone Age.

More importantly, it shows that the authorities, for all their phoney concern and oily mission statements, couldn't care less if some poor creature is persecuted and driven mad by scorn and mockery.

It deals at length with the unspeakably nasty case of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Frankie Hardwick.

Fiona Pilkington appealed more than 30 times to the police for help as her house was besieged and attacked, and her poor child mocked and terrified. 

There was no place of safety where they could feel secure, let alone happy. In the end, she went mad with grief and fear, and incinerated her daughter and herself in her car - a death so horrible that we can only wonder how ghastly their lives had been.

That is all bad enough. The uselessness of the police in such matters is well known to anyone who really needs them.

But most striking are the words of one of their leading tormentors: 'We can do anything we like and you can't do anything about it.'

He was quite right. The evil are always quick to realise it, when authority has departed.

For what the report adds is that the general attitude of our many officials, agencies, helplines and services towards this problem is one of total defeatism.

Perhaps most telling of all are these words from the EHRC's report: 'Public authorities sometimes focused on the victim's behaviour and suggested uncalled-for restrictions to their lives to avoid harassment rather than dealing with the perpetrators.'

Once again, our system lacks any moral distinction between right or wrong.

It is not outraged by human cruelty and filled with a burning desire to end it.

It sees its job as negotiating between the victim and the 'offender', whose behaviour is explained and excused by poverty or abuse.

This never works. Its failure was on show to the world when the feral multitude swarmed on to the streets of England a few weeks ago. 

The people who hounded Fiona Pilkington and Frankie Hardwick to death would do the same to anyone who appeared different, or weak.

They have already begun on the old, a category to which most of us will sooner or later belong.

There are more of them every day, thanks to our unchanging and hopelessly wrong policies on family, education and justice.

This is not moral panic. It is the sober truth.


How about a blockbuster lauding full-time mothers?

The blitzkrieg against full-time mothers continues. Now we have a greatly hyped film, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, of the greatly hyped book I Don't Know How She Does It, about some businesswoman or other who holds down an office job and has children, and they miraculously don't starve or freeze to death or burn the house down in her absence.

I think we are supposed to admire this. But actually we do know how she does it. She hires a foreign nanny (or if enormously rich, a British one).

Politicians whose wives go out to work do this, too, but media organisations, likewise crammed with wage-slave mothers, never refer to the presence of an expensive servant. All that is supposed to have gone out with Downton Abbey. The wives involved are written about as if they do it all themselves.

No doubt this is all very well for the super-rich. Many children of such households develop enviably close relationships with the nanny, whom they see far more than their actual parent.

High-flying office work is fun, and it pays enough for tolerable childcare. But for hundreds of thousands driven to boring work to pay the bills, the work is not fun and the childcare, in crammed day-orphanages, is inadequate and sad.

I don't know why we put up with it. Why is it still considered shaming and bad for a woman to bring up her own children?

A stroll through modern Britain

It is a sunny morning in a modest suburban shopping street I have known for years. I open the door of one of the newly refurbished public lavatories and find a couple busy together on the floor. I close it gently, wondering why they didn't even bother to bolt it.

Further down the street, a group of young women with pushchairs are screaming furiously at a menacing young man who looks as if he is going to attack them.

The staider citizens simply walk round this scene. They long ago learned not to intervene. Scowling teenagers whizz aggressively up and down the pavements on bicycles. There is no sign of authority; in fact I haven't seen a police foot patrol there since the Eighties, if then.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is funny that many other countries have a more special relationship with the USA than we do. If you fly to the USA from Dublin airport, you can go through U.S. immigration before you board your plane (a service also available in Canada).

This saves you getting stuck behind 500 suspected Colombian drug smugglers at Miami or JFK. If we're so special, why can't we have this too?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The BBC's Chief Commissar for Political Correctness (whom I imagine as a tall, stern young woman in cruel glasses issuing edicts from an austere office) was hard at work again last week.

On University Challenge, Jeremy Paxman referred to a date as being Common Era, rather than AD. This nasty formulation is designed to write Christianity out of our culture. Given the allegedly ferocious Mr Paxman's schoolgirlish, groupie-like treatment of various prominent atheists in recent interviews, maybe he favours this far-from-impartial view.

Then on Thursday morning, the Today programme's Justin Webb referred to a 'multi-billion-euro' project to build a space telescope.

It's touching, in a way, that deep in the BBC they still believe in the wretched and disastrous single currency. But why couldn't he have used pounds?

The figure wasn't precise; the meaning would have been the same. I expect it was for the same reason that the BBC now incessantly uses the metric system instead of customary British measures, often making hilarious mistakes as a result. My favourite remains the day when Lionel Kelleway, distinguished presenter of natural history programmes, announced that some cliffs (actually 600 feet high) were 2,000 metres high (6,560 feet).

 

Civilised Conversation – at least I hope so

In a way, September is the real New Year, not the futile dead zone of early January, or even the Spring.  The first crisp clear autumn morning of the year, which always makes my blood flow faster,  usually means a return to welcome routine after many months when the world was half asleep.  I've been away or otherwise engaged for much of the last six weeks or so,  the trains have been half-empty and the streets wonderfully clear of traffic. But what passes for normality is now back, with all the same crises and problems as before, unresolved. And I'm a little late in responding to comments this week because I spent Sunday and Monday in Ireland, coming down from Belfast to Dublin on one of my favourite train rides, the Enterprise, which in less than three hours takes you from one world to another, and crosses Britain's only land border, as well as passing through some of the loveliest countryside anywhere in these islands. As I said to my Dublin host, the two cities are still immensely different, but the differences are not the same as those which existed when I first made that journey 30 years ago. In those days, Dublin was probably the most Edwardian place in our archipelago (making a phone call was a cumbersome business usually involving the operator) whereas Belfast was a city in the midst of war. Now both cities have been utterly transformed by money, and I'm not sure whether hostility to the Roman Catholic church is now stronger in the North among militant protestants, or in the South among former Catholics.


Now, to your comments. As always, I shall set out trying to answer them all, and will inevitably fail. Let me stress, though, that I do read them all. If yours isn't singled out for comment, it may be because I feel I've dealt with the matter elsewhere, or because it's not central to the debate. But I have read it.

Mr Oliver wantas to know why I think his training was 'Marxist' or 'radical' as if these words were interchangeable. I don't think they are. And I don't think I said his training was 'Marxist'. If I did, where did I do so?  I do think it very likely that it was radical, but that is because I am an educational conservative.

I would doubt, for instance, that any of those who trained him would reject, as I do, the idea of 'child-centred' or 'discovery ' learning. I suspect they would regard as reactionary and outmoded my belief that:

Children should sit in ordered rows facing the teacher(this very much includes primary schools) chant times tables relentlessly until they know them by heart (learning by rote', as the radicals contemptuously say); be taught customary English measures (the ones they'll really use all their lives)  as they were taught times tables; be taught to read using synthetic phonics and nothing but synthetic phonics;  made to take dictation, have their spelling corrected when it is wrong;  made to do repeated exercises in addition, subtraction and multiplication, made to do bad work again;  taught factual geography – names, locations, capitals, populations, principal rivers, mountains, industries and produce etc of the countries of the world, starting with their own, rather than propaganda about global warming; taught the principles and essential scriptures of the Christian religion, not as an anthropological curiosity but as the established and living religion of this country (those whose parents do not wish this can opt out) reinforced with a daily assembly of a predominantly Christian character (opt-outs again available) ; taught narrative history of their own country, not confused with conflicting 'sources' dealing with disconnected episodes usually chosen for politically correct reasons or overlaid with futile attempts at empathy with the peoples of the past.

Now, if this is how he has been taught to teach, then I withdraw my suggestion that his training was supervised by radicals. But I suspect the sort of teaching he (and his trainers) regard as normal is what I would regard as an authority-free egalitarian catastrophe. For of course all the things I mention above require not merely a belief in the authority of adults, but a belief in the existence of a body of knowledge worth passing on, and in our right and duty to do so.

I have no doubt that many of those radicals have been influenced by Marxist teachings and movements, some consciously, some not. Marxist are all for deconstructing educational order in the societies they wish to undermine, and all for rigour, authority and so forth in the societies they have taken over.  Many of our educational problems result from the fact that this country has been in a permanent cultural upheaval, heavily influenced by Gramscian ideas of cultural hegemony,  for half a century.  But other intellectual currents, notably Deweyism, are also involved.

I am as usual baffled by Tim Lemon, writing once more from his fastness on one of the moons of Jupiter. He thinks Mr Blair trashed British comprehensives. I suspect he may be relying on that extraordinarily unreliable measure, the OECD PISA survey, in which 'evidence' is gathered in entirely different ways in different countries , but is then presented as if it is comparable. Mr Blair certainly did little or nothing to improve Britain's state schools, and he knew how bad they were, hence his use of the London Oratory rather than the secondary schools near his Islington home. But then since the comprehensive experiment was launched in 1965, the one sure method of curing the disease has been the one course nobody will take – a return to selection by ability. I might add that a lowering of the absurdly high compulsory school leaving age, allowing the non-academic to start work earlier, would also be a pretty good idea.


Mr Robinson comments : 'During the golden age of selective education from 1945 to 1965 Britain was comprehensively economically thrashed by its main economic competitors . Whatever its merits that system was not able to deliver the goods economically.'

Firstly, I am not sure this is true. Britain's economic performance in the immediate post war era was pretty good, in terms of exports, and we managed to survive as a major manufacturing country, despite the abuse of Marshall Aid to found a lavish welfare state, and the heavy burden of Cold War military spending. We did begin to fall behind as the rest of the world retooled.

Secondly,  quite how this can be blamed on the actions and behaviour of boys and girls who entered grammar schools between 1945 and 1965 I am not sure. Someone who was 11 years old in 1945 would have been 31 in 1965, nowhere near the levers of political or economic power, and a very short way up the rungs of any of the old professional ladders. What I do remember from this era was the worry about the 'Brain Drain', especially of scientists and engineers, to the USA, whose high schools were simply not producing people of the quality turned out by the British education system. You don't hear much about that now.


The failure of Britain as an economic power results much more from policy decisions taken by men educated before the war (such people as Harold Wilson, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas Home, Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey and Ted Heath, most of whom were at Oxford before 1939). In their cases, I don't think the quality of their schooling can be blamed, so much as the persistence of various wrong ideas. 

In answer to Mr Gray, the new grammar schools would, as they did before 1965, push private school products out of Oxford and Cambridge. They would just have to go elsewhere.  Accurate figures for the high and rising numbers of state school entrants reaching Oxbridge before the comprehensive revolution  *with no special provisions made to help them*  are given in my book 'The Cameron Delusion'. It is my belief that if Crosland's measures had never gone through, and if Scotland had not engaged in comparable vandalism of its fine state academies, many British private schools would by now have gone out of business, or partially entered the state system as Direct Grant schools. Those who genuinely oppose educational privilege should surely therefore support selection. Odd that they don't.

Of course people are right to be concerned for those who don't get into grammar schools. But the idea that they are damaged by the existence of grammar schools, or that they benefit from their abolition, is simply false. These are two separate questions. I am very interested in proper technical education, and wish the money squandered on futile new 'universities' had been applied to this end. A tougher problem is what to do about those in the middle, neither academic nor technical. I recognise the difficulty. I just don't accept that it is solved or even eased by the comprehensive system. By the way, it is silly to summarise my view as 'all comprehensives are bad'. Any classification of a school must be comparative. Also many officially comprehensive schools are in fact nothing of the kind, and are reasonably good as a result.  Comprehensives tend to be better , the more they defy the comprehensive ideal. That is because this ideal is political, not educational. . These better comprehensives would be far better in an openly selective system with more demanding examinations

I will end my comments on the selection issue by saying how very grateful I am to Mr Embery for his contribution. Regular readers here will know that Mr Embery and I rarely agree on anything. His clear-eyed account of the real state of affairs in the schools suffered by the children of the poor is therefore specially valuable, as it is not advanced to serve any cause, simply stated as the truth that it is. What he says has been confirmed to me many times by serving and retired teachers who often fear to speak out because of concern for their jobs or pensions.


The Twin Towers


A comment on the 11th September has wandered on to the education thread, but is a good starting point for one part of the argument.

Mr Crawford writes: 'it looks rather silly to complain that Israel (the only military superpower in the Middle East) is too small to give away any territory.'

This is a nonsequitur. Military power and territory are two different things. Even the most enormous military power cannot provide defence in depth, nor can it protect a country against (for instance ) rocket attacks from closely neighbouring territory. Were the West bank to be a sovereign state, it would be perfectly possible for its inhabitants to rain missiles on many Israeli cities and on the country's only international airport. As has been quite clear from the moronic Israeli attacks on Gaza, retaliation and incursion are poor defences against such things. It is also worth noting how the heavily entrenched forces of Hezbollah were able to inflict a defeat on Israel in the recent clashes on the Lebanese border.  Israel is well-armed against a conventional invasion(though it lacks defence in depth, as I say) and well-equipped against a nuclear threat. But against many forms of disproportionate warfare it is stumbling, muscle-bound  and inept. I might add that it has lost the propaganda war in advance. And that the Arab and Muslim nations taken together – especially Egypt, Iran  and Saudi Arabia, are not far short of military superpower status themselves. And they have much more territory.

He adds :' The Palestinian people have no homeland! They, alongside the Kurds, are the largest dispossessed peoples remaining in the world.'

Is it in fact correct to equate the Palestinians, a nationality largely invented for propaganda purposes, with the Kurds, a wholly distinct language and culture in existence for centuries? I should say it was questionable. Palestinians are Arabs. They speak Arabic, have an Arab heritage and are predominantly Muslim (In fact Christian Arabs in the region are often treated quite badly by the Palestinian authority, as I have myself witnessed in the area round Bethlehem. That is why they are emigrating in large numbers) .  They have in the past attempted to settle in Arab countries, and have often done so successfully but have on occasion been driven out (notably from Kuwait) for political reasons, or denied proper citizenship and rights by their Arab brethren. Compare them with other victims of the many hideous and bloody mass expulsions of the 20th century.

Turks and Greeks who were victims of the great population exchange of the 1920s have settled successfully as citizens in Greece and Turkey
Indian Muslims expelled from their ancestral homes in the 1947 partition have settled as citizens in Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs who were expelled from their ancestral homes  in Pakistan have settled in India.
Germans expelled from their ancestral homes in East Prussia, Poland and the Czech lands under the Potsdam agreement in the 1940s have settled successfully as citizens in Germany.
Greek and Turkish Cypriots driven from their ancestral homes in the partition and Turkish invasion of 1974 have settled successfully as citizens in their new homelands.
And hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled  from their ancestral homes in Arab and Muslim countries after 1948 have settled as citizens of Israel.

I accept that none of these population movements has been free of problems, and stress that none excuses the horrific brutality of the population exchanges themselves. But it does seem striking that alone of all these events, all many decades ago, this one remains unresolved, and the victims, their children and grandchildren, of the expulsions of 1948, remain in political limbo and in physical squalor – despite the enormous wealth of the oil-rich Arab world.

As for the question of having no homeland, it is in fact the case that the original Palestine Mandate (whose inhabitants can presumably be called 'Palestinians') included the whole of what is now Jordan, designated, by the Sanremo accords for 'close Jewish settlement'. So again, is this statement technically correct? The history of land title in this area is endlessly complex,  and most dogmatic statements made about it, don't work. Until 1918, it was a mess of Sanjaks and Vilayets of the Ottoman Empire (which had acquired it by force long ago) . It was then seized by Britain by force. Later the UN-approved state of Israel then seized more land by force. So did the emirate of TransJordan, which conquered the West Bank in 1948 But I have little doubt that, had the Arab armies of 1948 won their war, it would have been the Jews who would have been the refugees(as indeed they were elsewhere in the Middle East at that time). 



He asks :' Why does everyone think the Jewish people uniquely deserve a homeland (which I agree they do)'

Everyone doesn't think this. Many Jews are very much against it, for varying reasons (some think the restoration of Israel is blasphemous, some think Jews should assimilate in the countries of their birth). Nor would it be in any way 'unique'. On the contrary, practically everyone wants a homeland these days. Scores of new nations have been created since World War Two, often at the expense of minorities within them (see Africa above all). The thing that is unique about Jews is that so many people have an irrational and occasionally murderous hatred for them, as people – not on grounds of religion, or any outward characteristics, but because they are Jews. It was the most concentrated expression of this feeling so far, in the modern, scientific, advanced, civilised 20th century which convinced a lot of Jews that Zionism, previously reviled as an eccentric folly, might have a point. They'd ignored the Russian pogroms and the Dreyfus affair, and the casual Judophobia of much of  Europe. But the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht took things a little further.


'but the Palestinians and the Kurds do not?'

I don't know about the Kurds. It appears that for the moment, George W.Bush has given them a semi-official homeland in Iraq, though I wonder how long that will last. As for the Palestinians, see above.


'And comparing surrender to the might of Hitler's Third Reich with attempts to give self-determination to the impoverished and powerless Palestinians (first evicted from their homes by Jewish settlers half a century ago, and still being evicted from their homes today, in a slow-motion version of that earlier mass cleansing) just makes you look silly.'

First, that's not the comparison I made. I compared the behaviour of the European and North American powers in the face of aggressive demands, in 1938 and now.  Secondly, Israel does not just confront the local Arab population, but also the entire armed might of the oil-rich Arab world. It is propaganda genius on the part of the Arab world to have managed to portray the conflict in this way. 

He adds ' Apart from the fact that, as I said in my earlier post, Israel is only being asked to give up land it is holding illegally in the first place.'

Must I do this again? The question of the rightful ownership of the West Bank is not actually clear, unless you think it should be returned to the Ottomans, who at least held it for hundreds of years.  I personally think Israel made a grave mistake by occupying it, as a reasonably friendly Kingdom of Jordan on its Eastern frontier was a better defence by far than the current arrangements. But people who go on about illegal occupation must be asked to be consistent in their condemnations, or be suspected of partiality. Jordan occupied the west bank illegally from 1948 to 1967, and nobody cared a bit. If the Arab world's demands stopped at the pre-1967 border, that would be all well and good. But those of us old enough to remember 1966 can tell you that the Arab world did not love (or recognise)  the pre-1967 border when it was there, and launched frequent attacks across it. Nor did they love the Jewish state envisaged in the  1947 UN Partition Plan (much smaller than the present state of Israel) . They loved it so little that they invaded it.  Nor did they love the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan  (with an even smaller Jewish territory than in 1947).

To this day, maps of the area used in Arab schools, displayed on Arab TV stations, used in Arab history books, and pinned on the walls of Arab politicians do not show the existence of Israel at all. And significant parts of the Palestinian movement never have recognised ( and at this rate never will recognise)  recognised Israel's right to exist.

 

I don't believe I said anything about 'rights' beyond a right to exist as a Jewish state. But there is plenty of evidence that the Arab world feels there is no need to give unequivocal recognition to that right. And I am not surprised, given the confused and weak approach of the powers who are supposed to guarantee the stability of the world's national borders (who went, for instance, to war to restore Kuwait, without making any attempt in the interim to suggest that Saddam should be content with a portion of Kuwaiti territory, or that Kuwait should buy peace with him by conceding such a thing).

 

I repeat here a response I placed on the comment thread to various contributions:

'Mr Search raises an interesting point about the process through which George W.Bush began to *consider* support for a 'Palestinian' state. The absolutely fascinating and astonishingly furious letter which he received from the Saudi King a very short time before the 11th September attacks is indeed very important - and please note that it was almost exclusively devoted to the subject of American support for Israel. Likewise the enraged treatment of Israeli ( and American) delegates to the UN conference on 'racism' at Durban, which immediately preceded the 11th September.

But would that decision (in normal times a very tricky one for which the American nation and Congress would have had to be very carefully prepared) have been made with such speed and with so little fuss in other circumstances? Indeed, would it have in fact have been made at all?

The anti-Israel lobby go on endlessly about America's special relationship with Israel. They spend a lot less time examining its even more special relationship with Saudi Arabia. In my view the Bush administration inclined much more towards Riyadh than towards Jerusalem. That can also be said of the previous Buish administration, which sought to humble Israel at the Madrid conference.

The reason for the September 11 attacks was (as is obvious to anyone who knows the region) primarily Arab and Muslim fury at the USA's alliance with Israel (the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, also ended by George W.Bush, was a secondary but significant reason stated by those involved).

However, *and this is crucial* it has never, to my knowledge, been referred to as the reason for the attacks by any major US political figure, nor by the 9/11 Commission (for reasons explored by the authors of 'the 11th Day' and noted by me). That is why I make such a production out of pointing this out, something I am criticised for elsewhere.

The official explanation, adopted by the entire neo-conservative and liberal interventionist choir, has always been that the attack was motivated by 'Hatred for Our Way of Life'. 'Islamism' etc, and that it was the work of a specific organisation called 'Al Qaeda' with these priorities. One effect of this has been the swelling of 'Al Qaeda' from a nebulous concept into a vast bogey overshadowing the entire world, whose hand was seen behind every terrrorist act . This is obviously misleading, but is still clung to by many people who ought to know better. Why? Because the alternative (and correct) explanation has such worrying diploimatic and political consequences for so many people and countries.

This explanation suited the neo-cons and liberal interventionists who wished to make anti-Islamic points by attacking the Taleban in Afghanistan (almost wholly irrelevant to the issue) and who wished to spread 'democracy' to the Middle East by attacking Iraq.

It suited Saudi Arabia, from whose shores most of the murderers had come (and whose other connections with the 11th September are, I believe, explored in the 28 censored pages from the Congressional report on 9/11) .

And it suited the Palestinian movement, which initially badly underestimated the wounded fury of the people (as opposed to the government) of the USA. Had the American people identified the Manhattan massacre with the 'Palestinian' cause, there would never again have been any chance of a US intervention on behalf of their cause in world diplomacy. This is another reason why the US government might not have wanted to stress the 'Palestinian' aspect of the matter. It wanted to be free to negotiate more 'Land for Peace' deals with the PA.

It also appeared to suit supporters of the US-Israel alliance, who thought that the USA would abandon its support for them if it became clear that this was the price America would now pay for that support. My own view is that this was a short-sighted mistake. That is why I say what I say.

 

Mr Search says that the 9/11 Commission report mentions Khaled Sheikh Mohammed's animus towards Israel. Yes, but it does not in its general conclusions about the crime state the obvious and blatant fact that the entire attack was motivated by an desire to punish the USA for its support of Israel. Instead we are diverted into the nebulous 'Al Qaeda and the meaningless 'war on terror', which has followed - and got us worse than nowhere, because it is a wholly mistaken approach.  Nor has the US government acted (in public at least) as though this was the case (see my charting of its less-publicised actions, in 'The Cameron Delusion', the chapter 'A comfortable hotel on the road to Damascus' attacking the neo-conservative/liberal interventionist view of the event) . It is not to be mentioned, for reasons I explore above.

 

Mr Crosland rightly raises the rather belated claims of responsibility from Bin Laden and KSM. Perhaps Bin Laden's involvement was more marginal than has been believed, but it eventually suited him (as it suited the US government) to accept that he was the principal author. KSM was, I believe, repeatedly tortured. That casts some doubt on his testimony.

Why I hope Free Schools fail

If the English middle class will not fight for the return of grammar schools, then they should be given fully comprehensive schooling, hot and strong and unavoidable.

Two years of that, and they'll all be whimpering for grammar schools.

For far too long, a clever minority of smart left-wing parents have found loopholes in the horrible egalitarian state school system, while preaching its virtues to others. The last thing we need is any more such escape hatches or safety valves. After a long mental drought when the thinking classes would drone that 'you can't turn the clock back' or 'grammar schools can't be restored' or 'we couldn't have the eleven-plus again', the country is turning.

There is a great weight of opinion which now favours new grammar schools in large numbers  – and those who say it cannot be done need only look at the former East Germany, where dozens of new grammar schools have been successfully established since Communism (which was fully comprehensive, of course) collapsed. Germany, in all its states,  also tells us that you can have selection by agreement, and late switches between schools. with no need for a rigid exam at age 11.

The other need that has still to be addressed is providing good secondary schools for non-academic pupils. One vital part of this argument is that comprehensive schooling has utterly failed to fill this gap. The decision to go comprehensive in 1965 destroyed the only part of the state system that was actually working, apparently in the belief that the goodness of grammar schools, slightly diluted, would find its way into all schools.

Nothing of the kind has happened. All state schools have grown worse. That is why all exams have had to be devalued, to hide the decline.  The ones which are comparatively better are largely reserved for the privileged, the strong and the savvy, and closed to the children of the poor, ill-informed and weak. Instead of grammar education for all, we have secondary modern education for all. The old 1944 aspiration to provide technical schools has been entirely forgotten. And huge numbers of pupils who can barely read (thanks to other misguided 1960s reforms) are compelled to endure a pseudo-academic education which is of no use to them,  at the end of which they are awarded certificates of no use whatsoever.

A selective system gives us the chance to repair this damage, while rescuing academically gifted children from the wasteland of mixed-ability teaching and devalued examinations.

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, knows this perfectly well. But he's allowed himself to be diverted into the usual activity of a modern Education Secretary – stunts and gimmicks, plus Stalinist exhortation ('we must all work harder!') . These actions and speeches give the illusion of great change, while actually doing little more than alter appearances. Why, for instance, the big fuss about academies?  As Anastasia de Waal of Civitas has shown, there really isn't any proof that they are significantly better than other schools.  Or we have the lionising of heroic, charismatic heads, who can by the sheer force of their enormous personalities transform bad schools into good ones. But what happens when they leave? And what happens to the many schools which lack such leadership and always will?  Not all heads can be exceptional, any more than all our children can be above average. What we need are schools which are institutionally designed to succeed, and will do so even if the head and staff are merely competent.

The comprehensive system is anti-education, having as its main aim a political target -  the promotion of equality.  Why should schools be run on a principle which is designed to damage them? No wonder only giant personalities can make them work at all. Think what those giant personalities could do in schools that were designed to be good – grammar schools.

It is time for a return to selection, and all it needs is for a major political party to adopt this policy for it to happen. The current absurd position, under the School Standards and Framework Act of 1998, is that it is actually against the law for any local authority to open a new grammar school.

This rubbish would have been swept aside long ago if the elite classes really had to experience comprehensive schooling. But they don't.  Tories have been able to escape by paying fees, which is why that party has been so indifferent to this grave problem for so long. Well-off dwellers in market towns have been able to use rural comprehensives which, while inferior to grammar schools, do not suffer the discipline problems and high staff turnover of their inner-city equivalents.  The Roman Catholic Church has managed to preserve some standards in many of its secondary schools.  But now the education disaster, with all its social, cultural and economic implications, has begun to threaten the security of well-off people far from urban squalor.

Labour grandees – more importantly, for it is their party which ferociously insists on comprehensives, whereas the Tories merely meekly comply – have been able to escape through loopholes. They get their children into schools which, through small expensive catchment area or religious preference,  have escaped the worst features of the all-ability bog-standard comp (which is still a bog-standard comp even after it has been renamed 'The Burger Queen Academy, a specialist school for astrophysics and hairdressing', or whatever it is).

Until now these escapees by fiddle and dodge have mostly been left wingers –  above all Anthony Blair who wangled his young into the London Oratory. Many more obscure leftists , some of them almost Leninist in their fervour for comprehensive schools,  have made sure that their own heirs and successors were protected from it. It is interesting that such people will be rude about almost every form of education wangle except the one that they use – the catchment area dodge.

There are several schools, mainly in a certain part of North London, where early and careful attention to the borders of catchment areas can assure young Karl, Leon and Rosa a place at a school which is actually subtly, elusively selective, but officially comprehensive. It is quite expensive to do this, but New Labour apparatchiks are often rich these days, and it is not as if they are saving to pay for school fees. Those involved may then, if they choose, deliver lofty lectures to the rest of us on how wicked we are to pay fees, go to church or favour selection, while their young breeze into Oxbridge on the state schools quota. This interesting state of affairs is dealt with in detail in the chapter entitled 'The Fall of the Meritocracy' in my book 'The Cameron Delusion',  the most, er, comprehensive examination of this issue ever published in this country.

Now, thanks to 'Free Schools' and to David Cameron, this hypocritical pestilence is spreading into the Tory Party. Mr Cameron seems to see some virtue in sending his children to state schools, declaring in February 2009 that he would 'like them to go through the state sector' and adding 'I think it's crazy that we should pay lots of money for private schools. We all pay our taxes. You should have really good state schools available for all.'

As a statement, this is incoherent. What is the automatic virtue of a school being run by the state?  And if there were truly good state schools available for all, then he wouldn't need to say this. If there aren't (and there aren't, which is why so many people pay lots of money in fees) then why does he want to send his children to them? And by the way, does he think it was 'crazy' of his parents to send him to the hilariously opulent Heatherdown prep school (special lavatories for chauffeurs at sports day) and then to Eton? Does he think they should have sent him to the local primary and a reasonably civilised rural comp, as no doubt they could have done? I doubt it.

The answer to all these questions, of course, is that Mr Cameron is acting and speaking for political advantage. He was doing the same when he proclaimed himself to be in favour of 'elitism' in schools on Friday. If that is really so, he must choose between two different kinds – a meritocratic elite, based upon academic selection, or what we have now, based on money and privilege.  The people he hopes to win round to his Liberal Tory project are egalitarians, and so they 'believe in' egalitarian, secular comprehensive schooling, at least as a slogan. You can't really believe in it for any other reason, or in any other way, as it doesn't actually exist and never will.

I'm sure Mr Cameron personally doesn't believe in this. He doesn't (and I have this on good authority from his first boss at Tory Central Office)  believe in anything.  But he sees advantage in it and lo! Wonder of wonders! A charming and old-fashioned Church of England primary school lies a short drive from his London home (or what was his London home until he was confined in Downing Street) and also that of Michael Gove.

Even more happily, both men, in this secular age,  turn out to be that rare thing in their generation,  enthusiastic members of the Church of England, and their wives, likewise keen church supporters in this era of unbelief, do sterling work  on the parish magazine of the church to which this school is attached.  So when the highly oversubscribed little school picks its pupils, it is entirely right and just that the children of these pious couples should be among the lucky ones. Why, they even shared the school run.

Had things turned out differently, and had this school turned them away, I wonder what the Camerons and the Goves would have done.  Likewise, I wonder what they will do when their children turn eleven, and they face the desert of London secondary education. Funnily enough a solution to this problem may be at hand, if Toby Young's West London Free School manages to succeed, and others follow suit. After all, London is full of middle-class parents who have to choose between Bog Lane Comp or enormous fees, and hate it.

Mr Young's school, of course, has to fulfil the requirements of the 1998 Act. It cannot select by ability. That is against the law.

The same is true of a number of 'comprehensives' in North London favoured by New Labour persons. Yet these are famed for their excellent Oxbridge entry.  I shall be very interested to see, seven or eight years hence, what the West London school's  pupil profile and university entrance record turns out to be.

Can you really have, as I think Mr Young has suggested, 'grammar schools for all'? I do not think so.  I am told that streaming or setting can recreate forms of selection, and -  while accepting that these are better than nothing-  I note that the whim of a head or a governing body can end or alter them, whereas a school that is openly and clearly selective from the start will remain so unless it is closed down.  Many teachers (and heads), influenced by decades of radical teacher training, strongly  disapprove of streaming and setting, and have dogmatic reasons for wanting mixed-ability classes. I'd also point out that the ethos and atmosphere of a school entirely populated by pupils who are able to benefit from academic education are quite different from the ethos and atmosphere of one where such pupils are a segregated minority on the same site.

But you can have a school that is officially comprehensive in its constitution, but isn't in practice.

However,  the one group of people who will never benefit from such institutions are the children of the poor and powerless and ill-informed parents, who do not understand the deceptive maze of modern state education and cannot play it to their advantage.

It is these whose lives are ruined and wasted by our national hypocrisy. It is these who are being betrayed by all the leading political parties. Because Free Schools will not help them, and because they will reduce the necessary pressure on the establishment to restore grammar schools, I hope they fail.

Yasser Arafat's cruise missiles did their job on 9/11. Just ask Israel

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Most people still won't face what really happened ten years ago today. We still get the standard-issue rubbish about how New York was attacked because 'Islamists hate our way of life'. And we still get the thought-free incantation that '9/11 changed everything', a vacant slogan used to justify unending, dangerous attacks on our freedom.

This general unwillingness to think got us into the futile war in Afghanistan, and the appallingly costly and bloody and pointless war in Iraq. The pathetic Blair creature, who has learned nothing from his life, wants us to be even stupider, and launch a war in Iran as well.

Perhaps we won't accept the truth because it is so awkward. It is certainly awkward for me, as I'll explain. But before I go any further here, let me dispel any idea that the Manhattan massacre was connived at by the US authorities. This is obscene, baseless drivel, grossly disrespectful to the innocent dead and in defiance of a huge body of knowledge. Those who spout it should be subjected to cold contempt.

And I must here very strongly recommend the superb new account of the outrage, The Eleventh Day, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, a wholly absorbing and powerful narrative full of good sense, properly weighed facts and clear understanding.

It deals with many important points. There's the bungling of the security services, pretty much standard in these over-rated organisations. It is to cover their blushes that a million pairs of tweezers have been pointlessly confiscated by boot-faced airport security guards.

There's the creepy suppression of 28 pages of the US Congress's inquiry report into 9/11, believed to endanger Washington's very special relationship with Saudi Arabia.

But most impressive is their description of how and why the official 9/11 Commission deliberately ducked the issue of what motivated the murderers. 'All the evidence,' the authors correctly say, 'indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators.'

They were striking at America's alliance with Israel. The hijacked planes, as I wrote on this page ten years ago, were Yasser Arafat's cruise missiles.

That is why news of the New York murders led to grisly demonstrations of joy and triumph across the Middle East, film of which was quickly suppressed by the Palestinian movement for fear of a wave of American rage directed against them. And it worked. American wrath and thunderbolts fell on Afghanistan and Iraq, not on Gaza or Ramallah, let alone on Saudi Arabia, where most of the murderers came from.

Within weeks, George W. Bush had reversed a long-standing policy and come out in favour of a Palestinian state.

This interpretation doesn't suit me personally at all. It scares me stiff. I stick to it because I cannot avoid the fact that it is true. I believe it is the duty of the civilised West, having created the state of Israel, to defend its integrity and independence against irrational hatred and murderous threats. I believe this in spite of the fact that Israel has done, and continues to do, many wicked things.

I believe also that the West is deeply unwilling to face facts about this. It repeatedly pursues a policy of forcing Israel to give up territory in return for unenforceable promises of peace. This sort of negotiation was last used by Neville Chamberlain towards Hitler over Czechoslovakia. It failed, and is universally reviled as 'Appeasement'. Yet now it is called 'Land for Peace', and applauded.

The Muslim world has never properly acknowledged Israel's right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state. We have never asked it to because we thought we could buy peace with concessions. Israel is already so small it will eventually disappear completely if we carry on buying peace with slices of land.

As long as the Arab and Muslim world refuse to accept Israel's existence, we are ensuring horrible misery in the future – either in the Middle East, or here, or in the USA – or all three. In the coming decade we are going to have to choose between pressing, with all the courtesy and force at our command, for a genuine, permanent recognition of Israel, or accepting a weak process of appeasement interrupted by who knows what horrors.
Even though we all know how appeasement ends, I think it is what we have chosen. That is why we hide the truth from ourselves today and every day.

Smiley's life is best told by the book

The BBC version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was so good it made me get a TV, after years of not having one in my home. Yet when I watched it again a few years ago I found it oddly slow and quiet, not as thrilling as the first time round. I had changed completely in the 25 years between, as we all have.

This is because I am used to more and more of my thinking and feeling being done for me by the TV or the cinema, thanks to music, special effects and fast, clever editing.

I'll be interested to see how the new film version compares, but in the end they can't beat the book, drawn from life by a wonderful observer. Unlike the TV series, which starred Alec Guinness as Smiley, it gets better every time.

A Government of adolescents

David Cameron's smirking humiliation of Nadine Dorries in Parliament on Wednesday looked planned and deliberate to me. It was a straightforward piece of crude male-chauvinist bullying, more than a little bit smutty. But because Mr Cameron is viewed by the feminist sisterhood as friendly to the unrestricted abortion they all love, while Mrs Dorries is hostile to it, the women's movement has not come to her aid.

Mr Cameron's bodyguard of media flatterers also let him get away with this teenage stuff, not worthy of a man in such a responsible and serious job. And they have given a similar free pass to the Chancellor, George Osborne, for a gross and inept jest at a magazine awards ceremony.

It is impossible to imagine any previous Chancellor making such a stupid public mistake. We have a Government of adolescents, and an adolescent media to sustain and support them. But the world is still a grown-up place. What must the Chinese think?

**************
Somehow we're being sold the idea that the Blair-Brown regime sucked up to Colonel Gaddafi, but our current Government kept their distance. This is false. Archives reveal that the 'Minister for Africa', Henry Bellingham slurped up to the Colonel (referring to him as 'Brother Leader') at an EU-Africa Summit in Tripoli on November 30, 2010. A few weeks before, another Minister, Alastair Burt, told the Libyan British Business Council that Libya had 'turned a corner' which 'has paved the way for us to begin working together again'.

**************
If we are going to abandon our Christian heritage completely, and abolish the daily act of public worship in schools, shouldn't Parliament at least debate it and repeal the law? And shouldn't the Church of England, which handed over many schools to the state in return for this provision, complain?

The Penny Drops, at Least in Scotland

For years I have thumped my head against a stone wall, trying to explain that I don't think the Tory Party will win an election if it adopts the policies I favour. For years, my articles explaining this have been met with the idiotic, non-responsive  jibe: 'Well, William Hague tried it in 2001 and look what happened to him'. Actually, Mr Hague didn't go nearly far enough for me, but it wouldn't have helped if he had. The problem was that the Tories themselves were a poison brand.  People refused to vote for them because of who they were, not because of what they stood for. That is why they needed to be dissolved and replaced. And for that, they needed to lose the last election.

Well, they did lose the last election, as I knew they would and said they would. But until now, nobody much as noticed. Now the would-be leader of the Scottish Tories, Murdo Fraser, has suggested that the party be dissolved and re-established under another name. I'll come back to that in a moment. But in the meantime, it is encouraging to see that at last someone else, from however different a perspective, has recognised my basic point. It doesn't matter what they do. The Tories are institutionally finished. And if they died, Labour wouldn't be far behind.

As I repeatedly said, they were now so loathed by so many people that, whatever they did and said, they could not command a majority. Millions of people, I said, would rather tandoori their  grandmothers than vote Tory ever again. Far from calling, as my critics wrongly claimed, for one more Eurosceptic heave, my view was far more radical than that of David Cameron and his 'modernisers'. The thing neededto be destroyed – not renamed, but actually destroyed in a fourth catastrophic election defeat which caused it to be wound up, the tragic fragments reverently collected up and  given decent burial, and an entirely new party – not 'centre right' butquite radically conservative, could then move in to the vacant space. This remains my view. Except that the fourth election defeat in a row has been wrongly presented as a victory ( ask most Tories if their party lost the last election. They think it won. If it had, the en thusiastic leftism of the Cameroons would lack its current excuse).

Their view was, more or less, that the Tory Party could be detoxified by becoming more soppy liberal. This had major difficulties. One, if it did this, it would inevitably lose a significant minority of voters, probably to UKIP or abstention. This minority wasn't enough to form a positive threat. But it did form a negative threat. Its existence would deny the party seats where they needed them most. What they gained, they would lose. The other was, that a large number of people would continue to believe that deep down they were the 'same old Tories',  even if they were not. This ludicrous fantasy still persists in places like the new Statesman and the Leader's Office of the labour Party, where the blindingly obvious unprincipled liberalism of Mr Cameron and his friends is still construed as a cunning ploy.

Only one other group believes this, and it is a diminishing one – the tweedy old Thatcherites who fooled themselves that Mr Cameron was putting on all this husky and hoodie stuff, to get elected and then turn round and rend the Left. I met a lot of these, when a couple of years ago, I spoke at a Bruges Group meeting at the Tory conference and told them what sort of government Mr Cameron would head. I got a cool reception. As I was right, and they were wrong, I've been particularly pleased to receive one or two letters from people admitting they had been mistaken. But too late.  

Or is it? Should hope be kindled in my pessimistic breast (can you have a pessimistic breast? A poet would know)by Mr Fraser's initiative.

Well, not precisely. It is, in his case, wholly cynical as far as I can see, a bit like renaming the Royal Mail 'Consignia'. The new party will be the Tories, but under another less toxic name. It will (and this is the clue to what's going on) ally with the Tories at the Westminster Parliament.  In short, it's just a PR dodge trying to get a few more seats for the Tories in Scotland at the next election, which is going to be a tricky one for Mr Cameron.

The Scottish Tories used (I think) to be pretty widely known as Unionists, not as Conservatives. Their main activity was getting huge amounts of public money shipped north of the border. Their vote was based upon Protestant Unionism, not always that much different from its cousin in Northern Ireland, which to this day attracts many working class  votes which would go Labour on the mainland. When Protestant Christianity and Unionism gave way to secularism, the cultural revolution and the European Union, it quickly shrivelled.  It seems to me that Scottish Nationalism has neatly replaced Unionism, and will continue to do so as long as it stays just short of independence, using the threat to squeeze powers and money out of London, much like Quebec in Canada. I don't think the Tories will ever get that essentially 19th-century vote back again, in any foreseeable circumstances.

In fact if if a genuinely conservative London government took us out of the EU, Scotland might well want to stay in, as might Wales. That could be interesting.

The effect of EU membership on the Federal State which has been the United Kingdom is one of the most unexamined issues of our time.

But I digress. Mr Fraser's diagnosis is right. His cure is nothing like enough. The whole thing must go, and what remains afterwards must obviously have been purged by defeat and collapse.

Why just stop at nurses? We could give those tabards to our police, politicians, immigration staff, teachers...

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

What a pity that nurses are to stop wearing their scarlet Do Not Disturb waistcoats as they patrol hospital wards. These fetching items of clothing sum up modern Britain so perfectly that they should be much more widely available.

The Prime Minister could wear one during meetings with constituents worried about crime, disorder, immigration, EU control of Britain, wasteful foreign aid or the dismantling of the Armed Forces – all subjects on which he doesn't want to hear from us, thank you very much.

The police could wear them as they stroll, chatting to each other, through the streets, while they ignore all the things they regard as too trivial to trouble them – public swearing, alfresco widdling, cyclists scattering old ladies, littering, canna¬bis smoking, car theft and burglary. You know the sort of thing.

Teachers could wear them as they fail to teach yet another generation to read, stopping their ears to half a ton of research telling them that synthetic phonics works, because they think it is 'authoritarian'.

BBC complaints officers could wear them as they explain to licence-payers that their tastes, concerns and political views have no place on the airwaves, and they should be grateful to have the BBC at all.

All these people – and plenty more known to us in our daily lives – no longer do the jobs they are paid to do. Isn't it interesting that the work once done by the police is now handed to powerless Police Community Support Officers, that 'graduate' nurses are too grand to wield a bedpan and delegate such stuff to support workers. Teachers, apparently unable to teach much, have legions of 'assistants'.

Like the undisturbed nurses, they could all hand out pills – 'antidepressants', Ritalin, or semi-legal cannabis to zonk us all into believing that things are just great.
And our immigration officers, as they wave through the next batch of EU citizens anxious to do the jobs we don't fancy, could all be emblazoned with the words Do Not Disturb: Country Committing Suicide.

Rubbish dressed up as TV 'Culture'

When a nation goes rotten from the top down, it has some curious effects. One of them was on view last week when the BBC showed an expensive and slick drama, Page Eight. The camerawork, the production and the editing were of the best.

The actors, especially, were superb. Bill Nighy played every Left-wing Oxbridge graduate's fantasy of himself, haggardly handsome, effortlessly attractive to women, lived-in, witty, successful yet still rebellious. Michael Gambon was a wonderful old geezer. Rachel Weisz was the new Thinking Man's Crumpet. Ralph Fiennes was more believable as Prime Minister than any of the past four real ones. He was also the only character in the entire drama who didn't smoke roll-ups.

I watched it with enjoyment, until I realised that it was rubbish. The plot didn't make sense. Does a man on the run from a villainous state go to visit his ex-wife? Most of the scenes were wholly unbelievable, made bearable only by the quality of the acting. There were cliches as lumpy and wooden as tree stumps.

This would have been for¬giveable in an episode of Spooks, which everyone knows is tosh. But this is supposed to be 'Culture' with a capital 'C', the work of the immensely grand liberal-elite playwright Sir David Hare.

Like Alan Bennett and Stephen Fry, other Leftist Corporation favourites, Sir David can do no wrong. And so the best broadcasting skills in the country are recruited to make it look good. But it isn't.

The bodies of heroes hidden in a cloud of lies

The Government did not like the scenes at Wootton Bassett as the dead came home, and wants to make sure that nothing of the kind ever grows up again in any other place. It wants to be free to conduct more stupid, unwanted wars, without being reminded of the true cost of them.

From now on, the bodies of those soldiers killed in the Afghan conflict will be flown home to RAF Brize Norton, and will no longer pass through Wootton Bassett.

There are acceptable reasons for that. But there is no acceptable reason for what happens next. They will no longer go through the centre of any town, being routed through suburbs and along fast main roads and bypasses where no crowds are likely to gather.

They could go a different way. Brize Norton is on the edge of the town of Carterton, with a similar population to that of Wootton Bassett. There is also a perfectly good and rather beautiful route that would take the cortege to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford through the large and lovely village of Bampton.

I have heard the various official explanations for this curious routing, including the shameful, pitiful claim that the roads of Carterton, 22ft wide, are 'too narrow'. I think the time has come to say that these explanations are so much tripe, the sort of thing dictators and despots say.

In a free country, the Government should suffer for its lies.

Proof the 'War on Drugs' is a pathetic sham

We are always told that the authorities have given up on cannabis so that they can be 'freed up' to pursue other drugs, allegedly worse, and the 'evil dealers' who sell them. Since cannabis can unpredictably send you mad for life, I can't see why it is any less serious than heroin or cocaine.

But if the authorities have been 'freed up', they haven't taken much advantage of their freedom.

Thanks to Tim Knox and Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies, and to Nicola Blackwood MP, we now know that of 2,530 people convicted and ¬sentenced for supply of 'Class A' drugs last year,

1,756 did not even go to prison and none received the maximum sentence ('life'). There is no 'War on Drugs'. It is a sham.

* Can one of the many reporters in Libya stop gushing for a moment, and ask a few of the romantic rebels what they think of what happened in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and who they think was behind it? The answers might cool their ardour a bit.

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