Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 331

Keep on kissing the Tory frog if you like - but he's never going to turn into a prince

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I have looked hard and long for any grounds for hope in the votes that took place on
May 5. So far I have not found any. The cynical liberal David Cameron is still very much in charge of his Unconservative Party.

He may even be able to save it from the collapse it has so long and so richly deserved by actually winning the next Election outright. If so it will be by luck rather than judgment.
But Mr Cameron, alas, is almost as lucky as his mentor and model Anthony Blair, whose prosperous, grinning survival is bitter proof that fortune doesn't necessarily favour the good.

First, I'll deal with the massacre of Liberal Democrat councillors. There was some justice in this. We have a Liberal Government, and it was right that Liberals should be punished for its failings – the terrible schools where learning takes second place to social engineering, the mad foreign policy where we intervene cluelessly in other people's countries while disbanding our armed forces, the pitiful justice system which refuses to protect the good from the bad, and instead makes excuses for the bad.

But alas, this was not what the voters meant to do. They believed the comical media fiction – the exact opposite of the truth – that this is a conservative Government being propped up by imprisoned liberals. And so they sacked a lot of Liberal councillors in revenge for this imagined crime.

I do wish these people could find me one scrap of evidence that this is in fact a 'Right-wing' Government. It would cheer me up. Please don't tell me about the alleged 'cuts', which when finished will still leave us as one of the highest-taxed and most state-controlled, politically corrected countries on earth.

The people who should have been punished, who stand for election as Conservatives and then govern as Liberals, were let off.

I do not know if this can last. It is quite possible. I suppose that Tory voters may believe that if they carry on voting Tory, their party may one day turn into a proper conservative pro-British movement. This is a bit like going down to your nearest swamp, pond or bog and kissing all the frogs you can find in the belief that eventually one of them will turn into a prince.

It didn't work the first time because it is never going to work. But hope seems to override sense in the polling booths when party loyalties are involved.

It is striking that if people forget party loyalties they actually start to think. Millions for once actually used their brains in a polling booth when asked to decide on the AV referendum.

The huge majority against AV was a flickering vision of what might happen if we had a party that wasn't the Tories, and which stood for common-sense policies on crime, mass immigration, education, the family and national independence.

The sad part of this is that our clear dislike of constitutional reform will not actually make much difference. I suspect we will now get something much worse than AV as a consolation prize for the Liberals. This will be a 'Senate' to replace the House of Lords, elected by proportional representation. And there will be no referendum on that because we might reject it.

Then, as the Election approaches, the Liberal Democrats and the Tories will stage a noisy trial separation.

It will be much like the largely faked bickering of the past few weeks, only more so. And it will end with the Liberal Democrats pretending to walk out of the Coalition in a huff over some carefully chosen row.

And then David Cameron will be Prime Minister of a minority Government which is made up entirely of Tories, but which still follows the Liberal policies Mr Cameron likes. The excuse this time will be that it doesn't have a majority.

He hopes that thanks to the revolutionary boundary changes due to come into force soon that he will then win the next Election outright. And then he will be able to govern as a Liberal because nobody in his feeble party will dare to challenge him. If that doesn't work, he can always try another coalition.

Or it might all go wrong, if George Osborne's economic policies plunge us into another recession and things get so bad that even Ed Miliband can win an Election – by no means impossible. So there you have it – Left-wing government stretching out ahead till the crack of doom, while the country slowly breaks up, and nothing you can do about it, as long as you carry on kissing the Tory frog and hoping he'll turn into a prince. As I said, not much to look forward to, but quite a lot to laugh at, if you have a bitter sense of humour. Luckily for me, I do.


What's really important, 'equality and diversity' or the lives of firefighters?

The dogmatic madness of the Cultural Revolution marches on, screaming abuse at its critics as it destroys good institutions
and people.

More than eight years ago I wrote in this newspaper warning of the foolish sex quotas being imposed on Fire Brigades. I have nothing against any fit, strong women who want to work as firefighters. Good luck to them.

What I warned against was a lowering of standards to raise the quota of women in the fire service. Minimum height rules were abandoned, chest expansion and lung-capacity tests abolished. A test which involved carrying a 12-stone man 100 yards was scrapped.

I suspect that the main result of this will have been more small, unfit men in the Fire Service, which doesn't strike me as a good thing. The numbers of women have remained obstinately low. But the equality zealots have not been put off. I have heard from a firefighter who (as they all do) begged me to keep her or his sex, name and location secret. He or she writes that the watered-down fitness standards of only six years ago have now been weakened further still. 'They've reduced the standard to the point where, if you can walk, you can probably pass it. I know of a woman, weighing 26 stone, who smoked, drank and had done no physical exercise since she left school 16 years before, and she drove everywhere. She came down and took the "official national fire service fitness test" and passed. She only failed to get in because she was scared of heights.'

Could these reduced standards, combined with a reduction in training and a pursuit of 'equality and diversity', have anything to do with the alarming rise in deaths in the fire brigades, especially since 2003? Something is certainly wrong. The Fire Brigades Union and the Labour Research Department – both Left-wing bodies – say that more firefighters are dying on duty now than for 30 years.

Time for an inquiry, before it gets worse, and before the public are affected as well. Surely the saving of lives comes before equality and diversity? Or does it?

Bin Laden's death changes nothing: the 9/11 killers got EXACTLY what they wanted

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

What a lot of rubbish we have been told about Osama Bin Laden. I'm not sorry he's dead.

He boasted that he was a mass murderer and he can hardly have been shocked that the USA hunted him down and killed him.

But in the end the operation looks tawdry and futile. The Americans admitted as much when they lied that he had defended himself when he hadn't. I'm sure they wish he had, in fact, put up a fight.

For reasons it's hard to explain, but which most decent people instinctively know, killing an unarmed man in his bedroom just doesn't look good, however wicked he is. For once, Archbishop Rowan Williams has a point.

For the next 20 years, people will be arguing about whether Bin Laden could have been captured and tried. But the real problem with the whole business is that it doesn't really resolve anything. Only the dimmest mind can imagine that it does.

Bin Laden obligingly dressed like a villain in a melodrama, and obligingly claimed to be behind the September 2001 massacres in New York and Washington. I'm not sure he was.

The attack was really dreamed up in the Middle East. It was in Gaza and East Jerusalem – not Kabul or Kandahar – that the streets exploded in joy when the news of these disgusting murders first broke.

In fact, those demonstrations of ghoulish delight got so out of hand that the Palestinian authorities quickly got them taken off the world's TV screens by making dark threats to
Western news organisations. That's why so many people still don't know about them.

The attack on the Twin Towers wasn't made because Bin Laden 'hated our way of life'. It was aimed at driving U.S. forces out of Saudi Arabia, and compelling Washington to support a Palestinian state.

How do we know this? First, because one of the culprits said so. Abdulaziz al-Omari, almost certainly the man who flew the American Airlines plane into the North Tower, made a pre-suicide video, which was briefly shown on Al Jazeera TV in September 2002.

This homicidal fanatic had dressed carefully for his last message. He was shown wearing a chequered 'keffiyeh' headscarf, of the type associated with the Palestinian cause. What was his aim?

In his own words, his planned murders were to be 'a message to all infidels and to America to leave the Arabian peninsula and stop supporting the cowardly Jews in Palestine'.

And amid all the frenzy about Bin Laden, and the attack on Afghanistan, he got his way. For all its bluster about a 'war on terror', the US quietly bowed to this outrage, much as it had forced us to bow to the IRA in Northern Ireland.

U.S. troops were withdrawn from Saudi Arabia in 2003. As for ceasing to support the 'cowardly Jews', Washington dispatched three separate missions to see Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (two led by General Anthony Zinni, one by Secretary of State Colin Powell himself).

The U.S. also made its peace with the bitterly anti-Israel United Nations. It paid off millions of dollars in subscriptions which it had until then rightly held back in protest against that organisation's corruption and general wickedness.

This is significant because on September 3, 2001, just eight days before the attacks on America, the US delegation had stalked out of a UN conference on 'racism' because of the torrent of hateful language being aimed at Israel.

Most importantly of all, President George W. Bush declared, almost exactly a month after the Twin Towers fell, that the US now supported a Palestinian State.

This was a violent, astonishing reversal, especially by a supposedly 'Right-wing' Republican President.

When, in May 1998, the then First Lady Hillary Clinton had urged such a policy, she was instantly disowned by her own Left-wing husband.

Afghanistan, 'Al Qaeda' and the fact that 'they hate our way of life' (so do I) were all diversions from the real issue. This is whether the 'West' is ready to defend Israel's right to exist, or if it will continue its long and failed policy of appeasing Middle East terror with weak concessions, bags of money and slices of Israeli territory.

That issue has not gone away. The death of Bin Laden turned our eyes away from a new treaty between the unbending Islamists of Hamas and the more slippery Islamists of Fatah.

Less than four years ago, Hamas militants were throwing screaming Fatah members off high buildings in Gaza, so this is the cosiest reconciliation since the Stalin-Hitler pact.

Like that, this is also full of menace for the world. Bin Laden, on the other hand, is – and always was – a sideshow.


Where will Britain's next Henry come from?

Henry Cooper was a natural aristocrat, chivalrous, kind, unbigoted, modest, a devoted and faithful husband – in so many ways superior to the people who actually form our national elite.

Sir Henry was also quite typically British, at least as that word was understood until very recently. But given what we have done to the country, where are the future Henry Coopers going to come from?


The real cost of the Arab Spring

It grows clearer by the day that the main result of the Arab Spring for us in Europe is a surge of illegal migration across the Mediterranean.

So great is the crisis that the EU's treasured Schengen Agreement – the abolition of borders from Calais to Warsaw – has been torn up.

This is no bad thing in itself, but the fact it has happened shows the EU governments have been taken completely by surprise.

This is thanks to wilful blindness. The problem was easily foreseen, and I did warn
of it in the days when everyone (except me) was oohing and aahing about the supposed birth of democracy in the Arab world.

But our political leaders are clueless children in foreign affairs, just as they are in domestic ones. Their wild enthusiasm for all these mysterious revolutions is pure self-indulgence.

They have forgotten our national interests, and have decided instead to follow the policies that make them feel good about themselves.

Is there any chance that Parliament will wake up to this fact any time soon, or that
the Opposition will start doing the opposing that it is paid to do?


***************
Once again, after the wretched, drug-induced death of Isobel Jones-Reilly, and the miserable attempted suicide of Brian Dodgeon, in whose house she met her end, we hear the use of the stupid phrase about the young 'experimenting with drugs'.

Look, the experiments have been done. That's why they are illegal. All these substances can lead to misery, madness, crime and death. Those who treat the matter lightly should work in the mental hospitals where the young victims of the drug cult end up.


****************
There are many lessons to be learned from last week's elections and vote on AV. I plan to write about them next week.

Shedding more light on the timezone question

Michael's latest response to Peter:

 

I still do not understand the point Peter is making regarding German temporal dictatorship. These were different places, a different time, in the era before widespread electric lighting, when living and working patterns were entirely different to what we see in Britain today.

A century ago, maybe two million people laboured on the land in the UK; now the figure is a few tens or hundreds of thousands at most. We get up later, work possibly longer hours (though for fewer days)), mostly indoors and have altered all sorts of things about our society from when schools and factories open to railway timetables to take account of these shifts.

Peter says: "So, a shift of the clock by one or two hours is likely to shift the days of millions of people, willy nilly." In fact, there would be one LESS time switch for people to get their heads around. A switch to CET would merely involve the cancellation of the GMT switch the following October and from then on the clocks would change back and forth as they do now.

   
There is nothing wrong with the term 'daylight saving'. It does not imply that daylight is being created out of thin air, merely that we are trying to maximise the correlation between the times people are awake, up and about, and when the Sun is above the horizon. That's it, nothing sinister at all. 

Peter says: "Children wouldn't get 'longer' to play outside. They could just do so at different times of day. The evenings wouldn't be 'longer' - they'd just happen at different times of day. And how on earth they'd be 'lighter', I have no idea. Do they have a big lamp?"

 

 

Wrong!

Of course the amount of daylight is the same regardless of what timezone you choose, but there is a BIG DIFFERENCE between daylight at the start of the day and daylight at the end of the afternoon - at least in winter (none of my arguments really apply in summer, when there is more than enough daylight to go round however we organise our clocks).

Go to the park first thing in the morning in January and it will probably be too cold and miserable to play. Children will not have had their breakfast; they will be getting ready for school. But at 4pm school is over, it will be a few degrees warmer and play outside is a realistic proposition.

Skewing the clocks to favour daylight in the early winter morning robs us of USEFUL daylight.

Light winter mornings are simply not as useful as light winter afternoons.

Peter advocates sunset while we are still at work. My evenings would be 'lighter' simply because the 'evening' defined as the time between the end of the working day and bed, would coincide better with the time when the Sun is still above the horizon. No big lamp needed.

I agree with Peter that timezones can be political, although it is interesting that the earliest campaigners for Daylight Saving came not from the wishy-washy Left but included people like King Edward VII and Winston Churchill (yes yes, I know, Jeffrey Archer is a clock-changer … you can't always choose your allies) Peking time in western China is an abomination. Kaliningrad is an oddity and of course imperial powers will seek to impose centralist diktats on their dominions. But that is not an argument for saying we should not consider change, if we decide it is in our best interests to do so.

Peter says: "Can Michael find a significant free sovereign territory whose clocks are permanently fixed to a natural meridian two hours different from its own?" 

Yes, Iceland.

Peter's strongest point is his suggestion that as I am basing my arguments mostly on benefits that would accrue in winter, I may wish to leave our current summer time alone, and simply be on GMT+1 all year round. He is right; I think this is an ideal solution and he is also right in saying that it would not be allowed under EU law. This is a problem, but not an insurmountable one.

I am a democrat and it is up to us to decide under which timezone we choose to live. If a majority of people favour the status quo so be it. No arrangement will suit everyone; the trick is to find one which suits most people most of the time, if one can be found. My argument is that a shift to CET (and yes, avoiding CET+1 if possible) would benefit the majority of people in the UK, who live predominantly in the south east and who work indoors.

The strongest advocates for the status quo come from the far north of Scotland, the building industry and from the farmers. Some would suffer from a timezone switch, but more (I believe) would benefit.  Mine is a purely utilitarian argument, not political, nor motivated by Euro-leanings of any kind (although a utilitarian case can be made that by aligning our clocks with those on most of the Continent trade and so on would be easier). Peter, your call.  

 

 

On Not Knowing the Difference

Probably a final word on the Royal Wedding. Those of us who feel we are in exile in our own country have plenty of difficulties in explaining this, not least because most people naturally prefer to be content with their place in the world. Why make yourself miserable when you don't need to? The sun is shining, all's well with the world, etc.

First, it's a mistake to confuse contentment with happiness, an elusive experience best summed up by the old but true saying 'we were happy and we didn't know it'. I believe it's perfectly possible to be both discontented and happy, and cannot myself imagine being wholly content. Like the supposed joys of retirement, as seen from the office or workbench, I suspect utter contentment would lose its charms as soon as one arrived there. The human heart's not made to be content, as St Augustine pointed out.

But I could be a great deal more content than I am, and I think my concerns about our society are major, not trivial. I genuinely fear the future in which the young will have to live, and think that many of the bad things that threaten them are curable. But only discontent, now.

And an occasion such as a Royal Wedding, when so much attention is focused on one event, is a good opportunity to alert people ( who may previously have felt that all was well) to the fact that all is not well.

Others will be annoyed. There's no way round this. It's how controversy works.

It occurred to me, to explain how all this appears to me, to quote from a greatly underrated novel by Kingsley Amis called 'Russian Hide and Seek', published more than 30 years ago. It is not his best (that, I think, must be the savage 'Girl, 20') but it is good and still well worth reading. The book is, on the face of it, about a Britain many years after a Soviet invasion and occupation, after which the national culture has been more or less completely wiped out, right down to the mass felling of almost all mature trees.

My own view (and this was the first novel I ever had the good fortune to read in proof before the reviewers - who raved over the same author's dreadful book 'Jake's Thing' - had given the official, damning verdict on it) is that it is a satire on the self-imposed cultural revolution which had by 1980 achieved much of what an invasion might achieve. The scenes involving an attempt to stage a performance of Romeo and Juliet as part of an official Moscow-sponsored English cultural revival are bitterly funny, and seem to me to jeer accurately at many modern 'interpretations' of Shakespeare, not to mention the bad verse speaking of many actors.

The scene in which an Anglican church service is held, in front of and including a wholly baffled 'congregation' of post-invasion British people, is bitter and poignant, but not funny. I referred to it in my 1999 book 'The Abolition of Britain'.

But the part of the book which sprang to mind during our latest discussion is this. (It's on p.103 of my Penguin edition, near the beginning of Chapter Nine). A garden party is in progress:

'Everything, from a sufficient distance, looked as if it had been done in style, looked right; to everyone there everything was right. No one thought, no one saw that the clothes the guests wore were badly cut from poor materials, badly made-up, ill-fitting, unbecoming, that the women's coiffures were messy and the men's fingernails dirty, that the surfaces of the [tennis] courts were uneven and inadequately raked, that the servants' white coats were not very white, that the glasses and plates they carried had not been properly washed, or that the pavement where the couples danced needed sweeping. No one thought, no one perceived with other senses that the wine was thin, the soft drinks full of preservative and the cakes stodgy, or that the orchestra's playing was ragged and lifeless. No one thought any of that because no one had ever known any different.'

Yes, yes I know. It wasn't *that* bad. Not this time. And my point is much more about the *spirit* of the wedding than about the physical conduct of it. But the point, that 'No one thought any of that because no one had ever known any different' is the devastating bit. If you don't know, you won't care. If you do, you'll care like anything and others will look blankly at you and possibly get annoyed with you for pointing it out( as at the person who insists on making a fuss over a bad meal at an expensive restaurant, frequently 'spoiling the evening' for the others, which is why people so often unprotestingly eat costly muck at such places without a syllable of protest).

Of course, the real reason for a lot of the criticisms of what I said was this - that so many people prefer our post-Christian society because they think it suits them. Well, I know that. I understand that not everyone shares my view, or how would we be where we are now?

But they may not prefer it when it has gone a little further down the road which it will inevitably travel. I'm just pointing out that we have taken what I believe to be a wrong turning, while it's still relatively easy to turn back.

The execution of Osama bin Laden: A few thoughts

President Obama says 'Justice has been done' on Osama bin Laden, and I'm inclined to agree with him. While I'm still unsure that bin Laden played as large a part in 11th September 2001 as he boasted, he did boast, and was without doubt in general responsible for many cruel murders. Obviously I should prefer him to have been tried properly, but capturing him alive would have been hugely difficult and dangerous, if not actually impossible, and his own many public admissions, nay gloating avowals, of guilt make a trial superfluous.

But the many more-or-less liberal politicians and commentators who now exult at this death have a problem that I don't have. I believe in the death penalty, as deterrent and retribution. They don't. Had he fallen into the hands of some EU tribunal, bin Laden would have faced life imprisonment in some Dutch celebrity jail, doing his basket-making alongside various Serbs, and a few Croats for good measure, while the kitchens toiled to provide him with halal meals. This refusal to execute murderers is supposed to be a principle, so wouldn't be affected by the huge numbers of murders involved in this case. Shouldn't they then be condemning this execution too? On what morality or legality is it based, if we do not accept the death penalty?

And if they are not condemning it, why not?

I can cope with soppy liberals. I can cope with macho boasters. I know where I stand with either. But soppy liberal macho boasters are too much for me. If the death penalty is wrong, it's wrong, and they should say so. This mission could have had no other end.

Something similar is going on in the apparent attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi, which the Libyans say has led to the deaths of his youngest son and three grandchildren. Official sources deny that this is the purpose of missiles repeatedly aimed at compounds in which Gadaffi may live. In that case, what are they doing? And what moral basis do they have for their outrage against the Libyan regime, with which they had excellent and productive relations six months ago?

There are other questions about this bin Laden business. You may believe in 'al Qaeda' if you wish. I have yet to see any evidence that there is such an organisation, or if the phrase has anything other than a vaguely general application to a vast variety of Islamic armed militants loosely if at all connected to each other. I think this novelistic bogey is an invention of journalists and spooks (and politicians) all of whom have reasons to promote its importance.

If this organisation has now been decapitated, can we now declare the 'war on terror' over? I doubt it. Airports are going to be even more oppressive for quite a while. Our soldiers remain in Afghanistan. And so on.

Was there ever really such a war? Or was something else going on, during which the 'West' actually appeased the very terrorists against whom it was raging? I set out in my book 'The Broken Compass' (reissued in paperback as 'The Cameron Delusion') an alternative explanation for the events of 2001. I pointed out the following facts:

People sometimes wodner about the timing of the outrages. Here's a possible explanation. The terrorist assaults on the USA were immediately preceded by the UN conference on 'anti-racism' in Durban, during which the verbal attacks made upon Israel and the United States by Arab and Islamic delegates were so virulent that the delegations from the USA and Israel walked out (on 3rd September).

The murders in Manhattan and Washington DC were met with a wave of joy across the Middle East, from Beirut to Gaza. This wave only diminished (and even then, not totally, especially in Gaza) when local Arab leaders realised that the vengeful fury of the USA would be terrible if their rejoicing became widely known among Americans. On 16th September 2001 the Washington Post ( and several other major US newspapers) reported that the Palestinian Authority had been trying to suppress film taken of Palestinians in East Jerusalem celebrating the outrage. 'Palestinian officials have told local representatives of foreign news agencies and television stations on several occasions that their employees' safety could be jeopardized if videotapes showing Palestinians celebrating tha attacks were aired. Broadcast news organisations operating in the Palestinian-ruled portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have complied'.

In other words, stop showing this in the West, or your people won't be safe in areas under our control. Censorship? I should say so. If you remember seeing any of this stuff (and I do, particularly of smiling women distributing sweet pastries) this explains why it has since completely dropped out of the archive narrative.

On 17th September 2001 several provincial big city US newspapers (including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) carried a story presumably from wire services or syndicated from other newspapers with foreign bureaux, which described how the Palestinain Authority had confuiscated and then censored an Associated Press videotape showing marchers in Gaza carrying a portrait of bin Laden. My book speculates on why this story did not appear in more major US papers.

Next, I would draw to your attention the pre-suicide video of one of the actual 11th September hijackers, shown on Al Jazeera in September 2002 ( and very briefly on some Western stations) a year after the event. Abdul-Aziz al-Omari (believed by the FBI to have been responsible for the hijacking of the American Airines plane that was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center) was shown wearing a chequered 'keffiyeh' headscarf, of the type associated with the Palestinian cause.

What was his aim? In his own words, his planned murders were to be 'a message to all infidels and to America to leave the Arabian peninsula and stop supporting the cowardly Jews in Palestine'.

There is much more about this in the chapter entitled 'A Comfortable Hotel on the Road to Damascus', in my book.

But here's the really important bit. While the 'West' was bombarding sand and rocks in Afghanistan, largely irrelevant to the issue, the USA was behaving very differently in the Middle East. In a series of urgent and hastil-arranged missions, it sent first General Anthony Zinni (December 2001 and March 2002) , then Colin Powell himself (April 2002), to meet the Palestinian chieftain Yasser Arafat. US troops were withdrawn from the Arabian peninsula in 2003, as it happens an action demanded by rthe mass-murdering terrorrist al-Omari. Most striking of all, on 10th October 2001, was George W.Bush's declaration of his personal and Presidential support for a Palestinian State. For the USA as a country, and for a supposedly conservative Republican President, this was an enormous change of view. In May 1998 Hillary Clinton had made a similar statement - and it had been swiftly disavowed by her (Left-wing Democrat) husband and by the entire administration.

What, if not the attack of 11th September 2001, brought about these momentous changes in US foreign policy? Have we all been looking in the wrong direction?

I'd add a couple of other thoughts . I was amused by Mr Obama's use of the phrase 'Deep in Pakistan' to describe Abbottabad (named after a British army officer, by the way and still somehow retaining that name nearly 70 years after the Empire ended). It's amusing that Pakistan is the sort of country into which one can go 'deeply'. Would one say 'Deep in France' or Deep in England'?. And if one did, would one use the phrase to describe a substantial town a couple of hours' drive from the capital?

I must admit I had always thought that bin Laden was in Quetta, a rather remoter (or deeper) spot. I treasured President Hamid Karzai's wry remark some years ago that Bin laden was 'either in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and he definitely isn't in Afghanistan'.

But this discovery does raise the question 'What didn't they know about bin Laden's hiding place, and when didn't they know it?

Old misery guts hits back

Not only was my comment on the Royal Wedding much attacked here, but it was also assaulted by the ineffable Libby Purves in The Times. Her sarcastic summary of my article is crammed with adverbs such as 'crossly' and 'furiously'. I wouldn't have said I was particularly cross myself. It was written more in regret than in anger. I was simply stating a fact - not one I rejoice in, but one I accept as the case. I wasn't much concerned with making an immediate point that everyone would love and agree with, but one that I think will still look valid years after the gush of Friday has evaporated.

That is, can the Crown actually survive through two more Coronations? I think the next Coronation will be a major strain on the national belief in monarchy, because of the clash between what it stands for and the way in which it will have to be conducted. The one after that may never happen at all - and that, after all, is the one that most closely concerns the young couple married last Friday.

The concepts that sustain it are already almost impossible to explain to anyone under 50. Christianity itself is a mystery to most British people (hence my point about the mumbled hymns). Even I felt quite uncomfortable actually using the word 'Protestant' in a British national newspaper. For most readers this expression nowadays conjures up the figure of the Reverend Iain Paisley, or some bowler-hatted march in Drumcree. The idea that it might be our own tradition is baffling to them.

And the reader who pointed out that I'm more of a Roundhead than a Cavalier is pretty close to the mark. My version of monarchism is a 1688, Glorious Revolution, Bill of Rights version, not a Laudian Stuart one (though I've a lot of time for the first Elizabeth).

Few grasped my point, which is this: If you want a functioning monarchy, you have to have a serious, responsible and religiously committed people, who revere tradition and honour the past. That's simply not what we are. WE ceased to be during the Diana frenzy, the ghost of which haunted the hole event last week. And you cannot really like the events of last Friday if you value the hard, sometimes cold, sometimes gloomy things that lie beneath the ceremony and the pageant. Monarchy can't be fashionable, can't be modern, can't be populist - at least not for long.

If you marry the spirit of the age, you will pretty soon be bereaved or divorced. For that spirit doesn't wait around in the same place for long.

My guess is that the two central figures in the event went through it largely for their parents and for the institution, which was of course nice of them, but didn't actually involve a deep personal commitment. They may well have found large chunks of it incomprehensible, if not eye-wateringly tedious, and perhaps both.

There's a very funny pastiche of the wedding, produced by a mobile-phone company and on YouTube, in which the nuptials are rather funkier than the ones which actually took place, but which I expect was much closer to what they and their contemporaries would have wanted if they had been allowed. A lot of trouble has been taken to get convincing lookalikes. Some people suspect (I'm sure unfairly) that Archbishop Rowan Williams is actually playing himself in the joke version).

The big event for the friends of bride and bridegroom was not the Abbey service, but the party afterwards, which the older Royals sensibly bowed out of. . It was also the big event for much of the media and especially the gossip writers

And there really is a strong dissonance between the one and the other. Do I really need to go into detail?

My points about the marriage service will have meant nothing to those to whom they meant nothing, and lots to those who cared.

This is the point I constantly come up against. That all these arguments, over drugs, marriage, crime, schooling, foreign affairs etc are down to which sort of country you prefer, and what price you are prepared to pay for what you prefer. As I have begun to write my next book, on the non-existent 'War on Drugs', it has become clear to me that the issue, from right back into the late 1960s, has been ' are we to be a self-controlled, restrained people who accept this as the price for the ordered, peaceful, stratified, and insular civilisation we desire, deferring immediate gratification for long-term security and solid prosperity? Or are we to be a relaxed, pleasure-seeking and unrestrained people who accept that the price of that may be more disorder, less efficiency, more chaos, a steady decline in our real wealth - and less political freedom?

I know my opponents would put it differently, but I'll leave them to do that. My guess is that many of them actually quite like the benefits of the 'repressed' society I favour - the assurance that our frontiers will be defended, that there will be a competent doctor in the hospital when they need him, that there's somebody out there when things get difficult. But they're not really prepared to pay the price for it.

I did actually prefer London when its great buildings were still black with soot. It had the look of a serious capital which, in my view, it has now lost. It looks to me like a filmset or a Disney pastiche. Nobody could defend smog, and I won't, but the buildings stayed black for many years after the smog was cleared, in the days when the buses and the tubes worked, and were cheap and safe. I suspect the huge increase in traffic means the air is just as dirty now, but doesn't appear to be. A lot of people who remember post-war but pre-modern London praise its cheapness, its friendliness, its efficiency and the way in which people without much money were able to live and work in its centre. That is no longer really possible.

I also noticed that nobody much took me up on the fact that the grand service uniforms looked rather overdone given the pitiful state of the services themselves.

On the question of the wife's promise to obey, it forms part of a very tough contract indeed, and is not in my view either submissive or intended to be. The husband's promises are just as onerous.

Elsewhere in the 1662 service are to be found, for instance, these words :So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself; for no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth it and cherisheth it...let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself".

The Biblical passage chosen for the wedding (as well as being from The Duff Bible) was not specially traditional for this occasion.

What was omitted (and is in my view far better and far more lovely) is Miles Coverdale's translation of the 128th Psalm, one of the most beautiful marriage blessings ever written, including the words: 'Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thy house; thy children like the olive branches round about thy table. The Lord from out of Sion shall so bless thee that thou shalt see Jerusalem in prosperity all thy life long. Yea, that thou shalt see thy children's children, and peace upon Israel.'

Perhaps it's the references to Jerusalem and Israel that the modern pro-Palestinian clergy don't like (certainly several references to the Jewish patriarchs, and specifically to Isaac and Rebecca) have been cut out of the original prayers. I thought that was quite interesting, myself. Thomas Cranmer thought they belonged there, and so they were for about 400 years without a break. Then some bureaucrat thought they didn't. Which of them was more likely to have been right?

They wouldn't have thought much of this wedding back in 1953

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Friday's Royal parade was a dying gasp for the Monarchy, not a new beginning. This isn't wishful thinking. I want the Crown to survive. But I do not think it can do so in a modern Britain that has turned its back on the ideas and habits that make a Monarchy possible.

Almost everything about the day was false, and wherever it touched reality it was worrying rather than reassuring.

The Royal cars trailed to Westminster Abbey between motorcycle outriders with flashing blue lights and Range Rovers crammed with bodyguards.

On the way back, the Life Guards (trained killers to a man) for some reason had to be escorted down the road by mounted police. Even Majesty must now be governed and pestered by the twin menaces of 'security' and 'health and safety'.

The police, for once looking like servants of the people in their tunics and helmets, only reminded us how many of them there are and how rarely we see them, and also that on all other days of the year they slouch about in flat caps and stab vests.

The Edwardian braid and sashes worn by Princes and Dukes emphasised that our Armed Forces are shrunken remnants – lots of big hats, not many planes, ships or soldiers. Never have they looked so laughably Ruritanian.

Inside the Abbey, it was obvious that most of those present, though they are our educated elite, feel awkward in church and do not know the words of what were once familiar hymns.

And even on the 400th anniversary of the majestic, poetic and powerful King James Bible, we had to endure a lesson (sorry, a reading) from some flabby modern version.

The marriage service was, as it almost always is, tamed to remove the really dangerous, subversive bits. What? A wife obey her husband? He'll be calling her 'dear' next.

But then again, this husband didn't promise to endow his wife with all his worldly goods, only to share them, nor to worship her with his body. The blunt statement that the first purpose of marriage is the procreation of children was censored, too.

The fierce condemnation of men who behave towards women 'like brute beasts that have no understanding' was also left out. I should have thought it was needed now more than ever, given the way so many much-admired celebrities regularly act.

If you go back to the present Queen's Coronation service in 1953, you will find it was a profoundly British occasion – a -celebration, reaching back far into the past, of our long and happy sovereignty over ourselves.

It was also a straightforwardly Protestant Christian ceremony, based on ideas of self-discipline and self-restraint that we have entirely abandoned in the years since. The two things are completely bound together. You cannot remain free unless you can govern yourself.

When the day comes for our next Monarch to be crowned, we will no doubt put on an excellent show for the tourists. But political correctness, equality, diversity and the overwhelming fear of giving offence – and the fact that these days we prefer to do what we like rather than what we know to be good – will ensure that it will lack the heart and meaning it had in 1953. And my guess is that it will be the last time we try.

Will Ed steal the Right vote?

THIS Liberal Conservative Government is so Left-wing that even Labour is now attacking it from a conservative point of view.

Jack Straw, a former Home Secretary, has cunningly sniped at Kenneth Clarke's plans to reduce the use of prison, producing these interesting figures: 'The number of offenders given short sentences does not reflect a failure of the prison system, but the failure of those same offenders to respond to non-custodial sentences by going straight: 96 per cent of short-term prisoners have at least one previous conviction; three-quarters have seven or more, typically for multiple offences each time.'

Having dumped the Blairites by rejecting David Miliband, Labour is now free to get tough on crime and mass immigration. If it does so, then I think it can pretty much guarantee to win the next Election against the current lot, on any system of voting.

When the Tories abandon their own supporters as thoroughly as they are now doing, all kinds of things become possible.

Labour might even rediscover its old loathing for the European Union, another issue on which Mr Cameron has failed to live up to his own words.

Logically, Labour ought also to be in favour of restoring grammar schools, since they help the poor.

But do they have the courage and honesty to admit that most of their policies for the past 50 years have been wrong?

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I'M STILL waiting for any proof that the volcanic ash cloud, which paralysed Europe a year ago, actually existed outside computer projections.

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I HAVE looked at AV carefully and can't get excited about it, for itself. But I urge you to vote 'No' because the whole thing is designed to destabilise our existing system. Once you have got rid of what people were used to, and was always there, you can do what you like.

There's a long-term plan to make us as much as possible like a continental country, with politicians you can't sack, endless coalitions, and politics entirely beyond the reach of the people.

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I WISH I thought that Anthony Blair had been deliberately left off the Royal Wedding invitation list. It would show that the Palace still had some fighting spirit in it somewhere, if they had set out to snub this annoying, destructive, oily person. But alas, I suspect it was just a blunder by a flunkey.

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THE terrible death of 15-year-old Isobel Reilly, apparently from an overdose of 'Ecstasy', reminds us how dangerous drugs can be – though the risk to mental health from supposedly 'soft' cannabis is the gravest threat to the young. But I was struck by the response of one London commentator, Katie Law.

She said in the London Evening Standard: 'I never cease to be amazed at how many middle- class parents I know regularly snort drugs, smoke weed, pop pills and drink excessively, while at the same time lecturing their children on the dangers of substance abuse . . . One father jokingly told me this weekend he was sure his son wouldn't dream of touching his weed, while at a dinner a couple of years ago, the man on my right rolled a joint while the one on my left began cutting lines of coke. There were three children asleep upstairs.'

This isn't my world. I fled the capital many years ago. But it is the world in which many politicians, lawyers, media figures, actors and academics live and move. It is these corrupted, selfish people, for whom drugs are normal, who stand in the way of responsible laws to control them.

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

Peter Hitchens's second response to Michael Hanlon

Lighter Later? or Darkness Visible?



Let us assume everyone has read (or has easy access to) what has been written. In his first point, Michael says my acceptance of a time zone contradicts my desire not to be forced from my bed at dawn by the state.

In this he ignores a vital word I used in my first rebuttal. That word was 'consensual'. The time-zone compromise in the British Isles is generally accepted at present, even if only because we are used to it. There is certainly no mass movement for change (though there is a very active and persistent lobby for change, which overlaps interestingly with the Europhile wing of politics). If many more people lived in the north of Scotland, or if the main area of economic activity and population in the British Isles were around Galway Bay rather than the Thames Estuary, we might have a different compromise. But they don't, so we don't.

The compromise, of course, means that the South-Eastern majority get roughly what they want, which oddly enough is a time zone which places 12 noon on the clock within one hour (at maximum) of the moment when the sun is at its zenith. The timezone reform campaigners can't get over the fact that the experiment with permanent summer time was unpopular, and was ended by Parliament for that reason.

I may have been too generous to the German Empire on this point. While not a complete autocracy, Wilhelmine Germany was by no means a liberal democracy. If anyone in Koenigsberg or Aachen (let alone Strasbourg/Strassburg) had objected to Berlin time, they probably wouldn't have liked the response they got from the Hauptstadt.

Michael argues :'Whenever he chooses to get out of bed the clocks will be showing a certain time, be it 4am, 6am or indeed noon. It is not the clocks (or Prussian imperialists) telling him when to get up; it is a combination of his physical and mental needs and the strictures of job and family which do that.'

Not exactly. The 'strictures of jobs' are affected by the official time, and affect the structures of most people's days, profoundly and unalterably. Most if not all jobs, some more than others, require employees to turn up at set times. Schools, a major employer, certainly require set times, and these go on to affect the parents of schoolchildren whether they like it or not. Broadcasting is built around these times (has he ever listened to Radio 4 before 7.00 am on Saturdays? It's pretty obvious they're not trying too hard to appeal to the audience). Public transport runs in conformity with those times. Church services, restaurants, shops, all set their hours in conformity with the clock (any churchgoer will tell you what a jolt it is on the Sunday when the clocks go forward - non-churchgoers have a 24-hour period of grace before they have to readjust their lives).

So, a shift of the clock by one or two hours is likely to shift the days of millions of people, willy nilly.


And Michael says :'Of course changing the clocks makes not one second of difference to how much daylight there is. This is a straw-man argument; only a fool would claim that daylight-saving in some magical way creates more daylight.'

Funny he should say that. Maybe he wouldn't directly *claim* it. But he might wish to *imply* it,in the way of snake-oil salesmen down the ages. Or why do its supporters then call it ( as Michael does) 'Daylight Saving'? And why is the principal campaign for Berlin Time called 'Lighter Later', when it could just as truthfully be called 'Darker Later'?

Actually, this stuff about 'extra daylight' is embedded in the clock-fiddlers' argument.

Look at Michael's whole claim that: 'Children would be able to play outdoors for longer in the winter months, improving mental and physical health. Adults would be encouraged to be more active too with longer and lighter evenings. Iceland adopts what is basically 'double summer time' in winter specifically to allow children to get some healthy fresh air in the precious few hours of midwinter daylight.'

The entire statement is, as he rightly points out, vacuous and false. Children wouldn't get 'longer' to play outside. They could just do so at different times of day. The evenings wouldn't be 'longer' - they'd just happen at different times of day. And how on earth they'd be 'lighter', I have no idea. Do they have a big lamp? Likewise Iceland (and apologies about shifting the Arctic Circle, I was wrong, and own up to this silly mistake) has exactly the same number of hours of midwinter daylight, whatever time it adopts.

I agree. Only a fool would claim (or imply), and only a fool would believe (or be gulled by people who claim) that daylight-saving (the phrase Michael himself uses) in some magical way creates more daylight.

I think Michael will find, if he checks, that in this country 'several millions of us are asleep, for much of the year, when the sun is shining', under his proposed time zone scheme, as well as under the existing one. On the longest day, 21st June, sunrise in London will be at 4.43 am, and would be at 5.43 am if London were on Berlin time (Dawn of course comes some time before sunrise) . On the same day, sunset will be at 9.20 pm, and would be at 10.20 pm on Berlin time. If I know my Londoners, many of them will be fast asleep for at least two and a quarter hours of Berlin daylight. But then their children will be able to play outside until 11.00 pm, if you think that's a good thing. Some interesting charts on this time zone's effects on the times of sunrise and sunset further north were published in the MoS a few months ago.

Michael says his argument is 'not really about the summer, it is about the winter'. Well, as long as we remain in the EU, the argument has to be about both. All EU countries, so far as I know, are obliged by directive 2000/84/EC to move their clocks forward one hour each spring, and backward one hour each autumn, on common dates. The directive does not (yet) stipulate that all countries should observe the same time. But it makes the previous British experiment of permanent summer time all the year round impossible. That is why the 'Lighter Later' campaigners, if they want the clocks an hour further forward in winter, must also campaign for them to be an hour further forward in summer. Thus, Michael may not want to affect summer mornings and evenings.

But he has to.

As for dismissing the point about German power as a 'red herring', this just won't do. He has to address the political nature of time zones if he wishes to engage seriously in this argument. If it's not about politics, then why is the idea so popular with pro-EU politicians, from Roy Jenkins to Tim Yeo, and the latest member of the Gummer dynasty?

Why else are the times of formerly German-occupied countries, now in the EU, set at a meridian inconveniently different from their own? Why is Berlin itself so unconvinced of the shining merits of living two hours ahead of its own meridian? Free peoples, and dominant peoples, have their clocks fixed close to natural time. Subject peoples have their clocks fixed to suit the natural time of those who dominate them.

There is, simply, no other explanation apart from politics for the current position, anywhere in the world. Can Michael find a significant free sovereign territory whose clocks are permanently fixed to a natural meridian two hours different from its own?

Time zones are a classic example of 'who whom?'. In Peking, it is light in the mornings by around eight in winter. In Kashgar, in Chinese Turkestan, it is pitch black till ten at the same time of year. It would not take Sherlock Holmes to work out from this which of the two cities is the capital of the country (or empire) involved.

Kaliningrad (which appeared earlier in this argument under its old name of Koenigsberg) observes a unique time zone based on the fact that it is in Russia, though it is an enclave separated from the homeland - and in my view *because* it is an enclave separate from the homeland. It is out of step with Poland all the time, and with its other neighbour, Lithuania, half the time. (Russia is on permanent summer time, an arrangement legally impossible in EU Poland (in the Berlin Zone) or EU Lithuania(in the Eastern European zone, just, and for how long?) ). This Kaliningrad time is purely political, a demonstration of Russian sovereignty for the sake of it. No other Russian territory is on the same time as Kaliningrad, which has its own special time zone close to its actual meridian. But it is also the case that the city's clocks stay at the same time all the year round, just as they do in Moscow or Yekaterinburg or Vladivostok.

Michael Hanlon replies

I am afraid that Peter's argument does indeed 'depart from the normal rules of logic' so much so that it is self-contradictory.

He accepts that in a 'single legal jurisdiction, which does not embrace many degrees of longitude or latitude, it makes sense to have a single agreed time'. Agreed.

But Peter then goes on to say 'If I wish to sleep I'll do so when I want to, not when someone else tells me."  Eh? What does this mean? He is contradicting what he has just said. If Peter accepts that we have to live in one timezone or another (otherwise we simply do away with clocks altogether and descend into temporal anarchy which, I agree, has its appeal), then whenever he chooses to get out of bed the clocks will be showing a certain time, be it 4am, 6am or indeed noon. It is not the clocks (or Prussian imperialists) telling him when to get up; it is a combination of his physical and mental needs and the strictures of job and family which do that.

Of course changing the clocks makes not one second of difference to how much daylight there is. This is a straw-man argument; only a fool would claim that daylight-saving in some magical way creates more daylight.

But what it does is to make the working day fit as best as possible to the physical realities of the rising and setting Sun. Surely we must adopt the Benthamite principle that, when faced with a choice, we must make the choice that brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. To argue otherwise – that we should adopt a timezone which will disadvantage more people than it benefits – would seem perverse.

And this is why I argue that a switch to CET would benefit Britain. It wouldn't bring a revolution, but it would, quietly and at no cost, slightly improve the lives of many, many people. For a start there is the road safety issue. I am trusting the research done by ROSPA and others which suggests strongly that there would be a net reduction in road deaths, mainly among pedestrians and cyclists, if we had lighter evenings and darker mornings in winter. OK, they may be lying, but why would they?

I know no one who says, in October, "great, the dark evenings are back!" and I know no one who does not rejoice when BST comes in and we get our long, late afternoons back in March.

To give a personal, parochial example: if we adopted CET our local south London park would close not at 1615 in December, but at 1715. This would give my son a chance to play on the swings and so on after nursery school which, under the current arrangements, he cannot. In what way is this not a benefit not only to us but presumably lots of other families in a similar situation? This is not 'waffle', it is real. Who on earth would want to play indoors, under 'artificial light', if outside and fresh air are available?

Iceland: you are simply wrong, Peter. Iceland is not 'well north of the Arctic Circle'. It is, in its entirety (save a few islets off the northern tip) entirely SOUTH of the Arctic Circle.

And your argument concerning the Gulf Stream seems to have no bearing; this keeps us warmer than we would expect in winter, but of course has no bearing on how much daylight we get. You are entirely correct that in summer the UK gets a lot of daylight, because we are so far north, but my argument is not really about the summer, it is about the winter.

Finally, the argument about German power. This is a red-herring. It is irrelevant who it was that imposed CET on Paris, or why. This was a long time ago and these arguments no longer apply. The question is, which timezone suits us best, here and now? I understand that lots of people do not like getting up in the dark. But lots of people do not like finishing work in the dark either. In winter, at our latitude and longitude, the reality is that we will have one of or the other. Nothing will please everyone. But I argue that changing to CET will please more people than it will annoy.

 

 

 

Don't tell grown-ups when to get up and go to bed

Two leading writers on this site, Michael Hanlon and Peter Hitchens, who greatly enjoy arguing with each other, have agreed to start a series of occasional discussions on subjects on which they disagree, trying to stay firmly within the rules of debate and civility while showing no mercy to each other's ideas. Contributors are invited to join in, in the same spirit. Their contests will be displayed on both the 'Peter Hitchens' and 'Michael Hanlon' blogs, and readers may comment on both or either.

For their first combat, Michael Hanlon has chosen to question Peter Hitchens's opposition to what he calls 'Berlin Time', and Michael calls 'Central European Time' (CET).

 

MICHAEL HANLON SAYS...

Your passionate argument against the adoption of CET for the United Kingdom is bizarre and illogical. I can understand, perhaps, the loyalty to the current arrangements on nostalgic or sentimental grounds (and I acknowledge that sentiment and nostalgia can be fine motives) but the list of benefits that would accrue if we changes is simply too long to ignore.

Children would be able to play outdoors for longer in the winter months, improving mental and physical health. Adults would be encouraged to be more active too with longer and lighter evenings. Iceland adopts what is basically 'double summer time' in winter specifically to allow children to get some healthy fresh air in the precious few hours of midwinter daylight.

Under the GMT/BST regime, several millions of us are asleep, for much of the year, when the sun is shining. This is wasteful and stupid. The Sun is a free resource; why throw it away like this?

Moving to BST/BST+1 would save lives, to the tune of about 100 a year.
Drivers are sleepier in the evenings than in the morning and exacerbating this sleepiness with darkness makes things worse. I suspect you will quote the children killed on their way to school in the dark mornings of the 1968-70 experiment, but if you do you are forgetting that it is easy to point to someone killed by a particular policy change, impossible to point to the (in this case greater numbers) of people NOT killed.

It is not necessary to annoy the Scots or hillfarmers; cows are milked when they need to be milked. The time on the clock is irrelevant. Most farms these days are equipped with electric lighting. Most Scots are no in favour of a change and if they are not, Scotland is free to adopt its own timezone. Many countries manage with two or more timezones with no problem.

Talk of 'Berlin time' is a silly distraction. Why not argue that we are currently on 'Lisbon Time' or 'Timbuktu Time' (which we are)? What is wrong with being on the same timezone as Germany anyway? (yes, I know about the arguments used against 'Prussian Time' back in 1905).

You will notice I haven't mentioned global warming, once. But shifting timezone will save money, save lives, conserve resources, make us healthier and happier and give our cooped-up computer-addled children more opportunity to get some fresh air. I cannot see how anyone sane would object.

PETER HITCHENS REPLIES...

When Michael uses such terms as 'bizarre', he is really just saying that he disagrees with me. We knew that already. An argument is only 'bizarre' if it in some way departs from the normal rules of logic. Does mine? Or does he simply mean that he himself has no sympathy with it? By contrast, I can quite understand why someone might wish to meddle with the clocks. I just disagree. And I can say (as I will) why I disagree. This is, in fact, the core of the argument, our different attitudes to the way our lives should be ordered.

Michael also says that my argument is 'illogical'. Does he show that it is? I do not think so. Nor is his argument illogical. It is perfectly logical, if you accept that certain views are right and certain facts, which he asserts, can be shown to be correct. But what if you don't hold those views? And what if those, er, facts, aren't quite so factual?

He then accuses me of 'loyalty' to the current arrangements, through nostalgia or sentiment. Not guilty. What would I be nostalgic for? The present day? Impossible. Or for the 1960s experiment with permanent summer time which I much disliked? Not likely. Or the arrangement in my childhood, identical to the one we have now? Whatever this is, it isn't and cannot be nostalgia.

Actually I don't much like the current arrangement, believing that it would be far better if the clocks in this country were always in tune with actual physical fact , based upon the Greenwich meridian. I would prefer it if we never shifted them at all. But I accept the current compromise of going backwards and forwards because other people seem to like it in large enough numbers to justify such an arrangement.


Time zones are fundamentally political. In an age of rapid telecommunications and fast travel, totally local time would be chaotic.

But in a single legal jurisdiction, which does not embrace many degrees of longitude or of latitude, it makes sense to have a single agreed time which is best adapted to the needs of that jurisdiction.

I think the arguments for 'Daylight Saving Time' are fundamentally fatuous. We cannot alter the amount of daylight by a second. The measurement of time has to reflect reality. Where it does not do so, we are entitled to ask why not. For that reality is objectively measurable (as any sundial will tell you) , and depends upon the rotation of the earth, which we also cannot alter. At certain times in certain places, the sun will be at its zenith. You may call this noon, or ten o'clock in the morning, or two in the afternoon, but the sun will still be at its zenith.

Central European Time, as originally adopted by the German Empire before the First World War, sensibly based itself on the 15 degree line of longitude, which runs about 70 miles east of Berlin. That Empire extended considerably to the east and west of this line. Large parts of it lay west, between the 5 and 10 degree lines of longitude. Other important cities and regions were some way to the east, notably Koenigsberg in East Prussia (now Russian Kaliningrad). This great city, along with Memel (now Klaipeda) lay east of the 20 degree line of longitude. As one of the banned verses of 'Deutschland Ueber Alles' proclaims, Germany extends 'From the Maas to the Memel'. Well, it did then. So for sensible political, economic and organisational reasons, which were entirely the business of the German Empire, both Aachen and Koenigsberg functioned on Berlin time. Good for them. Why not? As I said, time is political. It reflects the existence of a sovereign nation, and of an internal political compromise made within that nation, consensually.

The extension of Berlin time to other parts of Western Europe has likewise been political, but not consensual. It was first imposed by conquest, and later retained as a reflection of German economic, political and diplomatic power in Europe (a fact which many people prefer not to discuss, as it undermines so many post-1945 national myths, but which is undoubted). Had things turned out differently, Berlin might now be getting up an hour later, and be enduring early winter dusks, having been quietly compelled to adopt what was in 1914 Paris Time (Paris is only a few degrees to the east of the Greenwich Meridian).

But Berlin doesn't have to suffer this. Paris has to get up in the dark in winter, instead. Nor, I might add, does Berlin believe there is any special virtue in having the sun at its zenith at two in the afternoon, as would happen here in summer if we adopted Michael's desire. If it's such a great arrangement, then why don't they adopt it? Because they don't have to, and they don't want to.

The Berlin Meridian is not as nearly close to the German centre of power as is the Greenwich Meridian, actually within the borders of London. But the continued existence in the common speech of the Greenwich Meridian hugely annoys lots of other nations(who like to call it 'UTC' instead). It is a reflection of Britain's 18th and 19th century maritime and economic (and political) power. Likewise. it is the 15 degree meridian's closeness to the German capital (the real heart of power in the EU) that has made the Berlin time zone so important, and caused it to be so widespread.

I really don't see why shifting daylight from early morning to late afternoon would in any way automatically lead to the result Michael asserts, that 'children would be able to play outdoors for longer in the winter months, improving mental and physical health. Adults would be encouraged to be more active too with longer and lighter evenings.' Apart form the huge number of physical activities that can be done under artificial light and always are, notably swimming and indoor ball games) this is just waffle, impossible to prove and lacking in solid evidence. Parental bans (or at least tight restrictions) on computer games and bedroom TV sets would have a much greater effect on this problem, at all times of the year.

The behaviour of Iceland, which at 65 degrees of latitude is well north of the Arctic Circle and thus utterly distinct from us in every conceivable way, doesn't really seem to have much bearing on the matter. As it happens, Britain is unusual among highly-populated nations in that it receives an enormous amount of summer daylight for those that want it (far more than the eastern seaboard of the USA) and is only so temperate at this extreme northerly latitude, thanks to the blessing of the Gulf Stream which keeps us warm. Newcastle on Tyne is on roughly the same latitude as Southern Alaska, and north of Krasnoyarsk.

Michael complains:'Under the GMT/BST regime, several millions of us are asleep, for much of the year, when the sun is shining. This is wasteful and stupid. The sun is a free resource; why throw it away like this? '

Well, pardon me for breathing. Here we have the nub of this bossyboots, hectoring scheme (indeed, the progenitor of daylight saving, William Willett, a developer, was personally irritated by the way other people lay about sleeping (rather than slaving for him) while he rode his horse around in the early morning sun) . In sum, it's 'Get up, you lazy slobs, and do as I tell you!'.

If I wish to sleep, I'll do so when I want to, not when someone else tells me. Doesn't Michael have curtains on his bedroom windows? Or does he live underground? Does he really get up with the sun in midsummer? Does he even know what time it rises?

If Michael wishes to get up in the small hours in June, and to have small children in his home wide awake after ten at night, then that is his right and he's welcome to exercise it, provided he gets up quietly and doesn't spend his extra leisure hours revving motorbike engines in his front garden. He's quite welcome. But why is he so anxious to make me and others do so too? That's surely a matter for us.

If I wish to get up early, I'll do so. If and when I go to prison I may return to the days when I was told by others when to get up and go to bed.

But for now, and as long as I remain free, I think it's a matter for me

He asserts:' Moving to BST/BST+1 would save lives, to the tune of about 100 a year. Drivers are sleepier in the evenings than in the morning and exacerbating this sleepiness with darkness makes things worse.'

I really would like to know on what basis he so confidently maintains this.The claim seems to me to be highly contentious and, once again, very hard to establish.

As for a Scottish time zone, this would seem to me to accelerate the break-up of the United Kingdom. Is this really a price worth paying for longer evenings in the winter in London?

Far from being a 'silly distraction', my use of the phrase 'Berlin Time' is entirely justified, is explained above and in more detail in items indexed under 'Berlin Time' on my blog. It has spread historically because of the ever-increasing dominance of Germany on the European continent and is, like many other features of EU unification, a feature of that domination, and has political significance.

We are being asked to adopt the time used in Berlin, based upon Berlin's longitude and appropriate for that city. That is the time which Berlin (quite reasonably) proposes to continue using. If being two hours ahead of your own meridian is such a good idea, why is it not being adopted everywhere, notably in Berlin itself?

Let him go to Berlin and urge them to adopt the time used currently in Minsk, if he likes, and see where it gets him.

Or get Washington DC to adopt mid-Atlantic time. Or Peking to adopt Korean time.

Michael asks: ' Why not argue that we are currently on 'Lisbon Time' or 'Timbuktu Time' (which we are)?' Because it would miss the point. These places are on times which suit their meridians, not influenced by outside political forces (though Portugal was on Berlin time for some years until they could bear it no longer, see many recent articles in the Mail on Sunday).

And he asks 'What is wrong with being on the same timezone as Germany anyway?' .Quite simple. We are too far from the Berlin Meridian for this to fit in with our daily habits.

As for the following assertions:' Shifting [the] timezone will save money, save lives, conserve resources, make us healthier and happier and give our cooped-up computer-addled children more opportunity to get some fresh air.'

I must ask him to provide objective quantifiable justification for these claims, rather than vague extrapolation and speculation

Finally, Michael says 'I cannot see how anyone sane would object'. Well, isn't that just the difficulty? Shouldn't any debater at least accept the possibility that he might be wrong, or that reasonable people might disagree with him? Calling your opponents insane is not a good way of persuading them, or of persuading neutrals that you are serious. I can entirely see why a sane person might want us to go to Berlin Time. That's why I have assembled and developed detailed arguments against it, and tried to explain why I object to it : 1) Because its origin is political, and an interference with national self-determination and 2) because it is a fundamentally authoritarian interference with my freedom to live my private life as I wish.