Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 334

Red Meat, Long-Distance Compassion, and Mr 'Mugaffi'

 I'll try to pick up one or two issues in the various discussions we are having here. On the Libyan question, I will briefly point out that my Mail on Sunday column on 20th March seems to me to have been some way closer to the mood of the people of this country than the wretched House of Commons, in which adversarial opposition has ceased and dissent is confined to the marginalised.

This House is now Mr Cameron's Poodle. I thought that,after Gordon Brown's post-Iraq declaration, this country would not again enter a war of choice without Parliamentary approval. Obviously if we were under attack, this would not be possible. But we weren't and aren't, and the circumstances under which we began our violence were foreseeable and had been foreseeable for days.

By the way, can those who write here and say that Gaddafi is a national enemy because of Lockerbie please state what they believe to be the evidence that Gaddafi is connected with this episode, and where it is on record? I have seen none. Those who rightly point out that Gaddafi armed the IRA need to deal with the fact that this country surrendered to the IRA in 1998 and now regard it as a partner in government. (So, in my experience, do most people in this country, who regard my condemnation of the 1998 Belfast Agreement as a weird eccentricity) So there's no current casus belli on that score either. If these people are so keen to make war on evil killers, torturers etc then why are they happy that we are at peace with the Provisional IRA, who actually launched a campaign of murder on our soil and tried to assassinate the British Cabinet in their beds in Brighton, along with anyone else from chambermaids to kitchen staff who happened to be in the way at the time?

Yet Mr Cameron used Royal prerogative (which should really be renamed Downing Street prerogative since the Monarch no longer has anything significant to do with it) to unleash colossal violence against a sovereign foreign country on Saturday night.

If the matter was so urgent, then the Commons could have been summoned on Saturday morning, as they were during the Falklands crisis.

The first item on the business of the Commons on Monday should have been a censure of the executive for launching a war without Parliamentary authority. But it wasn't. Instead the chamber was almost unanimously in favour of the action, with a tiny number of MPs either speaking or voting against it - far fewer, by my reckoning, than would have been justified by the feeling in the country as it has so far been measured. And remember, the doubt among the populace existed despite an almost wholly favourable media, especially TV, which has in my view thrown objectivity to the winds during the alleged 'Arab Spring'.

Edward Miliband failed the first major test of his leadership of the Labour Party. Having become leader by being prepared to condemn the Iraq War, he made himself David Cameron's lifelong slave by failing to oppose the Libya adventure. Why do I say this? Because his acquiescence was evidence that he is afraid of the Prime Minister, and no Leader of the Opposition can do his job if this is so. Once he has acted out of fear once, Mr Cameron knows he has him where he wants him, for good. He and his party were afraid of being jeered at for their attempts to normalise relations with Colonel Gaddafi in 2004. I am sure the Tories would have made the same attempts themselves had they been in office then. Michael Howard did oppose the Blair-Gaddafi meeting on 2004. But I can't see what principle he was applying.

The Tory attitude to the surrender to the IRA (for which William Hague actively campaigned when it was subjected to a rushed referendum in Northern Ireland) has always been devoid of morality. And the IRA were for years Gaddafi's principal allies on British soil(and to this day retain weapons and explosives supplied by him, though we pretend this is not so in case it annoys them).

As for the 'Liberal Democrats', the pathos and misery of their position must be increasingly unbearable. If they can't oppose this sort of nonsense, then why do they exist at all? Still more votes lost in May.

Dim Tories, we all know, believe that all military action is patriotic. The drum beats. They rally to the colours, however moronic and abject the cause. My theory is that in this way they comfort themselves for their abject surrenders to the EU and the IRA, real threats to this country, by biffing Arabs instead. Though there were one or two genuine patriots prepared to voice fears. And the best moment in the debate, as several contributors have noted, was when Mr Cameron was asked what we would do if the rebels committed war crimes.

From what we know of this uninspiring rabble, it seems more than possible that they have already done so, and very likely that (if we arm them) they will do so. I continue to be puzzled that we should have invested so much in a force so incoherent, so disorganised and of which we know so little. It is all very like that great novel 'Scoop', in which the actual issues took second place to the story. By the way, given how little we know of the various battles taking place, why is it that the BBC insists on saying that Tripoli's reports of civilian casualties cannot be verified.

Of course they can't, and they may well be propaganda. But so may many other things the Corporation reports as fact.If we're going to be cautious about accepting what we are told, then let's not be selective in our caution.

Anyway, there are bound to be civilian casualties. The power of modern munitions is terrible and their accuracy gravely over-rated by gullible war-junkies in the media. War is Hell. Don't forget it.

Then there's the row about whether we are trying to rub out Colonel Gaddafi himself. General Sir David Richards is obviously appalled by such talk, as well he might be, since it is his men who will end up in the International Court in the Hague if this turns nasty. Mr Cameron's strange shiftiness about this seems to me to be very worrying. My guess is that he realises that as long as Gaddafi lives, Tripoli will keep fighting, and the death of the Colonel (in 'collateral damage') is the only way to put a term to a civil war that could otherwise last for years. But that is now much harder than it would have been. And Mr Cameron certainly doesn't intend to spend his late middle age festering in the Slobodan Milosevic wing of the special prison in the Hague for politicians who misjudge the situation. Mind you,nor did Mr Milosevic intend or expect to end up there.

That deals with most of Mr Swanson's objections. As for his view that 'the fact that democracies cannot fight or overthrow every tyranny existing on the planet, all at once without delay, does not mean that they should not deal with at least the ones that present the most urgent and manageable problems', it needs elaboration.

On what principle of law or morality do we fight or overthrow other governments? The whole doctrine of Just war was developed to deal with this, and its principal difficulty is that War is Hell, and needs very strong justification. People such as Mr Swanson really do need to educate themselves about two aspects of war . One, that innocent people's lives are horribly ruined by war, even war in a good cause; and two, that wars are easy to start and hard to end.

My test is this: If you are so keen to set Libya to rights, establish an International Brigade of like-minded persons, all so truly concerned about that country's fate, and so sure of which side is in the right, that you are prepared to be maimed or rendered limbless and disfigured in that cause, Off you go. Fly to Egypt, slip across the border and offer your services to the heroes of Benghazi.

I won't stop you. But I pay for armed forces to defend me, not to go off on righteous adventures, and soldiers likewise sign up to defend their own country, not mess around with other people's.

My case is that 'democracies' whatever they are, have enough to do at home keeping the weak from being robbed and attacked by the strong. And that war is so wicked that the only real justification for it is to defend yourself against those who would destroy, rob or subjugate you.

And that those who claim to 'care' are usually curiously absent when the guns begin to shoot. George Orwell ( who did actually volunteer for the Spanish Civil War and found when he got there that his own side wasn't as nice as it looked) wrote once, I think, of 'that rare sight, a Jingo with a bullet-hole in him.' I would update it to 'that rare sight. A muscular liberal with a bullet hole in him'.

If you care, go. If you don't go, then I don't believe you care. You just want to feel good about yourself.

This is also the problem for our vegetarian friend. How curious that a person who apparently won't even eat a chicken feels so belligerent that he caricatures my view as follows:

'Dear Mr. Gaddafi,
I understand that, following your repeated gunning down of people in the streets of your fair cities, you are planning to move many tanks, fighter planes and troops, into Benghazi and massacre as many of your citizens as you see fit. Go ahead old man. I certainly hope those nasty people in the British Government don't dare to try and stop you. That would make them, in my humble opinion, which is never wrong, look silly.
Yours faithfully,
Mr. P. Hitchens.'

But as I have explained, I oppose intervention because I doubt my power to act benevolently and effectively, don't imagine that because a TV crew can get there, an army can, fear that intervening in ( and probably prolonging) a civil war I don't understand may well lead to more deaths and more suffering than it will prevent . Also I am by no means sure that the rebels will refrain from atrocities and massacres of their own if the chance comes their way. This person refers to Yugoslavia, and perhaps still believes that the Serbs were the unique villains in that conflict. They weren't. But we simplified the war into that shape, to justify our intervention for different purposes. In this case we have no such purposes, just naivety and vanity.

I am not sure if Mr Cameron thinks this war will make him popular. I certainly suspect that he believes it will enhance other people's opinions of him as a 'statesman' and 'man of action'. But not mine.

 

On the endless God versus the Atheists subject, I continue to be amused by the writhings and wrigglings of Mr 'Bunker', who is an atheist one minute and an agnostic the next, who has tickled the curiosity of all of us by telling how he was 'forced' to be an atheist, but won't tell us who or what did this awful thing to him, nor how they or it did it, and seems unable to distinguish between belief and knowledge for longer than five minutes at a stretch. And sometimes thinks that 'belief' is a sort of gift that has been denied to him, and which he cannot experience, and sometimes thinks it is an inert object which has nothing to do with the person who holds it.

Better still, through thick and thin, he maintains an extraordinarily high opinion of himself. Well done, Mr Bunker!

But I must go. As I peer nervously out of the window I see a sinister windowless van on the street outside, marked 'Huxley, Darwin and Dawkins, Glue Boilers' and two large men in stocking masks slapping rubber truncheons into their palms. I fear they are going to force me to be an atheist. I shall slip out by the back way.

Oh, and as for Mr 'Mugaffi', this was the figure mentioned in the Commons by that fine old survival, Sir Menzies Campbell. Poor Sir Menzies has lived all his life with a name most people can't pronounce (it is 'Mingus') so we can forgive him for mispronouncing the Libyan dictator's. But his slip of the brain did remind us all that, if you are looking for evil, murderous dictators to bomb, Zimbabwe has one just as foul, placed in office by a simpering British establishment from left to right with barely a voice raised in protest (though his true character was obvious to all who wished to know it) about whom we do two parts of nothing.

And if we don't bomb him, then once again, what is the principle on which we claim to act? And if it isn't a principle, then the action must be judged on its own merits - which are slender.

'ADHD' an interesting development

I have said all that I wish to say for the present about the fictional complaint 'ADHD', as the index will attest. (Anyone wishing to quarrel with me about this will find there a long article answering in advance all their objections, with which I am painfully familiar.Please do read it before posting angry comments).

But because the Times pay-wall will keep this from general web consumption, I just wanted to draw attention to an excellent article in Monday's 'Times' by Libby Purves, who is politically and culturally no ally of mine, on this vexed and important subject of drugging children.

Prompted by a Freedom of Information revelation that spending on 'ADHD' drugs in this country rose in 2010 to £31 million a year (a 65% increase in four years), Ms Purves wrote of her unease that we have become complacent about keeping thousands of children on psychotropic drugs during ten years of delicate brain development.


Adult convenience, she suggests, is as much involved as the alleviation of childhood suffering (I would say far more so).

Ms Purves concedes that there probably is a rare neurological disorder describable as 'ADHD'. I might also concede that, with heavy emphasis on the *rare*, and in my case adding that the enormous majority of those 'diagnosed' with this largely imaginary complaint have nothing wrong with them at all. At least,until they start being fed powerful drugs.

She then says : 'Look at the figures, look at the anecdotes, consider the unknown risks of prolonged medication, and reflect how a social pattern repeats itself: social control, homogenisation enforced by rigid societies impatient at the exuberance of children'.

It's an excellent article and I urge readers to obtain it if they can. I'd say it's worth paying for (especially given the awful price paid by our society and its children for the current complacency on this subject).

Mr Cameron Goes to War

No doubt in days to come we'll have several chances to discuss this. But I wanted to give a brief and concentrated response to comments so far on my Sunday column. For those not bothered by our latest war, an interesting debate on whether Atheists choose to be so, and why they do, continues on the 'Red Meat' thread, and probably will do till the sounding of the Last Trump. Intrepid Web voyagers may also be able to find an encounter with me and one of my more virulent critics, in which I have caught him red-handed distorting my words, and he and his supporters insist that this is perfectly all right.

But back to Benghazi. Though I'm never distressed to be in a small minority at the start of any controversy (usually the infallible way to be in the majority at the end of it, though this isn't my special purpose) , I'm amazed at the generally slack-minded support for this action, or at least acceptance of the feeble arguments for it, in the British political and media classes. It was dispiriting listening to Radio 4's 'Any Questions' last Friday night, in which a varied panel of reasonably intelligent people unanimously supported the war.

I suspect that many people outside the London elite, not least those in military families, are heartily sick of the British government's growing delight in launching wars in distant Muslim countries where they don't know what is going on and have no idea what the end of the story will be.


And by the way a wonderful example of the way in which Ministers are utterly insulated from reality emerged at the weekend, when the Mail on Sunday reported that Jack Straw was taking driving lessons because in his long Cabinet years he had more or less forgotten how to drive. I seem to recall him being driven very fast indeed at one point, during his time in office, but I like to remember tiresome things like that.

Andrew Bishop (who kindly reminds of my name, which I am glad to say I have still not forgotten) says: ' We have every right to intervene in Libya. Col. Gadaffi provided arms and money for the IRA and also don't forget the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in London. I could also raise the subject of Lockerbie but enough has been said about that recently. When a foreign dictator is responsible for terrorist atrocities against British citizens there is no doubt that action should be taken against him.'

I am not sure what this 'right' consists of. From 1648 until very recently, countries were sovereign and we didn't intervene in them because of their internal affairs. This was not perfect, but there was a reason for it. It was because of the horrible experience of the Thirty Years War, in which nations asserted their 'right' to intervene in states whose governments they disliked. The consequence was a period of massacre, torture, hatred, woe and depopulation, when the nightmare paintings of Hieronymus Bosch pretty much came true, which still lies across the continent of Europe like a scar (though is sadly little-known in Britain, which escaped it).

The myth that we went to war with Hitler because we didn't like his internal behaviour is a complete falsehood. He murdered and repressed with impunity for six years before we blundered into war with him. And our crucial ally, Stalin, murdered and repressed for decades before, during and after our alliance with him. See index.

The new doctrine, set forth in the mouth of (though not, I suspect , in the vacuous, historically illiterate mind of) Anthony Blair is of 'hard liberalism', or 'muscular liberalism' where we intervene in countries we currently don't like, for idealistic motives. The US invasion of Iraq, I think, was genuinely concocted by people who thought they were doing good. Always a bad sign, a point I will come to.

This is transparent, contradictory piffle. If our guiding principle is a hatred of oppression, then we don't apply it as a principle. in which case it isn't one. We don't intervene in the long term in China, Zimbabwe, North Korea (China massacred its; 'own' people in Tiananmen Square and those responsible are still in charge). We haven't intervened in Iran despite the grisly street massacres last year. We didn't intervene in the short term when Syria shelled its own people in their homes in the city of Hama. We aren't intervening against the Bahraini and Yemeni governments, both of which have been treating their 'own people' with severe violence.

Be warned, by the way. This 'principle' can and possibly will rebound. When, 20 years hence, Chinese or Russian jets, with UN Sanction, are destroying RAF bases and air defences because of some last-gasp British attempt to defend what's left of our sovereignty or suppress indigenous terrorism, they will silkily point out that they got the idea from us. Don't think it can't happen. The 21st century will be full of surprises, as we decline, and China and Russia almost certainly abstained on this so they could watch us destroy what remains of our influence, and because they can see that this new law of war could one day work for their benefit.

Colonel Gadaffi did indeed support and finance the IRA. So did the United States, in the form of NORAID collections, (private but legal), sanctuary for terrorists on the run (impossible without the authorities winking at it) and ultimately by the 'peace process;' under which Bill Clinton put the force of the White House behind the ghastly coffin-carrier Gerry Adams, humiliated and sidelined the formerly influential British Embassy in Washington, and forced John Major to begin the surrender to the IRA completed by A.Blair in 1998 (under which the IRA have kept the weapons supplied to them by Colonel Gadaffi, and we have all pretended to believe that they have been destroyed). So does he want to bomb Connecticut and Massachusetts? I doubt it.

He's wise to steer clear of Lockerbie as a Casus Belli. The evidence that Libya was responsible for that atrocity is non-existent, and this account is believed by nobody with any close knowledge of the affair.

I'll deal briefly (because I have other commitments) with two other points. One, that Mr Cameron's eventual fanning of the flames into actual war should make me sorry that I laughed at his initial efforts. Why? My point was twofold . One that such action was foolish and second that Mr Cameron had made a fool of himself.

Mr Cameron's initial efforts were without doubt confused and feeble, and accompanied by the SAS blunder, and at that time there seemed to be enough sensible people in Washington DC, notably at the Pentagon, to prevent a rush into war. The fact that electoral politics in the USA and France, no doubt influenced by the propagandist and simplified coverage of the affair on the TV screens of those nations, have over-ridden, doesn't change the folly of the action.

My only possible regret is that it may be Mr Cameron's wounded pride, when we laughed at his initial failure, that drove him on to the place where we are now.

Ever since the Falklands, when the Royal Navy saved Margaret Thatcher's bacon, British politicians have wrongly assumed that war is a ticket to popularity and the admiration awarded to statesmanship. Much more often it is a ticket to failure, recrimination (and national decline). Mrs thatcher was incredibly lucky that she hadn't yet scrapped the Navy.

I am also asked how I square my Christian conscience with my hard-bitten view of foreign policy.let us call this the doctrine of limited effect, combined with the law of unintended consequences. Good, as I often quote William Blake as pointing out, has to be done in minute particulars. Unselfishness is only really possible at short range, where we have a good chance of rightly predicting the consequences of our actions.

This is why i support the existence of nation states, genuine communities of common interest and understanding in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish. Such communities need to defend themselves against attack. Sometimes this will involved just wars, but aggressive war is rarely if ever just.

It is obviously permissible to fail to intervene in wrong and injustice if we are not aware of it. What if we are aware of it but not truly able to help? the Good Samaritan did not see the robbed man on TV. He saw him on the same road. TV has given us the illusion of closeness to, and ability to act in, places where we do not have the power to be effective. It is relatively easy to insert a TV crew into a famine or a war zone and with luck get it out again. An army ( or a relief operation) is a far greater problem. This is why so much charity ends up being wasted, creamed off in bribes or never reaching its recipients. That's not an argument against charity because some good is done, along with the harm and the waste.

The balance sheet for war seems less attractive.

We watch the launch of missiles, the grandeur of warships afloat, the thrill of jets flying low over targets, the pretty orange and black flowering of distant explosions, the flash of missiles landing in cities lighting the night sky. We are not shown what it looks like afterwards. People would rush from the room gagging if the truth came on their TV screens at 10 pm. Most of us have never even seen a corpse, let alone a charred or dismembered one. We have not been powerless and defenceless in a city under bombardment (I am haunted by the fact that during the bombing of Baghdad dozens of women went into premature labour through terror. Who wants to be responsible for that?) My own brief experience of war zones has forever cured me of imagining that there is such a thing as a humanitarian war.

Ultimately, in the sum of human kindness, my view may seem heartless. But it is far more merciful than an interventionist war.

General Sherman told us long ago that 'War is Hell', and he was right. The only mercy in war is a swift victory. No sane, kind person should ever call for it unless the alternative is slavery and subjugation in our own land.

Why can't we just let the Libyans fight it out (...then make friends with the winners)

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Politics seems to have become a sort of mental illness. We have no bloody business in Libya, and no idea what we hope to achieve there. We are daily told that we have no money to spare. We have just scrapped a large part of our Navy.

Our Army is stuck in an Afghan war whose point nobody can explain. And now we have set out on a course that could drag us into a long, gory brawl in North Africa.

And yet, when the Prime Minister announces this folly he is praised. Why? Partly it is because we all watch too much TV. Its reports simplify, then exaggerate. Reporters, much like politicians, like to feel they are helping to make history, and get excited by subjects they knew nothing about until last Wednesday.

Before we know where we are, we are taking sides in quarrels we don't understand. Who are the Libyan rebels? What do they want? Why do we love them so?

I've no idea, and nor has Mr Cameron, as we discovered when he (yes, it was him, not poor William Hague) sent the SAS to see them and they were welcomed with pitchforks and mockery.

The only sensible policy in Libya is to wait and see who wins, and then make friends with them. If you think this heartless, you are of course right. Foreign policy is heartless. Nice countries end up being conquered or going bankrupt. But it may be no more heartless than our kindly interference.

I pray that this episode ends quickly and cleanly. Perhaps it will. But we cannot know.

What if our humanitarian bombs and missiles accidentally kill women and children (which is almost certain)? What if air attacks and distant shelling fail to stop Gaddafi's forces? Will we then send in troops? Who knows? I don't. The Prime Minister doesn't.

Some of the longest wars in history started with small-scale intervention, for a purpose that looked good and achievable, and ended up ruining millions of lives. The Soviet takeover of Afghanistan in 1979 ended with countless innocents driven into refugee camps, and the collapse of the Soviet state itself. It also left Afghanistan as a worse snake pit than before.

Why are we suddenly so worried about Muammar Gaddafi? It's fashionable just now to get very hoity-toity about him. But until recently many of the war enthusiasts were rather keen on him, for supposedly heeding the fate of Saddam and changing his behaviour.

Liberal idealists might also consider that Gad¬dafi is one of the heroes of their hero Nelson Mandela (there is film on YouTube of a touching embrace between these two).

There's no principle at stake here, or we would be bombing Bahrain too, and demanding the withdrawal of the Saudi troops who arrived there in such sinister fashion last Monday. But Bahrain's the base of the U.S. 5th Fleet, so we won't be doing that. And as I've said here before, this supposed objection to rulers killing their own people is not consistent. Sometimes – as in China, Bahrain and Syria – we're happy to let them do it.

So why are we rattling the drums of war and fuelling up for a fight in a place where our national interests would be best served by staying out?

If the Arab League members want to intervene, they've got plenty of weapons not currently being used to attack Israel. I can only conclude that our Government is historically ignorant, politically dim, immune to good advice and swollen with personal vanity.

How freedom died in Midsomer

A man has been suspended from his job, and his whole career is endangered, because he expressed an opinion.

How can we call ourselves a free country when this sort of thing happens?

Threatening someone's livelihood is very nearly as oppressive as casting him into prison. This is the shocking thing about the Midsomer affair, that we all seem to have accepted that there is no freedom of speech here any more.

I have read with care the article about the programme's producer Brian True-May (though I have not heard a full recording of the conversation from which it was culled). Much of what he says is undeniable fact. The villages of the Home Counties are populated almost entirely by people with the pinkish-grey skins we oddly call 'white'.

He is stupidly wrong to say there are no pinkish-grey faces in Slough, but possibly he's never been there and doesn't know better. But should he be suspended for that?

I think he is being persecuted, and that is the right word, because he says he does not want to change the format of Midsomer Murders by bringing in non-pink actors.

Why is this so bad? It is, in fact, truthful, gritty realism to keep Midsomer's cast pinkish-grey – about the only gritty realism in the series.

By contrast, look at the endless, unlikely politically correct storylines in so many other dramas. It's all Left-wing wishful thinking, lesbian kisses, heroic transsexuals, Hindus marrying Christian vicars, happily married couples going through personality transplants so they can have affairs, etc.

Vanessa Whitburn, editor of the BBC radio soap opera The Archers, has actually said: 'To be PC is really to be moral. It is having a correct moral stance. PC is, in fact, my moral plank.'
And nobody suspended her for that.

Nor should they have, though there's a case for the BBC inaugurating an alternative version of The Archers free of PC, to see which gets the bigger audience.

I'd like to end by saying: 'It's a free country.' But it obviously isn't. Free
the Midsomer One. Where is Shami Chakrabarti when you need her?


Heroes insulted by a gimmick

Royal Wootton Bassett indeed. What a silly gimmick.

The town now has a name that's longer than its own High Street, and why?

Because we have a Government that sentimentalises the deaths of men who it sends to pointless doom, rather than bringing them home.


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Sometimes I feel ashamed of my trade. The panic-mongering coverage of the Japanese nuclear power station's troubles has been little short of moronic. The threat is elsewhere. The Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, is far more dangerous to health and safety than the Fukushima reactors. Out of his mouth issues a mile-high plume of deadly greenish drivel which, if not dispersed, will condemn this country to power shortages, dependence on foreign gas and economic collapse.


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They tell us that Gala apples are more popular than Cox's Orange Pippins. No they're not. Gala apples are horrible. But most of the time, supermarket monopolies don't stock or display Cox's any more – last autumn I looked in vain for them in big stores, and could find them only in my nearby covered market.

Even then they're usually not proper, rough-skinned Cox's but a blander, shinier variety with less bite that I suspect has been developed because it's easier to grow and keeps longer in cold stores.

Isn't the 21st Century great? You can get a chicken-flavoured potato crisp, but you can't get an apple-flavoured apple.

It's Not Just Me

Elsewhere on the web I am still under bombardment for daring to suggest that the evidence that passive smoking is a serious health threat is 'very thin'. A (small) wave of rage has broken over my head, simply because I voiced this doubt.

Is this because of the message, or because of the messenger?  During my researches on the second-hand smoking controversy, I came across an article by Tim Luckhurst in the Independent. (Tuesday May 2nd 2006). Mr Luckhurst, an ornament to my trade,  is now Professor of Journalism at the University of Kent, and the Independent is the sort of unpopular newspaper my critics normally revere.

Yet it seems to me that he expressed a view almost identical to mine. I don't recall, and cannot find, any equivalent complaints about this on the web at the time. Could it be that my detractors are more motivated by dislike of me and of my newspaper, than they are by the actual subject of the debate?

I can't reproduce the whole article, though it's easily found on the web here - here

But I will give a flavour of it.

Referring to what he calls the 'sanctimonious superstition that there can be no smoke without death' Mr Luckhurst recalls that 'On Desert Island Discs in 2001, Sir Richard Doll, the man who proved the incontrovertible causal link between active smoking and lung cancer, said: 'The effect of other people smoking in my presence is so small it doesn't worry me." He was right not to fret.'

Like me, he refers to the huge and important American survey published in the BMJ that has been so furiously attacked.

'Publication provoked a barrage of condemnation in which the then BMJ editor Dr Richard Smith was accused of every failing from naivety to active promotion of evil. His accusers demanded that he withdraw the article. To his credit, Smith refused, pointing out that the BMJ exists to publish science not polemic, and that the American study was proper, peer-reviewed science. A robust and persuasive anti-smoker, he replied that although the BMJ was "passionately anti-tobacco" it was not "anti-science". He went on to explain that "the question [of whether passive smoking kills] has not been definitively answered."'

Mr Luckhurst added 'Doctors and scientists who make such statements come under extraordinary pressure to withdraw them. Three years later, Dr Smith appeared to be satisfied that passive smoking does kill. Doll was persuaded to emphasise that his lack of concern about secondary smoking was a purely personal perspective. The tragedy, for those who care about truth, reason and scientific method, is that it was not. Profound scepticism about the claim that secondary smoking kills is the only rationally tenable position.'

It is worth going to the original article to read the quotation from Amanda Sandford of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) the principal anti-smoking pressure group.

 Mr Luckhurst concluded :'The logic is that distortions paraded in a good cause are virtuous. But, a non-smoker myself, I find it alarming that the Government is prepared to base legislation on what is barely more than superstition. Smoking only kills you if you stick the cigarette in your own mouth. To pretend otherwise is mumbo-jumbo.

'Those who disagree should remember a lesson from the history of anti-smoking. Doll's post-war study was not the first to prove that smoking caused lung cancer: Nazi scientists had reached the same conclusion 20 years earlier. The resulting evidence was ignored in this country because it came from a tainted source. It was assumed that good science could not come from an evil regime. In the modern-day debate over secondary smoking, campaigners who pretend there is proof that it kills are repeating that historic error in reverse. Excellent motives are producing grotesquely distorted science'.

I never intended to get into a scuffle on this subject. My reference to the passive smoking topic was not even a central part of the article I wrote, just a passing nod to the truth that I thought I ought to acknowledge - even though it had no impact on my support for smoking bans. But if I'm going to be assaulted in this way then I will defend myself as a matter of duty.  The abuse of science to assert certainty on contentious issues,  and to shut down important discussions, is an increasing problem in public debate.

Smoke fails to clear

I'll take this opportunity to return to a subject which is still causing controversy. On another website I'm told by a scornful but anonymous person that, by turning to the Wikipedia entry on second-hand smoke, I can see that the question of the danger from such smoke is resolved. I have a higher opinion of Wikipedia than many, but I think we all acknowledge that, where the subject under discussion is controversial, it can let you down.
Entries have often been captured by one side or the other in the controversy, and you have to be alive to the possibility that you may be missing something.

So what about the study by Enstrom and Kabat, which my excerpt from Christopher Booker mentions in my earlier posting?  I've looked for some sources on this which wouldn't necessarily be on my side, or which may be unfamiliar.

As Sarah Boseley wrote in her Guardian account of the report (16th May 2003, page one): 'The study is given scientific credibility by its publication in one of the world's most prestigious peer-reviewed journals, whose editor Richard Smith quit a professorship after Newcastle University accepted £3.8m of funding from British American Tobacco.'

There's been a lot of anger about this study, as there often is when science comes into conflict with intellectual fashion, and no doubt we'll have people commenting here about 'vast majorities' and 'deniers'. The use of such terms is always a sign that the scientific method has been abandoned, and other forces are in play. Scientific truth is not established by majority vote, opinion poll or current fashion. That would reduce it to the level of 'Britain's Got Talent', or, worse, a British general election. Scientists don't 'deny'. They prove or fail to prove, or disprove. Or they provide evidence which upsets the theories of others, and which those others must other accept or disprove.

It's said that Enstrom and Kabat (both non-smokers) took funding from Big Tobacco. This is undoubtedly true, and in my view a great pity because it draws attention away form more important aspects of the research,  but as far as I can see they took this cash only after they had lost if from elsewhere.  What were they supposed to do? Fail to complete the research at all, because they were so pure? And the question is , did this funding influence the outcome, or is this just an ad hominem attack on the individuals involved?

Can anyone point to anything in the research, which was after all a unique and long-lasting survey, now unrepeatable, which was influenced by Big Tobacco? Please do so.

And are there are any other reasons to believe that the evidence for the rebuttals of Enstrom and Kabat, or for the claims of second hand smoke's dangers, is thin? I think there may be.

It's said, for instance, that the people in Enstrom and Kabat's survey (the non-smoking spouses of smokers) would have encountered second-hand smoke apart from in their homes, almost everywhere in this period. This may well be so, but surely if they had encountered it *as well* day and night, in their own homes, and if it os as deadly as claimed, they would have been at significantly greater risk anyway.

Trawling through some US newspapers, I found this interesting reflection in an article in the Chicago Sun Times (22nd October 2005), by Dennis Constant( Director of the Illinois Taxpayer Education Foundation): 'According to Michael Fumento, writing in Health Care News, in 2003 professors James Enstrom of UCLA and Geoffrey Kabat of the State University of New York reported in the British Medical Journal that their 39-year study of 35,561 Californians who had never smoked showed no causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco-related mortality.

'Fumento also reports that in 1999, an Environmental Health Perspectives survey of 17 studies of environmental tobacco smoke and heart disease found only five that were statistically significantly positive. And in 2002, an analysis of 48 studies of environmental tobacco smoke found only 10 studies that were significantly positive, one that was significantly negative, and 37 that were not significant in either direction.

'Fumento adds that in 1975, when many more individuals smoked in restaurants, cocktail lounges and transportation lounges, the concentration of tobacco smoke then was equivalent to 0.004 cigarettes an hour -- a very small amount.

'Despite the claim of anti-smoking groups that scientific studies unanimously have shown that second-hand smoke is killing thousands from lung cancer, the truth is that the vast majority of such studies failed to find any statistically significant link.'

The article also refers to: '...the 1993 study by Michael Siegel, "Involuntary Smoking in the Restaurant Workplace," published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which declared that non-smoking restaurant workers have a 50 per cent higher risk of lung cancer than the general population. However, a peer review of the study completed in 2000, authored by Martha Perske, revealed that the claimed 50 percent increased risk was based on six studies that had absolutely nothing to do with second-hand smoke in restaurants, bars, or anywhere else.

Small increased risks for lung cancer were found in food service workers, but there was no evidence in any of the six studies that food service workers had been exposed to tobacco smoke!'

A report in Newsday (16th May 2003) summed up the controversy quite neatly: 'Kabat and co-author James Enstrom of UCLA found no clear risk pattern for either disease among the 35,561 people who had never smoked, but whose spouses did.

'Critics charged yesterday that the study's funding by a consortium of three tobacco firms calls its objectivity into question.

'"For this study, you have to consider the source," said Marianne Zacharia, director of education and advocacy for the American Lung Association of Nassau-Suffolk. She noted that existing data collected by state, federal and international agencies have all documented a link between second-hand smoke and an increased risk for both diseases.

'Kabat defended the study's methods and instead questioned the validity of past research, charging that much of the controversy has derived from difficulties in measuring smoke intake by non-smokers.

'"Why is the science weak?" he said. "Because environmental smoke is a lot more dilute than what people are sucking into their lungs, and it stands to reason that you would not see as great a risk."'

That last paragraph does seem to me to make a good point.

Let me stress that I have no dog in this fight. I don't smoke, I dislike people smoking near me,  I don't take money from the tobacco companies and - crucially - I actively support the current moves to put as many restrictions on tobacco as can reasonably be imposed. I back the banning of smoking in restaurants, public transport, pubs and so forth.

So it simply cannot be said that I am believing this stuff because I have an interest in doing so. Yet my remark, that the evidence for the dangers of passive smoking was rather thin, has provoked rage and talk of denial' here and elsewhere.

Why would I 'deny' it? Why would Enstrom and Kabat do so? In my case because I am, simply, unconvinced. Am I not entitled to be?

Your last chance to see...

For those of you who relish (or like to shout rude words at) my TV appearances, you have a few hours left to see my short film on policing on BBC's This Week broadcast last Thursday on the BBC iPlayer here.

In answer to a reader who asked about the Clockwork Orange theme, yes, I believe the underpass we used, a wasteland of concrete in Wandsworth, was the one used by Stanley Kubrick to film a rather nasty scene in that film.

Note also the background music from Beethoven's Ninth symphony, a reference which those familiar with the film will immediately get.

They wanted me to wear a Bowler hat and paint lightning streaks on my face, as in the film, but I declined.

The Andrew Neil programme is undoubtedly a very good one (and Alan Johnson a pleasant change from Diane Abbott). Why is it confined to this impossibly late hour?

A Hunk of Red Meat

From time to time I like to hurl a chunk of bleeding meat into the cave where the Atheist readers of this site lurk, waiting longingly for a chance for a good superior snarl at those stupid, unteachable believers, just to hear the snapping of their jaws.

I know they enjoy it, and it is fairly harmless. I quite enjoy it too. But since completing the index, I've been less inclined to go over old ground - those really interested can look up what's been said in the past and perhaps try to avoid saying it again.

This post is prompted by responses to my clarification last week on teaching Christianity as truth in schools - something I will in future describe as 'Teaching Christianity as a Faith' to protect myself from deliberate or accidental misunderstandings. I would also point out to those who moan that I seek to 'impose' Christianity, that I specifically stated that those who did not wish their children to undergo such education should be entirely free to opt out. As usual, they didn't read what I said with any care. Or they didn't care what I said and just hate me anyway.

I'm quite relaxed about that, but they shouldn't pose as friends of reason if they want to behave in this way. I might add that there's a lot of justified stuff here about how long it took Christians to discover that slavery was absolutely wrong. Christians are human and imperfect, and not always quick to discover the true direction of the law. But when they get there, they get there.

Still, it seems odd to me that this discussion of slavery seems to end in the 19th century, as if that was that.

Since the subject of slavery is so dear to the hearts of the Atheists, it does seem necessary to point out that the 20th-century reinvention of slavery, on a positively Pharaonic scale, was the work of Atheist Communists. In the early 1990s I would ride the Moscow Metro each day, conscious of the macabre fact that its gorgeous vaults and deep, deep tunnels were the work of slaves no less oppressed (and quite possibly worse

treated) than those who built the Pyramids. If I travelled east towards Siberia or Karaganda, I could see whole cities and industrial complexes built by slaves, some even in my own lifetime.  Likewise the grandiose apartment block on Kutuzovsky Prospekt in which I dwelt, constructed in the late 1940s by enslaved German Prisoners of War.

But, to return to the thing which now bothers me,  once again I received comments claiming that Christians believe that they behave better than Atheists, and that Atheists are immoral.  I've never said or thought anything so absurdly oversimplified, , and have repeatedly explained why not but it never seems to get through. The blazingly simple logic that, if the Universe has no purpose, actions can only be judged on an ad hoc basis, seems to me to the whole point of Atheism ( a position of choice not mandated or endorsed by any objective truth) anyway.

Atheists can describe their actions as 'good' or 'bad' but to do so they have to borrow the necessary measuring device from believers. Otherwise they can only measure things against themselves and against their immediate effect or appearance. If it *looks* level, then that will have to do.  East is roughly over there, isn't it?  That's roughly two feet long, isn't it?

etc etc. I wouldn't build a garden shed, or fit a shelf, or go on a hike on Dartmoor, on that basis. No more would I make moral ( as opposed to

practical) judgements about actions without reference to a moral system based on absolutes. Such a system will lead you pretty fast to being the person in charge of a torture chamber, or at least the person defending the use of one,  because it gets the immediate results that you wanted. Look at the popularity of Jack Bauer in '24' in the supposedly civilised West.

This borrowing is perfectly all right.  If I have troubled to buy a tape measure, a spirit level or a compass, I am quite happy to lend it to a neighbour provided he acknowledges that it is a loan and gives it back to me. It's only if he then pretends that he bought it himself,  or that he could have managed perfectly well without my help and my measuring devices, that I get shirty.

Why are Atheists so coy about admitting that they don't actually want there to be an absolute code, when this is precisely why so many of them (especially the modern angry campus breed) are Atheists in the first place?

Didn't the Atheists  pay to stick the following declaration on the sides of London buses 'There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life'. (I believe the Advertising Standards people told them they had to insert the word 'probably', thanks to the absence of proof on this subject, which is quite funny). I don't, by the way, recall any Atheist or other secular group protesting against this slogan.

Well, if 'There is no God, so stop worrying and enjoy yourself' is a logical progression in their minds (and it usually is) why should unbelief cause anyone to stop worrying and 'enjoy' his life? Well, of course it's because it liberates him from tedious external restraints, which instantly lose their meaning if there is no God. Why else should it matter so much and make these people so woundy cross-tempered if someone says 'actually, I believe there is a God'?  What else can it mean?

The interesting reverse of the bus slogan, , the Christian understanding that actions matter in a way we can't readily observe or understand if we reject the eternal, is hauntingly expressed in this passage from a 'Father Brown' story 'The Sins of Prince Saradine'. 

"Do you believe in doom?" asked the restless Prince Saradine suddenly.

"No", answered his guest. "I believe in Doomsday."

The prince turned from the window and stared at him in a singular manner, his face in shadow against the sunset. "What do you mean?"he asked.

"I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry," answered Father Brown. "The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person."

I particularly like that phrase 'the wrong side of the tapestry', as it is such a good metaphor for the way humans so often completely misunderstand the circumstances in which they find themselves. And the idea that our actions 'mean something somewhere else' sends a shiver down my spine whenever I think about it, as well it might.

I've had quite a few letters (though interestingly not recently)  from ex-believers, urging me to join them in their Godless universe and savour the sense of liberation which they feel from tiresome obligations, now that they have cast aside the religion of their childhood.

As if I didn't know. I was one of them myself, as I describe in my book 'The Rage Against God'. I also quote at length in that book from W.Somerset Maugham's autobiographical novel 'Of Human Bondage', especially the passage in which the hero, Philip Carey, abandons his Christian faith and experiences a vast sense of liberation.

I will give my younger self this, very nasty as he was. I immediately grasped the advantages this brought me, especially in a world where others continued to be bound by absolute morals.

And perhaps this is it. The Atheist knows perfectly well that , in a world without absolute morals, he is liberated. As long as he isn't found out (and how many of us are found out in our lifetimes? In my experience, hardly any) he can behave as he likes.  His own ethical system, of enlightened self-interest and common decency, depends on people knowing about each other's misdeeds. If a man can appear to be good, then he can expect others to be good back to him (within the limits of common decency, not under the much more demanding rules of unrewarded selflessness mandated by faith). If he is a privileged and wealthy person (which most young Western men and women are by any standard), he can buy his pleasures at the expense of others (often people thousands of miles away whom he will never

meet) and feel at ease about them. He can also feel entirely self-sufficient and not in need of any forgiveness or grace.

But what if everyone latches on to this formula? Then it is not so pretty, is it? If we all cast off our obligation of selflessness, and all believe the law is what we can get away with, where shall we all be?Somewhere near

Mogadishu, by my guess. Or Babylon, anyway. Best pretend that it is

nothing to do with this, and get petulantly angry at suggestions that Atheism has moral consequences.

In Defence of Prohibition - and other matters

The point about Prohibition is that it works if it is cleverly done. As I've said here before, total banning often doesn't work, when an ill is well-established and part of the culture. To reduce tobacco smoking, an ever-strengthening campaign of workplace bans, advertising bans and display restrictions has been quite effective - though I sometimes wonder if they shouldn't put something in all cigarettes to make the smoke black. Not so glamorous.

In the case of cannabis and other illegal drugs, it is still quite possible, through enforcement, to discourage all but the most determined from taking up the use of drugs which are not part of our culture and which are widely (and justly) viewed with suspicion. For that, possession must remain an offence and be effectively prosecuted.

By the way,  I really do hope those posting here who continue to deny the possibility of a link between cannabis and mental illness will soon grow up and start acting responsibly. Don't they realise that some young person, acting on their complacent, ill-informed  advice, might end up needlessly in a locked ward?  And it will be their fault. Can they really not face the infinitesimally small risk of prosecution, and the still smaller one of actual punishment, as the price of their nasty pleasure?  In that case, are they really the bold revolutionaries they imagine themselves to be? Must they sacrifice others for it? And how long will they continue to expect that the rest of us will take their insistence that 'it never did me any harm' at face value? As I've pointed out before, they're not the ones to say. The self-regard of these people is limitless, and is perhaps a sign of the deeper damage done by this drug even to those who appear superficially to be unharmed by it.

In the case of alcohol, total bans are unlikely to work. It is far deeper in the culture than tobacco, which has really only taken hold as a mass pleasure in the last century, and the law is wise to distinguish between different kinds of drinking - restrained social drinking and binge-drinking or drinking to get drunk (the difference, if you like, between 'Martini's '

bar in Bedford Falls , and 'Nick's' in Pottersville, both portrayed in the same building in 'Its a Wonderful Life').

This is the case with alcohol in Christian countries, or in Muslim countries which have in the past liberated alcohol.  So during my visit to Iran it was often made clear to me that I could easily get a drink if I wanted one, despite a supposedly draconian ban. I didn't bother because I didn't want the authorities to have any excuse to interrupt my work, and because after many Lents and Advents I can manage for long periods without a drink anyway (though a cold beer would have been welcome, for its astringent taste alone, as I sat in a rooftop cafe overlooking the heart of Isfahan, pondering what seemed to be about the millionth lamb kebab and rice that I had consumed since arriving).

In Baghdad soon after the Blair invasion, and so between Saddam's not-very-serious attempt to appear more Islamic, and the growing wave of puritanism that followed the Shia ascendancy,  I was easily able to find wine shops run by Christians . But you couldn't always get precisely what you wanted.  One riverside restaurant unbelievably served an ultra-strong Scottish lager,  apparently brewed to reduce Glaswegians to giggling oblivion, which I declined. There was nothing else on the wine list.

Even this wasn't available further south in Najaf and Karbala, Shia shrine towns where the men I talked to called noisily for a booze ban (But my

(Christian) interpreter muttered that they would all go home afterwards and get sozzled on home-brewed Arak).

The only wholly dry place I have ever visited was the Gaza strip under the iron rule of Hamas, presumably because in Gaza even the smuggling is controlled by Islamic fanatics.

The American experiment with a total alcohol ban failed for many reasons.

One, it attempted to go from total availability to total non-availability, and in one step. Two, it penalised sale and distribution, but had nothing to say about possession. And it was also political. Recent Roman Catholic migrants from Ireland, Germany and Southern Europe, with their strong beer and wine cultures, felt penalised by Anglo-Saxon Puritans who loathed drink anyway.

While this was going on Canada had extremely strict saloon laws, likewise designed to control the desperate drunkenness which was rampant in early 20th century north America, laying waste lives, destroying families, leading to crime and pandemic wife-beating. Not to mention general ill-health, from chronic liver disease upwards. Prohibition was not just the crabby idea of intolerant, purse-lipped killjoys but a serious idealistic (and sometimes feminist) movement for the improvement of the lives of the poor.

I was once in the interesting town of Fond du Lac in Wisconsin (investigating that enjoyable state's famed 1990s welfare reforms)  when I came across a plaque commemorating the day in 1902 when the ferocious anti-booze campaigner Carrie Nation stormed into the Schmidt sample Room (a

bar) with her trusty hatchet, and smashed it up. It was the wreckage of families and the mistreatment of women that exercised Mrs Nation, a formidable six-footer in black who patrolled the American Midwest with an axe in one hand and a Bible in the other, greeting barmen with the salutation :'Good morning, destroyer of men's souls' before laying about her.

We have had Hogarth's 'Gin Lane' here. I'd like to, but can't readily find, display some of George Cruickshank's 19th century anti-alcohol paintings, showing Victorian civilisation wounded by disease, brutality, insanity and crime, the consequences of unbridled boozing.

People who call themselves 'Libertarians' are of course welcome to take this position, and say that nobody has the right to interfere in such choices. But they can only do so, in my view, because the huge temperance campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries actually greatly reduced drinking in this country, helped by Lloyd George's clever use of World war One as a pretext to bring in the wise and effective licensing laws which did so much to reduce the menace of drunkenness in Britain in the 20th century.  I'm told this was only a problem with seaports. Well, I doubt it, but even if true, look at a map and see how many of our great cities fit that description. Interestingly temperance is still a major issue in works of fiction written in 1932 ('South Riding') and 1959 ('No Love for Johnnie'). In the former,  a corrupt  and presumably Labour councillor is a Methodist lay preacher and temperance advocate (who secretly drinks when away from his home area and unrecognised) . In the latter, an ambitious but frustrated Labour MP breaks a huge taboo and risks offending many of his voters by taking his first drink, a step which turns out to lead him on to general failure.

I don't think they really understand just how devastating unrestricted drinking is in the lives of poor people, though I think we are soon going to find out.

 

they have also swallowed whole John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' as if it offered a definitive answer on a question which must surely always be very carefully shaded.

Hence the silly false parallels that are sometimes made, suggesting that there is no difference in principle between telling someone what to think (the case of the Johns) and stopping someone doing himself physical or mental damage, damage which will also ruin the lives of others.

What principle is this, actually?

Then there is the stuff about riding horses, or mountaineering. Now, as i bear the scars of a bad motorbike accident in 1969, which was entirely my own fault and which only by great good fortune did no serious damage to anyone else, I am quite sympathetic to a law banning anyone below the age of (say) 72 from riding powerful motorbikes on the public road. The difficulty is in finding an age when men have lost their insane bravado, which some do rather late,  and not become too senile to control these things, which some do rather early.

But motorcycling is just a recreation. The riding of horses and the climbing of mountains are both examples of activities which require long training, great skill and patience, the pursuit of which makes their enthusiasts better, braver, wiser people than they might otherwise be.

This just can't be said of smoking tobacco ( or dope) or of taking Ecstasy or Cocaine.

Oh, one other thing. I am angrily attacked elsewhere on the web for dismissing  the evidence that 'second-hand smoke' causes a serious health danger. This is not self-serving, simply an observation I feel bound to make. So I am perfectly content to be shown to be wrong, and will willingly concede if so. I am relying on published articles by Christopher Booker, who wrote in July 2007 :'A further series of studies in the Nineties, mainly in the US, claimed to have found that passive smoking was causing thousands of deaths a year. But however much the researchers tried to manipulate the evidence, none could come up with an increased risk of cancer that, by the strict rules of epidemiology, was "statistically significant".

'In 1998 and 2003 came the results of by far the biggest studies of passive smoking ever carried out. One was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation. The other, run by Prof James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat for the American Cancer Society, was a mammoth 40-year-long study of 35,000 non-smokers living with smokers.

In each case, when the sponsors saw the results they were horrified. The evidence inescapably showed that passive smoking posed no significant risk.

This confirmed Sir Richard Doll's own comment in 2001: "The effects of other people's smoking in my presence is so small it doesn't worry me'.

'In each case, the sponsors tried to suppress the results, which were only with difficulty made public (the fact that Enstrom and Kabat, both non-smokers, could only get their results published with help from the tobacco industry was inevitably used to discredit them, even though all their research had been financed by the anti-tobacco cancer charity).'

If this is incorrect, or has been superseded by later research, then I would be most interested to know.

 

I was wrong on cigarettes but believe me, I'm right on cannabis

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I used to fall for the old arguments about smoking and freedom – that people were entitled to do this stupid thing if they wanted to. I may even have used the expression 'nanny state', though I try very hard to avoid it now. Sometimes even grown-ups need a bit of nannying.

I even campaigned, in an office I worked in, against a planned smoking ban, though I have never smoked myself. I was quite wrong. It is perfectly sensible and justifiable to use the law to try to stop people from harming themselves, unless there are very good reasons for the risk. Because when you harm yourself, you harm plenty of other people too.

No, I never believed the stories about second-hand smoke, and still don't.

Cigarettes stink and spoil the atmosphere, and anyone who smokes them near others who are eating is inconsiderate and rude. But I think the evidence that they give cancer to anyone apart from the people actually smoking them is very thin indeed.

The real harm to others is quite different. If you fall seriously ill, you are not the only one who suffers. Everyone close to you suffers too, often more than you do. And after your (often unpleasantly lingering) death from lung cancer, it is the others who are left to grieve and cope without the help, company and income of the carefree smoker who said it was a risk worth taking and discovered too late that it wasn't.

And I have no doubt at all that the bans on smoking, in trains, cinemas, buses, pubs, restaurants and hotels are helping many people give up a habit that is actually much harder to quit than heroin. And one measure of the rightness of these bans is how quickly it has begun to seem strange that smoking was ever allowed in these places.

Did we really watch films through columns of bluish effluent? Were trains on the London Underground stained a noxious yellow, full of stale fug and strewn with butts? Was the back end of every aeroplane a sordid zone of wheezing and spluttering? Yes, it was so, though I really can't work out why we put up with it for so long.

Something so self-evidently ugly and dirty obviously wasn't good for us. I realised that I couldn't really believe – as I do – that the law can be used to discourage cannabis, or drunkenness, or drunk driving, if I continued to support the futile, fatal freedoms of smokers.

So I changed my opinion. The ban on displaying cigarettes in shops will cause fewer people to smoke, as all the other measures have since the first health warning appeared on the first packet. And in time this strange, self-destructive habit, which is actually very new and only really invaded the civilised world during two disastrous wars, will be banished to the
margins of life.

Then we will have proof prohibition does sometimes work, if it is intelligently and persistently imposed. And the stupid, fashionable claim that there is no point in applying the laws against that sinister poison, cannabis, will be shown up for what it is – selfish, dangerous tripe. Where we can save people from destroying themselves, we must do so.


So, what if the poppy burner insulted a gay?

It is time we were told the rules of the new game called 'Equality and Diversity', under which some thought crimes are treated more harshly than others.

We know that homosexuals trump Christians. We know (at least I think we do) that animal rights campaigners, pagans and believers in man-made global warming are the equals of Christians.

Thanks to the case of Emdadur Choudhury, whose Islamist grouplet deliberately set out to enrage any patriotic British person by burning replica poppies and chanting 'British soldiers burn in Hell' during a two-minute silence, we know something else: the judiciary and the police are scared out of their socks by Islam.

Even under the USA's very open free speech laws, this nasty piece of publicity-seeking bad manners would have been classified as 'fighting words' and denied protection. Yet here the consequence was a £50 fine, so small as to be barely worth the bother of collecting it from a culprit who is in any case living off the state he claims to despise.

What I am waiting for is a test case in which (and how I long for this) two elderly Muslims, running a B & B, are sued by a funky homosexual couple for refusing to accommodate them.

Both parties would have their costs paid by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Then at last we shall find out whether the law of England thinks Islam or the Sexual Revolution should dominate our future. We can have one or the other (and we will). But not both.


Genuine Tories will never make a dent on Dave

Some of you urge me to rejoin the Tory Party and work from within to change it. Can anyone tell me how this could be done? I have studied the Tory constitution and can find no way in which its dwindling membership can influence policy at all.

But others can influence it with great speed and power. Take the case of the Johns, the Derby couple who refused to say what they didn't believe, and so were forbidden by judges to foster any more children, ever. Swiftly, the supposed Right-winger Iain Duncan Smith was on TV saying the court was correct.

Had IDS simply misunderstood? No, soon afterwards David Cameron was seizing the opportunity to say he too was against freedom of conscience and in favour of iron political correctness imposed by the State.

A decision had obviously been taken by Tory High Command to follow a specified line on this notable case. Whose decision, and in whose interests? And is anyone accountable for it?


The real cost of feeble Clarke

We are not being told the truth about crime.

Only because of a Freedom of Information request do we know that teenage criminals, supposedly being 'monitored' by the authorities, were charged with more than 100 serious offences last year, including rape and murder.

All those charged had already been convicted at least once, and been released under so-called supervision.

This is clear evidence that Kenneth Clarke's feeble policies, which make much less use of prison, are actively dangerous.

The truth about this situation is being suppressed because nothing will be done about it, and we will suffer.

****************

An interesting slip-up by the Prime Minister, as usual more or less missed by those who report on Parliament. During Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, Mr Cameron was asked if he would support a referendum on British membership of the EU. He replied that he wouldn't, because we were 'better off in'. This deliberate snub to the anti-EU pressure group 'Better Off Out' explodes once and for all the stories spread by Mr Cameron's many media toadies that he is hostile to the EU. But even more strikingly, Mr Cameron's answer showed – unintentionally –that he thinks that in such a referendum we would vote to leave. Is he right? He's not going to give us the chance to find out.