Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 330

As Dave 'does the talking', war dead are sneaked out of the back gate

This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column

As Dave 'does the talking', war dead are sneaked out of the back gate The flag-wrapped coffins of dead servicemen are to be driven out of the back gate of RAF Brize Norton when it takes over from Lyneham (a few weeks from now) as the arrival point for the fallen.

They will then be routed down side roads to avoid nearby Carterton – a town almost exactly the same size as Wootton Bassett – and make their way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford along A-roads and bypasses. There'll be a small guard of honour near the hospital entrance (there already is) but somehow or other the cortege won't go down any High Streets.

I will tell you in a moment what the official excuses are for this. I should have thought the mere words 'back gate' would tell most people all they need to know about this decision.

And despite the Prime Minister's oily award of the title 'Royal' to Wootton Bassett, you can bet that he'd much rather the public scenes of grief and remembrance in that place had never happened, and that nobody noticed the frequent deaths his weakness and political cowardice are causing.

In the same way, the Defence Ministry has almost completely succeeded in covering up the appalling numbers of men who have been gravely injured in Afghanistan because the Government hasn't the guts to quit this meaningless war. We hardly ever see them. Were they all to be assembled in one photograph, the nation would demand instant withdrawal and probably get it.

The official version is that the families of the dead will be using a new 'Repatriation Centre' at Brize Norton, and that it is near the back gate. Routing the hearses through the base might disrupt its normal operations.

And here's what was said by Andrew Robathan, whose stirring title is 'Minister for Defence Personnel, Welfare and Veterans'. Speaking to Radio Oxford, he explained: 'The side gate was seen by the Ministry of Defence and the police as the most appropriate way to take out future corteges.'

I love that word 'appropriate', the favourite adjective of those who have quietly forsaken the idea that there are such things as 'right' and 'wrong'.

He continued: 'I am not sure taking coffins in hearses past schools, past families, past married quarters is necessarily the thing that everybody would wish to see .  .  . the focus must be on the families of the dead service  personnel. They are the people who care most. That is where our focus is.'

This is a curious statement. None of us exactly 'wishes' to see a funeral going by. But surely death should not be hidden away. And surely it is right that all of us – especially the young and service families – should be reminded of the price of courage and duty, and given the opportunity to salute these fine things.

You can believe the various official excuses. Or you might recall that until (in April 2008) this newspaper highlighted the way the hearses were left to fight their way through indifferent traffic, even cut up by impatient motorists at roundabouts, they did  not get a police escort for the final few miles to the hospital.

Mr Cameron says that he will do the talking about war, and the commanders should do the fighting. Well, he may have a point there, or he would if he were not militarily and diplomatically clueless.

But he might also mention that while he is doing the talking, real men are doing the dying, and their families are doing the weeping.

Personally, I don't think he or his Government colleagues are grown-up enough to pay the price of their own vanity and bombast. So they sneak the dead out by the back gate, and hope it doesn't get on the TV.

Slaughtered...by our side

You might not like to read this brief and terrible description of a scene in Libya, written by that very fine reporter Martin Fletcher: 'In a hospital at Sabratha, 50 miles west of Tripoli, lay 11 corpses, perhaps more. Their state was such that a precise count was impossible. Three were identifiably young children, though little more than the head of one remained. One journalist fainted at the sight.'

The previous day, Martin had written from the scene of an air strike in Souk- al-Juma, which is a centre of opposition to Colonel Gaddafi: 'In the rooms still standing there were beds, a freezer full of food, plastic flowers, clothes, cushions and a children's bedroom with a cot, bunks and a yellow teddy bear. The apartments had clearly been civilian and were manifestly in a residential area... There was no sign of any military or government installation. Locals insisted that there were none.'

Our side did these things. I have left out some more gruesome details of the dead and injured. Since our only official justification for intervening in Libya is to 'protect civilians', why haven't these undoubted incidents led to an emergency debate in Parliament on our involvement in this cack-handed, bird-brained adventure?

It's fathers we're demonising

If I make a reasoned case against state subsidies for fatherless families, I am immediately, and falsely, accused by Tories and other Leftists of 'demonising single mothers'.

As it happens, I think single mothers make an entirely rational decision, based on the existing benefits system and the divorce laws. So we should change the system, and reform divorce.

If David Cameron makes a weird, puce-faced attack on absent fathers, he is taken seriously by a largely sycophantic media. Read what the Prime Minister says. It is – and I am being mild here – actually unhinged. It is close to an incitement to violence, and if violence follows it, then I think the victims should make sure that Mr Cameron's outburst is considered by the Crown Prosecution Service.

Here goes. These are the actual words of the Queen's First Minister, and Controller of the Nuclear Button: 'We need to make Britain a genuinely hostile place for fathers who go AWOL. It's high time runaway dads were stigmatised, and the full force of shame was heaped upon them. They should be looked at like drink drivers, people who are beyond the pale.'

He wouldn't dare say any such thing about the many women who deliberately set out to bring up children without fathers, and he was careful to sugar his statement with exaggerated praise for 'heroic' single mothers. The deep anti-male, politically correct bias in our culture has grown markedly worse since the Tory Party was captured by Mr Cameron and his rich liberal friends.

Can pills really make you a racist bigot?
 
A pitiful creature called John Galliano is given to mad, insulting outbursts in Paris bars. He has been filmed speaking of his love for Hitler and his, er, dislike of Jews.

Even his friends in the fashion world, who know more about handbags than about Hitler, can see that this is not a good look.

He has sought to excuse his behaviour by pointing out that he is, or has been, 'addicted' to various pills.

Two points here. There is no such thing as addiction, which is a fancy name for human weakness. If the pills are bad for him, then it's his responsibility not to take them.

And isn't it rather far-fetched to suggest that a few pills can turn a decent person into an anti-Jewish bigot?

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More proof that the BBC are willing to believe anything bad about Israel. On June 18, the Corporation's website published a laughably unlikely story claiming that Rabbis in Jerusalem had sentenced a dog to death by stoning. It was false from nose to tail and had been retracted, with apologies, by the Israeli newspaper that first published it, days before the BBC picked it up (without checking) from a French news agency, and a website.

It's partly because of this hopeless bias – Israel bad, Arabs good –  that the BBC hardly ever mentioned the tyranny, corruption and political squalor of the Arab world before it became impossible to ignore in the spring.

The excuse industry at work

Christopher Charles states: 'Annie was sexually abused by her father from the age of 11 to 16. She bore him a child which was taken into care. Unable to bear the abuse any longer, Annie let herself fell into the clutches of a man twice her age who it transpired was a pimp. She was prostituted out to five or six men a day and was anaesthetised with heroin. She became an addict. She has carried on being an addict for the next twenty years. [She is now in her late thirties and has been in and out of prison countless times.] Finally by dint of her own efforts and that of outside agencies she has finally got herself drug free. 'Annie' [I've changed her name] is one of thousands. Ask any social worker or health visitor or prison officer. And PH has the effrontery to claim that 'all' addicts submit to their addiction willingly. He needs to get out more and talk to some real people before loftily proclaiming such loathsome prejudices as though they bore the stamp of fact.'

Let us examine this statement. It begins with a series of repellent criminal assaults on 'Annie'. I am, I must say, dismayed that the 'abuse' continued after the incestuous child was taken into care, for presumably by then the authorities knew of the abuse and the culprit should have been in prison for a long stretch. There he could not have continued the abuse. . Perhaps he, too, had lots of excuses for his behaviour and so was left at liberty by our excuse-making injustice system, to continue abusing his daughter. I hope nobody imagines that I am in favour of that.

The assaults on 'Annie' are appalling. But Mr Charles seems to assume that these events have robbed 'Annie' of the power to choose.

Note how in this account 'Annie' is always the subject of passive verbs, or a person apparently without a will of her own. She 'lets herself fall'. She is 'prostituted'. Mr Charles is so used to making excuses for wrongdoing that he does not write, as I would have done, that the father of this girl abused her.
In the world of excuses, everybody is passive, nobody has any power of will, decision or resistance, all is fore-ordained by previous abuse, maltreatment etc, back to the beginning of time. Nobody is ever responsible, and none of us has any duty to overcome evil circumstances. 

Annie now 'lets herself fall' into the clutches of a pimp. Lets herself fall? Did she have no choice about this? The language is obscure, and I believe deliberately so.

She 'was prostituted'. How exactly is this different from 'she decided to become a prostitute'. Was she forced? How? Was there truly no choice in our welfare state? Did she never have any opportunity to take up any other life? The passive, will-free language, crammed with the assumption that nobody is ever to blame for anything they do,  makes it impossible to tell.

And then she 'was anaesthetised' with heroin. Anaesthetised? Against what?  By whom? Was a professional anaesthetist present? Was it a measured dose?  Did she consent? Or was she held down by force while the drug was administered?

Bah. Humbug. Tell us what actually happened in good honest English, would you please, Mr Charles.

This slippery, misleadingly medicalised , passive euphemism tells us nothing about the crucial events. I suspect that this is because it would confirm my original statement that so annoyed Mr Charles, namely that all heroin abusers take the drug because they want to, because they enjoy taking it, in spite of the fact that they are well aware it is both illegal and wrong.

I do not in fact 'claim' that 'addicts' 'submit to their "addiction" willingly'. I should have thought Mr Charles would know by now that I do not believe that there is any such thing as addiction, an excuse made up for people who are not prepared to control their appetites for harmful pleasures. Nor is what  say a 'claim'. If Mr Charles has any objective evidence for the existence of a medical condition which could be called 'addiction', in any way distinguishable from a weak will, I would like to hear it.

One other thing

The wearisome obtuseness of atheist bores would be funny if it didn't take up so much space. Why can't these people just accept that belief or unbelief in God is a choice? Why can't they accept that they have chosen unbelief because they greatly dislike and fear the idea that their private actions may be judged by an absolute standard?

Well, the answer to that's pretty obvious, isn't it?  That would involve admitting that their belief is a selfish scuttle away from justice, rather than a grand assertion of intellectual purity. Hence their flight from the idea of choice, and the shutdown of their logical processes anywhere near the point where this might need to be acknowledged.

The daft 'argument' about change in someone's pocket could only be advanced by someone who had wilfully misunderstood this point. It is possible to discover by objective enquiry how much change someone has in his pocket. It is not possible to discover if God exists.

Gosh, is that clear now? Of course not. 

The wilful closure of a human mind is a tragic thing.

For example: I'm told: 'You have said that if I asked you how much money I had in my pocket and you did not know, you could 'choose' to believe that it was £4.20.'

No, I haven't. The choice only exists because the truth cannot be objectively determined. The person has to invent statements I have never made, and could not have made, to support his dismal 'argument.

More angry people

I will turn in a moment to comments on this week's column. But first I'd like to take up once more a discussion we had last week about 'anger' in debate. This arises from my appearance on Sunday on BBC1's 'The Big Questions', which is still on the iPlayer if anyone wishes to watch it.

The second half of the discussion was devoted to the Israeli-Arab question. I repeated the arguments I made in my article from Gaza last autumn, which was posted here. But the Palestinian case was put mainly by a man in a chequered keffiyeh scarf and matching tie,  and by a female alleged comedian from Glasgow who made several interjections along the standard propaganda lines of the current anti-Israel campaign.

Were either or both of these people consumed with anger? Would those who make this claim about my public appearances (with the intention of invalidating my arguments) make the same claim about either of them? I would be interested to know.

My suspicion is that they would not. Most people are perfectly happy to see their own opinions forcefully and passionately expressed, and I would imagine my critics have pretty much swallowed the current anti-Israel orthodoxy of the blathering classes. Yet in one of these cases I think the speaker actually damaged his cause by being so impassioned. Nor did he have the excuse that he needed to shout to get heard. He had been given a prominent position, his own microphone and a pretty-much-guaranteed major role in the discussion.

In answer to comments, I called the author Sir Terence Pratchett because he chose to accept a knighthood. As far as I know, it was given in that form, and if it hadn't been, it would have been absurd. The formulation 'Sir Terry' is ridiculous and incongruous, and if people don't wish to be addressed by their full names they shouldn't accept titles of honour.

I have heard the position of the new atheists well summed up elsewhere as 'God doesn't exist – and I hate Him!' But I wasn't aware that Sir Terence (whose books I have not felt compelled to finish, or explore further, after sampling one or two) had said he hated God for not existing. Both positions are of course nonsensical. Sir Terence has no idea if God exists or not, and can believe in Him tonight if he chooses to do so. You cannot hate someone who is not there.

My own view is that both believers and atheists fear that God exists, but believers also hope that he does. The passion which atheists devote the subject suggests (as such passion almost invariably does) a grave uncertainty underneath. So do the linguistic and debating tricks employed by some atheist bores (and there is no more expert and accomplished room-emptier than one of these) to strip them of any responsibility for their religious opinions, which they have somehow been 'forced' into.

Mr 'Avid Fan' tells me I am self-righteous and asks me to assert that his grandmother is better off now than if she'd committed suicide some years ago. He interprets her stated wish to join her late husband, when she was still coherent, as a desire to do so. Or so it seems to me.

I believe that the Christian religion (though not Judaism) has set its canon against self-slaughter. I am also (incidentally) haunted by a macabre Chares Williams story in which a man kills himself and finds that nothing has happened except that he is exactly where he was before, only in a perceptibly darker, more sinister version of the world he was attempting to leave, populated by others like himself, and with a rope still uncomfortably round his neck. What if suicide, far from being an escape, is a way deeper into the woe that takes us there?

For me, therefore, there is no choice in the matter. It is something I must not do, and must not aid another to do. Others are in a different position, especially if it becomes legal to assist suicide. Would I be let off if (for instance) I were in some state of unutterable despair which was not of my own making – say in the midst of being tortured slowly to death in some despot's dungeon? I like to think so. But I don't know.

One of the main reasons for this prohibition, though not the principal one, is (I think) the unending puzzled grief and guilt which suicide leaves behind it.

Many old and bereaved people speak longingly of their wish to rejoin their lifelong companion. Many others just speak of their wish to be dead. Yet very few of them take their own lives, even so, though they have the power to do so.

I am not sure it is self-righteous to advance the arguments I set out. Did Mr Avid Fan ever ask his grandmother if he could help her achieve this end, which would be the logical conclusion of thee view he now expresses?  I have to say that I very much doubt it, and it is easy to imagine why he didn't. Most of us, self-righteous or no, would feel there was something grotesque and ugly about such an offer, even made out of kindness. And we might also suspect that the answer would be pretty brusque (old, ill people can be surprisingly forceful when they choose). In which case is it fair to use her statement of wistful longing as a retrospective justification for sending her into the Big Sleep now?

One of the problems with senility and dementia, as with many other states of being on the fringe of life, is that we have little or no idea of what the person is actually feeling and experiencing. My own suspicion is that the horrible mismatch between bodily decay and mental decay which makes so many final years so ghastly to behold is a consequence of our modern way of life and of modern medicine's futile ability to prolong physical existence without being able to prolong health. But that does not permit us to look at the result and say we will deal with it with a lethal injection, a plastic bag or a dose of barbiturates.

There should be far more hospice places, far more concentration on making death more bearable for the dying and for those who love them. But modern medicine, which strives with enormous officiousness to keep people alive up to a certain point, becomes cold and dismissive once they are old. I suspect that many old people are now effectively starved and thirsted to death, while many others are connected to the morphine pump , ostensibly  to relieve their pain with no real expectation that they will ever wake up.

In answer to Mr Perrin, this country will not leave the EU until a political party committed to this object is elected with a clear majority. I have explained at length how that could be brought about. It starts with the destruction of the Tory Party.  I do not believe in referendums, and am uninterested in the futile Euro-elections to the Brussels Supreme Soviet. Why give this farce legitimacy by taking part in it?

Juries (as described at length in my 'Abolition of Liberty', in the chapter 'Twelve Angry Persons') used to be selected on the basis of a property qualification, which was in effect an age and education barrier. When this was got rid of, nothing was done to replace it because the government were afraid to do so. Anything they suggested was bound to offend someone. At the time, the minimum voting age was 21, which is bad enough. It is now 18, and may well soon be 16, which will mean 16-year-old jurors.

I was astonished at the age of the woman Fraill. But it did seem to me that a combination of age and educational qualification would be enough to rule out most such people. 

Though I am in principle a defender of juries, I sometimes think that the liberal elite has set out to make them look silly and ineffectual, as part of a long-term campaign (which is undoubted, see 'the Abolition of Liberty') to get rid of them altogether so that our legal system can be fully merged with that of the EU (where proper independent juries are unknown outside the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic).

A Mr 'maccamfc' , in a posting on the frontiers of literacy and coherence, says he 'became' a heroin 'addict' as if this was beyond his control, and he caught this affliction as one might catch flu.  I do not believe this was the case.  He started taking heroin, as all heroin abusers do, because he enjoyed it and wanted to, well knowing that it was both illegal and wrong.

No doubt I shall be accused of being callous towards this individual. I don't think so. It is the wilful drugtaker who is callous to his family and neighbours, not the person who condemns this selfishness and seeks to deter it with punishment.

Whether I am 'upper class' or not ( lower upper middle class is my own self-description),  I bet his working class neighbours and family have had plenty of cause to regret his choice, even if he thinks he hasn't. Though I doubt he would admit to that, and he writes under a pseudonym so he needn't take full responsibility for the truth of his posting.

He also asks us to believe that while he enjoyed himself taking this very expensive drug, which tends, ah, to undermine the work ethic, he was able to support himself for many years (17 by my calculation) and not to rob anyone else. Why, in that case is he now taking methadone, paid for by me and many others out of taxes we would rather spend on something good and useful? Why didn't he just stop taking heroin, far easier to give up than cigarettes? I have no idea if he is poor. He is certainly undeserving.

Neil Saunders should be aware of the reason why capital punishment is different from abortion and euthanasia.

To be justly executed, you have to be found guilty of a particularly heinous murder by an impartial jury, to fail in repeated appeals and to be refused a reprieve by the Home Secretary after careful individual consideration of all aspects of your case..

To be aborted or euthanised, you just have to be weak and inconvenient.

It is Mr Hentoff (whom I rather admire) who is inconsistent.

This man in black is leading us to a very dark place

This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column

There's only one suicide I would cheerfully assist. If the Tory Party wants to go to Zurich and end it all, I will accompany it, hold its hand, help it swallow a cocktail of poison, refuse its pleas for water at the last moment (for its own good, of course) and listen to its death gurgles. It would be a mercy.

But the Tory Party is just a rather slippery and dishonest organisation. There's nothing immoral about pushing it gently but firmly through the dark door marked 'Exit'. In fact I'd have fewer qualms about that than I would about putting down an elderly guinea pig.

Any human being, by contrast, is immensely, uniquely valuable. We cannot kill our fellow creatures, except under very special circumstances of self-defence or deterrent justice.

And yet we do. And we will do so even more quite soon. A society that baulks fussily at the death penalty for guilty murderers has become adept at excusing the convenient killing of innocents.

Using the advanced techniques of a perverted science, we hunt down imperfect babies in the womb and kill them. Or we kill perfect babies because their birth might disrupt our comfy lives. And we tell ourselves that it is all right because our victims aren't fully human, though in our hearts we know they are.

When the law which permits this massacre was first proposed nearly 50 years ago, we were told that it would be for exceptional and very difficult cases only. I do not know if those who campaigned for the change really believed that – but their opponents warned that it would lead to abortion on demand. And that is what happened, because that is what suited the baby-boom generation to which I belong.

Now that generation and its children (the ones who weren't aborted) have a new fear and
a new desire. And the BBC – the voice of the boomers – has begun to express their secret concern, louder and louder. The old are a burden. They must die sooner, in the interests of the State, and of the middle-aged.

Couldn't you see the unspoken thought – that it might be more convenient for the old and ill to be hurried into the grave – lurking behind the black-clad figure of Sir Terence Pratchett as he presented his pro-death programme at the licence-payers' expense last week?

Sir Terence is no doubt innocent of such thoughts himself, and motivated entirely by understandable fears of his own Alzheimer's. But there must be many homes in this country where men and women are secretly hoping that their parents will die in a reasonable, timely manner – and above all that they will not consume their inheritance with endless care-home fees before they go.

Unhappily, many of those parents may also be guiltily wondering if they should hang on to life when it means that the home they have bought over many years of careful saving may have to be sold to pay for their care, instead of being passed on to their offspring.
Meanwhile, the State is consumed with a similar fear, that the NHS may fall to pieces trying to cope with the coming wave of old people living on into their 90s and demanding ever more care, space and medicine. It is this fear that lies behind the current frenzied attempts at reform. Taxation simply will not pay for it.

I predict that if assisted suicide is made available here, it will gradually become commonplace, just as abortion did. And it will not necessarily stay voluntary. In the Netherlands, that supposed paradise of liberal thought, there are about 1,000 instances every year of a patient's life being ended by a doctor, without an explicit request. As a brilliant analysis of the issue by Professor John Keown, of Georgetown University in Washington DC, states: 'Dutch courts have held that just as the relief of suffering can justify the termination  of patients who request euthanasia, it can equally justify
the termination of those who cannot.'

And once it is commonplace, as with abortion, those who oppose it will be a noisy but powerless minority, because so many of us will have become accomplices in kindly murder, that we will not dare to call it murder, and will get angry with those who do. But it will be murder all the same.

New signs, same lousy schools

Education Secretary Michael Gove has just declared that another batch of schools are to become 'academies'. I've yet to see any proof that 'academies' are better than other schools, though they have nice new signboards. But at this rate, all the schools in the country will be 'academies' by the time Mr Gove has finished – and no doubt all the children will be above average, and all the exam results will be 'As' and 'A-stars'.

And still nobody will know anything. The really sad thing about this is that Michael Gove is an intelligent man, who knows this is all rubbish and window-dressing. In fact, he is himself window-dressing for a government that couldn't care less about the schooling of the poor.

Is it the State's job to rob us on behalf of addicts?

Undeserving Poor Latest: Abusers of illegal drugs in this country receive something like £1.7 billion a year in benefits, from you and me. £730 million alone is squandered on giving methadone to people who have chosen to ruin their lives (and those of everyone who knows them) by taking illegal heroin.

The figures are revealed and explained by Kathy Gyngell today in a devastating pamphlet, Breaking The Habit. The logic behind this seems to be that if the State robs you on the drug-users' behalf, they won't need to burgle your house or mug you. Something wrong here?

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At last the monstrous myth of 'ADHD' and the unspeakable drugging of healthy children is being questioned. It's a small start, but the Association of Educational Psychologists is calling for a review into the use of Ritalin on children, many as young as five. Not a moment too soon. There are now nearly 700,000 prescriptions being handed out each year. Which Minister will risk the wrath of the mighty and spiteful Ritalin lobby by launching such an inquiry?

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Idiots like Joanne Fraill shouldn't be allowed to sit on juries. Yet she did, and contacted the defendant via Facebook, the Morons' Directory. How couldn't she have realised this was wrong? Isn't it time we introduced a much higher minimum age and a serious education qualification for jurors, many of whom are not fit to go out on their own, let alone decide the fate of a fellow creature?

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Still they won't admit the real reason for the abolition of weekly bin collections. So I'll say it again. It's the European Union Landfill Directive, stupid.

The Deserving Poor, and being booed in Norwich

Is there any point in public debate, in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?

Sometimes I wonder.

I asked a simple question in my main column item – about why Christians, in their charitable work and in their engagement with wider politics,   should make no distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

I produced two unambiguous quotations from scripture which clearly permit, and indeed demand, such a distinction. It would be odd if they did not. The idea that someone could live comfortably at the expense of his fellow men , when he was able to work, would have been so unthinkable to any previous civilisation that it would have been regarded as absurd.

The real question is whether the modern creation of a large welfare-dependent class in our society is an improvement on the past, or a worsening if the human condition. I tend to think it is the latter, and to blame many of the faults of our cruel, coarse, disorderly society on the extension of welfare to people who do not really need it , and the reclassification of human weaknesses and failures as incurable 'disabilities' which must be indulged. In some ways worse, these failings (drug-taking, drunkenness etc) are equated with genuine disabilities which are not in any way the fault of the sufferer.

But my critics don't take this up. Some go into diversions about the rich. Well, if the rich start claiming welfare payments, or evading the taxes they are legally obliged to pay, then I'll start condemning them for it.  But if not, they're not part of the argument. The rich ( I know this annoys communist levellers, but it's true) spend their own money. Welfare recipients spend other people's money,  taken from those other people by taxation under the threat of imprisonment.

Then I was accused of indulging in theology, by atheistical logic-choppers and show-offs who have swallowed R.Dawkins and A.C.Grayling, and long to lure me into some futile dispute on a subject which doesn't interest me and in which I'm not versed – not because they actually wish to debate the subject, or would ever concede their position as a result of argument,  but because they wish to show off. No dice, guys.

I think this is in any case mistaken. Theology is to do with the philosophical arguments for religion as such. I wasn't making any.  I never do. My only point is that we are free to choose whether to believe or not, as I have many times explained here. Quite a lot of my opponents actually seek to deny this choice by various means, which generally have little to do with facts or logic.

The most I could be accused of here is internal scriptural exegetics, aimed only at people who already accept the Christian faith, and at one who,  in the Archbishop's case, is its chief representative in this country. The quotations I produced from Holy Writ are wholly unambiguous and can only be interpreted in one way. They are also from the New Testament, uncomplicated by the supersession of many Old Testament laws by the new covenant.

None of the other hostile comments addressed this simple point – that there are different sorts of poor people, and it is reasonable for Christians to distinguish between them.

My own view is that those who needlessly throw themselves on the charity of others are active thieves from the poor (who are in the end the main source of both tax and charity) and frauds on goodness, who poison the wells of generosity and altruism,  and their actions cry out for justice. This does not in any way affect my belief in charity as a duty.

Likewise, nothing I said from the Question Time platform in Norwich is specially controversial. Most serious persons agree that much foreign aid is wasted, misdirected and misappropriated. Some does positive harm. The late (Lord) Peter Bauer, who knew more about this than all of us put together, did say what I quoted him as saying. The proportion of our aid budget which is controlled by the EU is as I said ( I confirmed the figures with Mr Mitchell's department that morning, and he told me he had personally signed off on the answer).

Yet I was treated as if I had said all aid should be stopped, which I didn't say, and don't believe.

Likewise it is true that our society was until the 1960s a sexually restrained and puritan one, and that it changed largely because an active and persuasive minority wanted it to change, though many others have since decided that they, too, approve. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest (my main point) that the sexualisation of children is a consequence of that . It is undeniable that sexually charged and explicit material pours out of the radio , the TV and the Internet.

As for sex education, much of it is aimed at overcoming the inhibitions of pupils about what many of them reasonably regard as private or embarrassing matters (the use of joke words for body parts in class, etc). It is perfectly reasonable to describe this as taking away the innocence of those exposed to it.  As I have said before, if any adult apart from a teacher said these things and illustrated these acts in front of our children, mobs of News of the World readers would be breaking their windows and demanding they be sent to jail forever. As it is, they're paid to do it by the taxpayer.

Sex education was originally devised by George Lukacs, as education commissar during the brief Hungarian Revolution, to debauch the minds of religiously-brought-up children. When it was first introduced in this country it was purely biological, and heavily circumscribed. It is only as the power of parents has declined, and that of social workers and teachers increased, that (under the excuse of combating disease and under-age pregnancy) it has been permitted to become so explicit and to be based on the assumption (itself both false and morally questionable)that the young will have sex outside marriage whatever anyone says or does.

As for my statement that the pretext for sex education is that it will prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies etc, this is demonstrably so – that is what its advocates say it is for. Equally true is my further statement that, the more sex education we have had, the more STIs and unwanted pregnancies we have had. In the absence of research into this correlation, we may only guess as to the cause of it, if any. But what is certainly true is that sex education is failing *on its own terms*.

Nothing I said was specially controversial.  On Libya, many of my critics in the audience would have agreed with me if it hadn't been me saying it. As it is they didn't want their views expressed by such a wicked person ('the Sunday Mail hack').

The howling intolerance of a vocal section of the audience (and the licence given to members of that audience to barrack me and interrupt me) shows how any defiance of current orthodoxy is now greeted not with argument but with rage. It is probably a good thing that there was no question about man-made global warming, or who knows what might have happened? 

All this has drawn attention away from other oddities about the programme. Why does the Coalition now qualify for two members of a five-person panel? Isn't a newly-elected MP who hasn't risen above the rank of Parliamentary Private Secretary a bit junior for such a task? And why was the Labour Party represented by a man who, while a heavyweight politician, is no longer even in Parliament? Wasn't anyone in the Shadow Cabinet available or able?

I should not here how grateful I am for the kind letters and e-mails I have received from viewers who felt that I had been unfairly treated, or needlessly abused. I can't really complain for myself – if I couldn't take a joke, I shouldn't have joined, and I've experienced far worse than that in TV studios and elsewhere.  It is a reasonable price to be paid for getting on to the most powerful medium of modern times, which conservatives have to use if they can,  whatever they may think of it. The real sufferers from the unfairness and the abuse are not me, but the BBC licence-payers who are entitled to more respect for their opinions.

Blessed are the Spongers? That's not what St Paul said, Archbishop

This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column

Why is it so bad to draw a line between the deserving and the undeserving poor? I have searched the Sermon on the Mount for the words 'Blessed are the Spongers' and I cannot find them – or anything remotely like them.

So why does the Archbishop of Canterbury speak as if it was obvious that we should treat people who can work, but won't, in the same way as we treat those who are truly in need?

As Dr Williams has decided to take up political commentating, I think I shall do a little bit of Archbishoping. Here beginneth the first lesson: In St Paul's first epistle to Timothy, Chapter 5, we read: 'If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.'

And in his second epistle to the Thessalonians, St Paul rubs it in, in that way he has: 'This we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.'

This seems pretty clear to me, and a dozen generations before my own knew these words by heart and lived according to them. They gave to charity and supported the helpless and needy with all their might.

But they scorned those who sought to live off others when they had no need to. Our Welfare State took much the same line until Harold Wilson 'reformed' it in the Sixties.

I don't mind bishops intervening in our national life. That's what they are for. I like having them in the House of Lords to remind us of the foundations on which our country stands. But they are not there to act as reinforcements for the Liberal Democrats. They are there to remind us that we are at heart a Christian nation and people.

They should stand up for lifelong marriage, denounce the lax treatment of wrongdoers and the neglect of their victims, condemn public drunkenness, defend unborn babies against those who wish to kill them, stand in the way of stupid and unjust wars, and of selfish cruelty of all kinds. But they really have to get out of their heads the idea that the Welfare State must be unconditionally defended.

For it is the hard-working poor who pay for it, and who see their near neighbours living lives of shameless idleness on their money. And they also watch criminals profiting by their crimes, and getting away with it.

If the parsons, pastors, priests and bishops of this country took the side of the poor against these parasites, instead of acting as their spokesmen, they might find their churches filling up again.

But as long as they talk like the TUC, they will stay at the fringe of our national life.


How I was banned from giving blood by (you guessed it) a Brussels decree

You've heard of trying to get blood out of a stone. But these days it isn't much harder than trying to give blood to our national transfusion service. I have been a blood donor since I was a student, and I recommend that everyone who can become one does so. But why do they make it so difficult?

I turned up for a long-booked session the other day, and dutifully answered all the intrusive questions about my illegal drug use, needle-sharing and so on.

They asked me about my sexual habits too. You can't leave this questionnaire around where children will see it, it's so explicit. Anyway, surely anyone irresponsible and wicked enough to give blood after doing such things is also capable of lying on a form.

As usual, I was taken into a side room for the final interrogation. Had I been abroad? Yes. Where? Inner Mongolia. No interest. And the United States. Suddenly my interviewer became alert. How long ago had I returned? About a week. Terribly sorry, but you can't give blood today. Come back in three weeks.

I bridled. I go, in my work, to quite a lot of dirty and diseased places. For some of them I have nasty injections.

For others I swallow unpleasant malaria pills, and cart around a jar of repellent, a double-strength can of Insect Doom and a portable net. I even wear a hat. You should have seen me in the Congo with my trousers stuffed into my socks and my hat crammed down to my ears, hunting behind the loo at bedtime for the cunning mosquito that always hides there.

I would understand it if they didn't want my blood for a bit after that, and I wouldn't offer it. But the USA? If it's so dangerous, why wasn't I warned? And why didn't the nosey questionnaire mention this problem either? I had got up at 5.30 that morning to be sure to reach the clinic on time.

A spokesman tells me that there is an 'epidemic' of West Nile Fever in North America. Well, it all depends what you mean by epidemic. The United States has a population of 311 million. Last year, the entire country had 629 serious cases of this virus – 144 of them fatal.

In 24 of the 50 states, there were no deaths at all. Five states had only one death each; another five only two.

Until a few years ago, the National Blood Service didn't have a ban of this kind, but instead tested donors who had been to the US. They found precisely no cases. I might add that there were precisely no cases of West Nile in this country in 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2010. There was one in 2006 (from Canada) and one in 2007 (also from Canada).

Epidemic? Anyway, I hadn't been bitten by a mosquito. If I am, even here, I am sore for weeks afterwards, and so I surely would have noticed. But the rule is absolute. Staff have no discretion at all.

And I eventually found out why, but only by diligent searching, armed with the knowledge that the Brussels maggot would probably be wriggling around somewhere at the heart of this mess.

Nobody in this country has any discretion or control over this rule, because it was made by the EU, our real government. Directive 2004/33/EC of March 22, 2004, over which you, I, the Blood Service and Parliament have no control, demands this concrete-headed regulation. So, it's true. Brussels banned me from giving blood.

I wonder just how many other stupid rules of this kind have the same origin, without us knowing.

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War on drugs latest. The vicious persecution of innocent dope-smokers continues, or does it? William Marsh, caught with nearly one pound and two ounces of cannabis (worth £5,000), plus a set of scales, received a suspended prison sentence, plus some community service, meaning he was let off, at Liverpool Crown Court. This was despite five previous convictions, including one for cannabis possession. Official guidelines now say this great lump of poison is a 'small quantity'.


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Ulster Peace latest. The only good argument for our squalid, cowardly pact with the criminal terror gangs of Northern Ireland was that it brought peace.

Has it?

Try these figures. More than 1,100 people on terrorist death lists in Northern Ireland are being allowed to carry guns for their own protection. Bombing incidents are at their highest level in eight years – 100 in 2010-11. Terrorist attacks are going virtually unsolved – 12 of 272 such attacks between 2008 and 2010 have been solved. The number of people claiming to have been driven out of their homes rose by a third in 2009-10. Terrorist and sectarian intimidation was cited in 85 per cent of these cases. And sectarian incidents rose from 1,595 in 2008-09 to 1,840 in 2009-10 – a 15 per cent increase. Sectarian crimes in the same period went up from 1,017 to 1,264 – a 24 per cent increase.

Peace? Or a shameful surrender.

You want louts like this punished? You must be a 'nasty extremist' like me

This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column

I regret to inform you that you are an extremist, bonkers, a spittle-flecked member of the lunatic fringe.

That is because you agree with me that Wayne Bishop, whose triumphantly smirking, selfish face looks out at us from amid his terrifying brood of children, ought to be breaking rocks on Dartmoor instead, and to hell with his 'right' to a family life.

Bishop is a burglar. He is also a menacing lout who badly needs to learn some lessons in manners, but never will. We've all seen faces like that and learned to cross the street, or shift down the bus, to avoid them when we see them coming. Some people, and God help them, cannot avoid them because they live next to them.

Bishop is the sort of person the law, the police and the prisons were invented to deal with and who – in a sharp break with normal practice – was actually locked up. As the
Ministry of Injustice finally admitted last week, it is harder by far to get into prison than it is to get into university.

Here are the figures, which should be tattooed on the foreheads of every member of the Cabinet so we are constantly reminded of how useless they all are: '96,710 criminals sentenced last year for more serious "indictable" offences had 15 or more previous crimes against their name. They included violent muggers, burglars and drug dealers.

'Of those, only 36 per cent –around 34,600 offenders – were given immediate custody.' So even after 15 or more previous offences, they won't put most of them away.

So it's almost an irrelevance that Bishop has been let out of prison in the name of his Human Wrongs. It is amazing that he was inside in the first place.

You are (for the moment) allowed to laugh at this, or to complain about it. But if, like me, you actually want to do anything about it, then you become an extremist, bonkers, spittle-flecked, lunatic etc.

Because against you, you will find all three major parties, most especially the treacherous, slippery and dishonest Tories, the BBC, the legal profession, the police and the Church of England.

They believe the system that allows Wayne Bishop and his many friends to smirk at you while they live off you is a good system. They think you are cruel, crude, outrageous and uncivilised to want a justice system that punishes bad people swiftly in ways they won't forget.

Well, Wayne Bishop is the result of all their compassion and kindness and, as I grow older and nastier, I can't help wishing that the people who created him could be forced to go and live next door to him for the rest of their natural lives.

But then, I'm an extremist. And if you hate the way people such as Wayne Bishop are caressed by our society, why do you keep voting for the Tories who help to caress him, and do nothing to rescue you from him and from people like him?


The second-rate celebrity dopes

The demand for the weakening of our already feeble, unenforced anti-drug laws must surely be wrong if it has supporters such as these: here they are, the Celebrity Dopes – Bob Ainsworth, the worst Defence Secretary in our history, who sent better men than him to die in Afghanistan, without even being able to explain what they were doing there.

A pop star so pretentious he seems to think he is a nettle, or perhaps a wasp.

Dame Judi Dench, an actress who believes mistakenly that because she spends her life uttering other people's grand sentiments on stage, she is clever.

Tom Lloyd, a disgraced ex-copper who, as they say politely, 'resigned amid claims' that he got drunk and sexually harassed a woman at a police conference.

And that was after going on holiday during the biggest and most serious murder case his force ever investigated.

Then there's that vague, bearded businessman Sir Richard Branson, who once told us to join the euro (what a mind!) and whose irritatingly bad trains proved he wasn't as brilliant as he was cracked up to be.

I've explained the real situation, face to face, to a couple of these people. I told them, with facts and figures, how the 'war on drugs' that they rail against was called off in 1972.

They took not a blind bit of notice. So let's try this instead. I hope all these second-rate dupes learn, before it is too late and at first hand, the tear-stained consequences of the wicked policy they now promote.


BBC's only taboo c-word is 'conservative'

Every few weeks a reader writes to me to tell me that the BBC has brushed aside a reasonable complaint. They send me the fat-bottomed, complacent responses, and they share with me their frustration that, in the end, the BBC is accountable to nobody.

But Colin Harrow's story was exceptional. Colin likes the BBC, and sees the point of it.

Like millions, he feels betrayed by the way in which the Corporation has become an active and highly committed campaigner for a social, sexual and cultural revolution that they don't support.

It is as if a valued old friend had suddenly taken up snorting cocaine in late middle age.

But Colin really didn't see why The News Quiz, which goes out on Radio 4 at a time when children might easily be listening, should get away with transmitting Sandi Toksvig's crude joke, which coyly smuggled the c-word on to the air while casually insulting an entire political party (one that I don't support), and, crucially, had been pre-approved by a senior executive.

The BBC has played a big part in normalising the f-word and so making our society a lot coarser than it was.

It is plainly itching to do the same with the c-word, as its smug, unhelpful responses to Colin Harrow show.

The details of this event – and of Mr Harrow's patient efforts to do something about it – are in today's Mail on Sunday, and I urge you to read them for an insight into the proud, sealed minds of those who are in control of public broadcasting in this country.

The News Quiz itself has for years been a great red boil on the BBC's bland face, utterly biased in favour of the Left in all matters, and neither ashamed nor restrained.

No executive ever does anything about this constant, repeated breach of the Corporation's own charter.

And when listeners try, they receive crass, unresponsive statements such as the one offered to Colin Harrow: 'The innuendo was within audience expectations for an adult
comedy programme.'

This is simply untrue, as it obviously wasn't within the audience expectations of Mr Harrow and, it is reasonable to assume, not within the expectations of quite a lot of other reasonable Radio 4 listeners. But he's only a powerless licence-payer.

Does anyone believe for a moment that an innuendo of this kind, directed against
Nelson Mandela or any person or body beloved by the BBC, would have been approved for transmission?

The licence fee cannot survive if the BBC continues to treat conservative men and women in this contemptuous manner.


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You can't change the weather by fiddling with the barometer, and you can't fight the sexualisation of children with symbolic, futile gestures and bans.

Once we dumped lifelong marriage, and decided that sex was just a game played for fun, like tennis, we licensed every form of sexual activity that didn't happen to disgust us at the time.

The problem with disgust is that there's no absolute standard for it. What people thought was disgusting 30 years ago is normal now, and what we think is disgusting now may easily be normal 30 years hence.

Our society has worked hard to destroy innocence, with explicit sex education, the abolition of taboos and the marketing of adult clothes and cosmetics to little girls.

Modesty is derided as repression. When I attacked a range of sexually knowing dolls for little girls, Slutz, I think they were called, I received angry letters from mothers saying there was nothing wrong with them. God help us. Nobody else will.

Wherever there's trouble, you'll find Human Rights

This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column

Human rights are a threat to free speech. This has never been clearer, since the breathtaking attempt by the judges to gag the reporting of Parliament. What sort of mind comes up with this tyrannical idea, and sees it as an acceptable price to pay for covering up the misdeeds of nauseatingly rich celebrities?

It is suddenly, terrifyingly plain that the Human Rights judges instinctively loathe proper British liberty. The new dogma of Human Rights gives them a mighty weapon against it, which they now feel strong enough to use.

It has always been hard to fight against Human Rights because the phrase sounds so nice. Who could oppose such a wonderful thing? But now we know why we should oppose it in one important detail. If the alleged 'right' to privacy is so powerful that it trumps the freedom to report parliamentary proceedings, then we are better off without such a right.

Every single one of these rights can be interpreted in some similar twisted way. And for too long we have failed to notice the nasty revolutionary origins and the nasty purpose of this noble-sounding idea.

Human Rights, closely related to the ideas behind the bloodthirsty, ruthless revolutions in France and Russia, are now being used to give our own Left-wing elite the power to override a thousand years of tradition, national independence and freedom, in the name of something that sounds noble but is in fact sordid and ugly.

In the past 30 years I can think of only one instance – a group of railwaymen who refused to be forced into a union closed shop – where Human Rights have been used in the interests of real freedom. In many other cases, the Human Rights Act has been deployed to reduce the freedoms of the hard-working, the tax-paying and the law-abiding.

The rights asserted have been those of lawbreakers trying to avoid justice, illegal immigrants trying to avoid deportation for criminal acts, prisoners trying to win votes and similar unpopular and unwanted changes for the worse in our way of life.

If Christianity is being sidelined, marriage reduced to the level of any other sexual relationship, Britain being pressed to adapt to immigrants rather than the other way round, extreme feminism imposed on workplaces, schools compelled to re-admit trouble-making pupils, Human Rights will be involved.

Real rights and freedoms are not like this. Our British Great Charters, Claims and Bills of Rights do one simple thing – tell the Government what it cannot do. These are in truth the only rights worth having.

But it has become deeply unfashionable to say so. In fact, the elite has become so committed to this unpleasant dogma that opposition to it is viewed as wicked.

People like me – though still allowed to speak – are allowed on to mainstream national broadcasting only under strict conditions: that we are 'balanced' by at least three other people who disagree with us so that our views, actually held by millions, are made to look like an eccentric minority opinion.

In some cases, newspapers, once open to our views, are pressured into silencing our voices. Our books, if we can get them published, are not reviewed. The major political parties won't select us as candidates. And so on.

No, of course, it is not as bad as being arrested and locked up – though in modern Britain it is increasingly possible to have your collar felt for expressing an unfashionable opinion.

But it is without doubt an attack on our freedom of speech – which is of little value if millions never hear what we say – while our opponents are not restricted in the same way.

Now that we see Human Rights openly employed in a direct attempt to gag MPs and reporters, perhaps others will begin to wonder if the great liberal revolution is as good and kind as it claims to be.


Flipping burgers doesn't make up for moronic wars

I thought it quite gruesome to see David Cameron and Barack Obama dispensing grilled meats to service personnel – some of them wounded in war – in the Downing Street garden.

It is bad enough that David Cameron has caught the Blair disease, and thinks the Armed Forces are his rather than the Queen's.

But what really dismays me is that both these men have been responsible for prolonging the purposeless war in Afghanistan, in which many British and American soldiers have died – or have been too terribly injured ever to attend a barbecue again.

In both countries this is because these leaders didn't have the courage to admit the war is pointless, and end it. Feeding soldiers burgers doesn't make up for sending them off to be killed or maimed without good reason.

If Mr Cameron and Mr Obama really cared about them, they'd put away the barbecue, and bring them home – and also halt the increasingly moronic intervention in Libya before it gets any worse.


Cannabis: the dreadful truth

When a giggling Jared Loughner was first charged with the horrible mass shooting in Phoenix, Arizona, I suggested that he was insane and wondered if he had been unhinged by his acknowledged past heavy use of cannabis.

I still do. It is now plain that  I was right to suspect that he is seriously mentally ill. We still need to know why. I would like to see some research done on this. The cannabis lobby (what's in it for them, by the way?) were furious with me for even suggesting such a thing.

In Britain and America there are countless parents of teenagers who have good reason to suspect that this supposedly harmless, allegedly soft drug did dreadful damage to their sons and daughters. More and more research suggests a link between cannabis and mental illness.

I believe that within ten or 20 years, that link will be as clearly established as that between cigarettes and lung cancer. And that those who now noisily insist that this drug is harmless will be as discredited and disdained as the Big Tobacco lobbyists who pretended for so long that there was nothing to worry about.

In the meantime, wouldn't it be wiser not to take the risk, and for the law against this drug to be strengthened rather than weakened?


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We now have proof that computer games stop children reading, withering their imaginations and filling their minds with grubby rubbish. Parents have a right and a duty to protect their young from this sort of thing. You wouldn't give your children neat gin. Why leave them alone at the screen?


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It's time for another round of grandiose Middle East 'peace' efforts. The one thing that can be guaranteed about these is that they will lead to more war and more death.

Anybody who really cared about the suffering people of the region would stick to helping everyone get richer and live better, a process quietly under way already.

There are already shopping malls in Gaza (yes, really, I've been there), Hebron and Ramallah. Israelis and Arabs cheerfully share the same cut-price supermarkets on the road south of Jerusalem. Prosperity and normality, not endless wrangling over land, is the road to peace.


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The more sex education we have, the more abortions we have. So can we try having less sex education for a few years and see what happens?

Some rapes ARE worse than others... there, I've said it

This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column

I am sick of the censorship that surrounds the issue
of rape. So I shall defy it. Of course all rapes are bad. But some rapes are worse than others.

The extension of rape, to cover any situation where a woman says she has been raped, is a huge difficulty for a fair legal system that relies on actual evidence before deciding guilt.

Even for saying this, I know quite well that I will get raging, lying abuse. This is what
happened to Kenneth Clarke, right, when he went on the radio and tried to speak his mind as if
this were a free country.

As he quickly found out, it is not. I am sorry that he was in the end forced to grovel. But this is a Liberal, PC government, and I am not surprised.

Revolutionary feminism, which regards all men as predators and sees the married family as a sordid prison, has scared most politicians, most judges, most journalists, most civil servants – and most people – into accepting its nasty dogmas.

Oddly enough, Mr Clarke would normally be an ally of this cause. But ultra-feminist zealotry is bitterly intolerant of any disagreement, however gentle or thoughtful. Nothing short of total submission will do.

The problem is Mr Clarke's unceasing search for ways of stopping our prisons from bursting. The answer is quite simple – the reintroduction of serious punitive prison regimes, plus putting the police back on preventive foot patrol. But that would never do in the liberal world of David Cameron.

So instead sentences – even for rape – must get shorter and shorter until they almostentirely disappear.

It won't work. Whatever this lot does, I promise you, the prisons will be crammed, with their revolving doors whizzing round fast enough to generate electricity.

Modern liberals make a few exceptions to their view that lawbreakers need to be let out of jail quickly.

One is over child-molesting, which has become the one form of sexual behaviour of which we can all still disapprove.

One is when people 'take the law into their own hands', by defending themselves, their families or their property. The courts and the police view this as competition, and fear it. So it is crushed with heavy sentences.

Another is offences against political correctness. And another is rape.

But in this case rape does not usually mean what most people think it means – the forcible abduction and violation of a woman by a stranger. It means a dispute about consent, often between people who are already in a sexual relationship.

It means one person's word against another's, in highly unequal circumstances, with the accuser granted anonymity and the accused under the glare of publicity.

Those who don't think there's anything wrong with this definition are quite entitled to their opinion. But they're not entitled to shout down those who disagree with them. Even so, I bet they try to.



In full hijab, is Orla trying a bit too hard?

Here's the BBC's very severe reporter Orla Guerin broadcasting from Pakistan after an atrocity.

Ms Guerin, who during her stint in Israel often seemed more like a prosecutor than a reporter, has adopted the full hijab or headscarf, completely covering her hair, plus a very, very long dress.

Is she trying too hard here? And if so, why? The BBC said it was a 'conservative area' but couldn't provide any details of how it measured this. It also said other female reporters had done the same thing, but couldn't, despite repeated requests, substantiate this.

I'm all in favour of showing respect to the culture where you are. But in this clip, Ms Guerin is speaking to camera and standing in front of a van, not conversing with some mullah stuck in the 14th Century.

Even the late Benazir Bhutto, who was Premier of Pakistan and needed to keep the imams happy, usually wore her headgear further back than this.


Now Gerry Adams can lay a wreath in Guildford

Following the Queen's successful visit to the Irish Republic, I look forward to the day when President-of-all-Ireland Gerry Adams makes a state visit to London and lays wreaths at Harrods, in Hyde Park, outside the Old Bailey, in Bishopsgate and at Canary Wharf, and then heads out of town to do the same in Brighton, Deal, Warrington, Manchester, Guildford and Birmingham – and on the graves of Ross McWhirter and Ian Gow.

If he will wear a Union Jack tie, then I don't see why an Army band can't play Kevin Barry or some other rebel ditty while he lays his tributes.

As far as I am concerned the Irish people, almost all of them, are our friends, brothers and sisters, bound to us by many common causes, greatly enriching the culture and history of our two islands.

If I could undo the Easter Rising and the execution of its leaders, I would.

The obvious liking shown on both sides during the Queen's visit is far more representative than the violent, undying hate of Sinn Fein.

Yet, behind all the smiles and generosity, Sinn Fein has been the ultimate winner in this conflict.



Lawrence retrial is a bad day for liberty

I am sorry but I cannot rejoice at the planned retrial of a suspect in the Stephen Lawrence murder case.

The rule against being tried twice for the same offence is a keystone of freedom. And to work, it has to be a rule, even when it breaks our hearts to obey it. For if it is not absolute, then one day a bad government will use this as a precedent to pursue and crush opponents. Why do we care so little about these great treasures of liberty? Perhaps we no longer deserve to have them.


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The head of the Armed Forces, General Sir David Richards, has been making political speeches, calling for more indiscriminate bombing of Libya.

This is not his job. He is also plumb wrong. We should abandon this daft ill-considered war before we get in any deeper.


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It always gravely saddens me to see Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, a distinguished doctor who has dedicated his life and mind to the cure of disease and the easing of pain, supporting the dangerous campaign to soften our drug laws. If successful, this will lead to greatly increased pain, misery and disease.

The pro-drug lobby – much like Big Tobacco when the link between cigarettes and lung cancer was first made – is hostile to any facts that contradict its claims. I fear Sir Ian's allegiance to this cause has affected him in this way.

During a London debate on the subject last week, my ally Dr Hans-Christian Raabe tried to hand Sir Ian an article from the New England Journal Of Medicine that supported a point he had just made – that deaths due to legal prescription drugs (eg methadone) far exceed deaths due to illegal drugs (eg heroin) in the USA. Sir Ian flung it to the floor.

Is this what we should expect from a former president of the Royal College of Physicians?

How I can be so relaxed about Bin Laden's death? It's easy...

Notes and Queries

I'm in between journeys and cumbered about with much business of one kind or another. So I can't reply as fully as I'd like, but here are a few general thoughts on comments and responses to recent postings.

On the Bin Laden question, I am asked how I can be so relaxed about his death if he was not directly responsible for the 11th September massacres. Mainly because I have no doubt that he was directly responsible for several earlier, if lesser, attacks.

I am also asked if my speculation flies in the face of the 9/11 commission report. Does it? I would be glad if anyone could quote from that report the passages which directly link Osama Bin Laden to the attacks in the USA on that date, which do not rely on Bin Laden's own boasting of his responsibility.

I am happy to concede that he had *some* involvement. What seems to me to be suspect is the 'Al Qaeda' explanation, that this was a generalised attack on the 'West' by 'Al Qaeda' because 'they hate our way of life'.

My point is that both 'Al Qaeda' and the 'West' are concepts too vague to be much use (any expert will tell you that 'Al Qaeda' is at most a franchise or an ideology, rather than a close-knit organisation with a command structure. It simply cannot be compared to the Provisional IRA, ETA, the Red Army Faction or other previous terror groups, which most definitely did – and in some cases still do – have such structures). Also, the contention that this was in some way an attack on our way of life' is in my view both false and gravely misleading. If this is so, then we are condemned to war forever, since there will always be billions of people who can be assumed to be motivated to war and terror by the fact that the 'west' is not Islamic.

I happen to think this is untrue.

I think that most Muslims are entirely uninterested in such a war. I also think that many Muslims quite rightly and reasonably disapprove of our debauched and decadent way of life, as do I, and I do not think that a temporary superiority in wealth and weapons entitles us to feel superior to them.

The fundamental emptiness of neo-conservatism (and its ability to appeal to Marxist leftists such as Nick Cohen and my brother) comes from its complete absence of a real counter to the claims and ideas of Islam. This is because it has rejected Christianity, the only coherent answer we in fact possess to Islam. As Rudyard Kipling once wrote in 'Recessional', 'Reeking tube' and 'iron shard' will not alone protect us.

My point is that specific actions happen at specific times for specific reasons. Like it or not, terrorists are rational beings, hateful not because of their irrationality – but because of their merciless ruthlessness.

Terrorism works. Look at Northern Ireland. Look at the transformation of Yasser Arafat from despised fringe figure to garlanded statesman, showered with money and status by the 'West' which began by denouncing him. Look, as some will rightly point out, at Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.

My points, about the UN Durban conference just before the outrage, about the actual words of one of the principal murderers, about the major retreats and policy changes made by the U.S. after the outrage, about the unbridled joy over the outrage concentrated in the Middle East itself, seem to me to be persuasive.

Those, such as Mr 'Crosland', who dispute this, need to explain an alternative *specific* rationale, not huff and puff with general doubts.

I am also asked what is so significant about the switch of U.S. policy, to support for a Palestinian State.

Those who ask this maintain that support for such a state, which could co-exist with Israel, is not a blow to Israel.

This is, in my view, seriously naïve. The reason why Israel itself (and many in the U.S. policy establishment before 11th September 2001) so fiercely opposed this move, the reason why the Clinton White House actually disavowed a statement in its support by the President's own wife, is that the idea that such  Palestinian State could co-exist with Israel is not, er, universally shared. (Look, for example, at Gaza, from which Israel has withdrawn. Do its people go about their business seeking the best available lives? No, they do not. They continue to wage war against the state which has granted them the independence they said was their aim, at great cost to themselves).

Those who take the pessimistic view argue that such a state (this goal is a fairly recent invention as an aim of the 'Palestinian' cause, itself invented only after the successive military defeats of direct Arab attacks on Israel) is not an aim in itself. It is instead intended to be temporary, as a stage upon the way to the true objective, namely the removal of the Jewish state (one governed by Jews and – crucially – with its immigration controlled by Jews) from the Middle East.

There is plenty of evidence that this is the case, which I have gone into before and will no doubt have to go into again. But not now. Look at the index.

My case that, to imagine that it doesn't matter which side the USA takes in this controversy is to miss the point, spectacularly. This, plus the rapprochement with the UN, was a gigantic policy switch which needs to be explained by something.

Now, it is never a good idea for a President whose country has just been attacked to look weak. And this is never more important than when he is actually *being* weak. So this is a perfectly good explanation for the flailing, futile attack on Afghanistan and even (though I agree that fear of 'losing' Saudi Arabia may have played a part) the later attack upon Iraq.

Personally I have little doubt that George W.Bush would have made still more concessions to Arafat, had it not been for the brutally cynical diplomacy of Ariel Sharon, who cunningly managed to identify Israel with the wounded USA. There is also the perennial problem, that practical, real concessions to the 'Palestinian' cause are not really what is wanted in the Arab Muslim world. What is wanted is a steady move towards the de-recognition, destabilisation and de-legitimisation of Israel, ending with the Jewish state enduring a South African style political and economic isolation (this – in my view false - parallel between Israel and Apartheid South Africa is repeatedly made by influential people), followed by the concession of the 'right of return' of Arab refuges which will spell the end of it.

You may want this outcome or you may not (personally I do not, as I sometimes say but I don't wish to argue about that here again and haven't time to do so now). But the point here is that I just think it silly to pretend that 11th September wasn't about Israel, the preoccupation of the Arab and Muslim world, or that it didn't move the world many steps closer to that point.

As to who was actually directly responsible for plotting these cruel murders, I have no idea. Quite possibly Bin Laden's Afghan outfit played some part, though quite how one learns to hijack and fly a plane in Kandahar or a 'terror training camp' I don't know. As I sometimes point out, the use of air piracy (hijacking) as a political weapon was originated, developed and perfected by the 'Palestinian' movement, going back to Leila Khaled and Dawson's Field. It seems worth asking. But as soon as we believe the single bogeyman theory, we stop thinking…

And I think we should start thinking again.

For the ten millionth time, I have explained why I will not support UKIP and the index provides the answer (though the key phrases 'Robert Kilroy Silk', 'behind the fridge', 'Nigel Farage' and 'cannabis decriminalisation' may help).

People did not, as one contributor says, vote against AV because the Tories told them to. The huge majority against this silly scheme included many who would never have voted Tory. My point was and remains that, freed from the party mind-set, people voted intelligently in their own interest. But as long as elections are conducted on this Rangers versus Celtic, or Spurs versus Chelsea basis, people will stop thinking as soon as they go into the general election polling booths. Hence the need to get rid of the existing parties, especially the Tories, urged here ad infinitum.

A reader doubts the story of the 26-stone woman. It was told to me in good faith by an articulate well-informed firefighter who knew of it directly. If the reader believes it to be untrue, perhaps he can tell me what, in the recruitment regulations of those fire services which have most lowered their standards, would prevent it?

My suspicion is that a) in many services nothing would prevent it and b) that the person's sex would make it difficult for recruiters pursuing quotas to reject her. I expect something of this kind will happen before long, if it has not already done so.

And then people will say 'Political correctness gone mad' and as 'how did we get here?' We got here by not believing how bad things are, and by not being prepared to fight back against it.

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