Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 339

Delusions amid the Pyramids

My own experience of Egypt is limited to seeing a demonstration broken up by plainclothes police thugs who later overpowered my photographer colleague Phil Ide and stripped him of thousands of pounds' worth of equipment (not to mention the fruits of a day's hard work) which he did not recover for many months. Luckily they weren't interested in me at all. These people are above the law and will happily rough up foreigners as well as their 'own' people.

The demonstration, just after Friday prayers in a poor and dusty district of Southern Cairo, was - oddly enough - against the Iraq war. The Egyptian government receives enormous subsidies from the USA (I think around £1,500,000,000 a year, much of it in the form of weapons) in return for maintaining its 'Cold Peace' with Israel, and regards attacks on Washington as attacks on itself.

I spoke to quite a few of the protestors, who were friendly, articulate people of both sexes and all ages, until the state musclemen burst into the cafe where I was and started to arrest them ( again, they weren't interested in me).

So I think I can say I have no special fondness for the Mubarak regime. Like every Arab regime I know of, it relies ultimately upon brute force. That brute force defends a system which is extremely corrupt and inefficient, in which free speech, free assembly and the liberty to organise opposition are more or less forbidden, though a sort of token opposition is permitted to function, and its leaders seem surprisingly resigned to spending long periods in the country's unlovely prisons.

But I am amazed at the way in which Western journalists and politicians now seem to be encouraging street protests against that regime. What do they think will happen? Who do they think will benefit? What do they expect the long-term result to be?

Egypt does not have a western-type civil society waiting to step into the gap left when the Mubarak state falls. The most potent opposition movement is the Muslim Brotherhood, and the most popular cause is enraged hatred of the neighbouring State of Israel. Since Egypt is heavily armed and right next to Israel (and Gaza) would it necessarily be a good idea to encourage events which might install an Islamist government in Cairo?

Those who support dissent in Islamic countries really ought to have learned by now that the will of the people in these places is not necessarily in our favour. Western opinion was largely sympathetic to the 1979 rising against the Shah of Persia, until it realised far too late what would replace it. They're all sorry now. A couple of years ago a great deal of sentimental tosh was talked about a wave of democracy in the Middle East, supposedly comparable to the peaceful overthrow of Soviet-backed regimes in eastern Europe in 1989. This was supposedly inspired by the 'success' of our imposition of a Shia majority government in Iraq, a story which has not yet reached its end and which will not – I here predict - end happily.

Much gush was penned and spoken about a 'Cedar Tree' Revolution' in Lebanon, which was boldly rejecting the sinister presence of Syria on its territory, etc etc. I sighed when I heard this, as I sigh when I hear the current wave of enthusiasm for events in Tunisia and Egypt. And I was right to sigh, for Lebanon is now under the control of a Hizbollah government, closer than ever to Syria (and to Iran) and silly dreams of a new dawn are all dissipated, as they were bound to be.

Otto von Bismarck is supposed to have said that if you enjoyed either sausages or politics you should make sure you never saw either of them being made. The same is true of diplomacy. If you don't like propping up nasty regimes, don't go in for foreign policy. The only genuine and serious conclusion, for those who truly want to make the world a better place, is to pursue a policy of enlightened imperialism. But is this realistic? Ask yourself a few questions? Are you convinced enough of the superiority of our civilisation to feel you have the moral right to impose it on others by force? Think we can afford it? Fancy serving in the enormous armed forces necessary to impose it, or paying the huge taxes needed to finance those forces, or allowing your relatives to be conscripted into those forces? Are you prepared to stay forever?

If the answer to any of these questions is 'no', then please be so kind as to stop pretending to care about the woes of the Third World. You don't mean it. You're trying to make yourself feel good, not to do good.

Meanwhile the best motto for dealing with nasty regimes in the Middle East remains, as it always was, Hilaire Belloc's words: 'Always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse.' Literary types will know what happened to poor Jim, who ignored this sensible advice. He was devoured ('slowly eaten, bit by bit, no wonder Jim detested it') by a Lion.

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General musings

Being profoundly bored by scandal, which is the main feature of the news today, I thought I would write about small matters. I was dragged from sleep at 4.30 on Sunday morning when the TV set in my hotel room suddenly switched itself on. I have no idea why it did this. It had been on when I came into the room (this is often the case these days) and I had immediately switched it off. But this plainly wasn't enough.

I fumbled my way across the room and pulled out every plug I could find. The experience increased my feeling that we really are not in control of anything much - like those slightly sinister times when advanced computers start correcting your typing before you have time to do so, or the horrible moment when your phone switches to predictive text (mine does this without my asking it to) and tries to tell you what you want to say.

The actual phone has been known to switch itself on after I have quite definitely switched it off (once doing so in the middle of a Remembrance day service I happened to be attending). Not to mention the fact that the simple, hard-wearing phone I really liked, which did the few things I wanted and nothing else, is now no longer manufactured.

Nor is its charger, which always worked, and which has been replaced by a new model which often mysteriously stops charging if a hamster sneezes in the vicinity, so causing a tiny tremor which shakes the jack loose.

This is one of the many reasons for my doubts about the idea that 'market forces', left to themselves, will make us all free and happy. In fact, 'market forces' often seem to me to be rather like East Germany with a good PR company and more efficient distribution. East German cities used to have uniform high streets in which the same basic goods were available everywhere, or not available, in more or less identical shops. So do we, except that we have an illusion of variety. And before anyone goes on about fresh fruit and vegetables, I have been virtually unable to find a fresh Cox's Orange Pippin apple this season (a pulpy, smooth-skinned impostor which tastes as if it has been in a chiller for ten years and goes soft in a day, is offered under this name, but it is not a proper rough-skinned Cox) and only a very few decent Russets. Foreign varieties, often from the far side of the world, are sold here even during the English apple season.

You will have this. That razor that worked has been improved, and replaced by another one that is far more expensive and actually not as good. The marmalade that you like has been wiped off the stock list of all the (supposedly competitive) supermarket chains, and can now only be obtained by mail order via the United States, though it is made in Manchester.

Now I gather that Pears Soap has been utterly transformed, though it is still sold as if it were the same thing as before. Despite having a large nose, I have failed to notice that it smells quite different. What I have noticed is that it now comes sealed in an unnecessary plastic bag, and is a cloudy, almost milky brown instead of the old dark but translucent colour. And, though this is hard to measure, I don't think it lasts as long as it used to.

Nobody asked me about this. The free market couldn't give a curse about what I think or want but instead spends billions on trying to make me want what it makes. If I stop buying it, will anyone care? Keith Waterhouse used to expostulate, when told that there was 'no call' for some product that he wanted but which had been discontinued 'well, I am calling for it'. And, when some call centre claims that 'nobody's complained about this before', my brother always retorts 'Well, you won't be able to say that the next time, will you?' Such ripostes make us all feel good, but do they change anything?

I was in a hotel on Sunday night because I was appearing on the Andrew Marr show, to do the newspaper review. There is a story behind this, which I can now tell. A few weeks ago, as some of you noticed, the author Ken Follett appeared on the same programme, also reviewing the papers.

He chose to give an inaccurate account of an article I had written in my MoS column, about Keith Richards. And on the basis of this misrepresentation he continued, unchallenged, about what a generally stupid person I was. Now, if I had written what he'd said I had written, I would indeed have been stupid. But I didn't. Since Mr Follett had the offending article in his hand when he said what he said, viewers would have been entitled to assume he was quoting me correctly. Those who read my column would know he was incorrect. But what about the others?

And when I protested, the BBC offered me the chance to go on the programme to put the matter right. This is another step forward, and another sign that the Corporation is trying harder to be fair.

There was an unexpected bonus out of this. We were invited to breakfast afterwards (nothing specially grand) but I found myself sitting opposite Rosamund Pike, an actress I have long admired - especially for her superlative performance in the film 'An Education' - and who I think will get better and better as the years go by, so that I will be able to boast that I once met her.

And then I had to spend much of Monday morning (beginning before dawn) going through the final stage of the long procedure now needed to renew a US Visa. Now, I have no complaints at all about this in itself. I think all countries should be very careful who they let in. And my August 1969 arrest for being in possession of an offensive weapon (four plastic lavatory ballcocks, since you ask, and no, I didn't do anything with them and it's a long, not specially exciting story whose high point involves me trying to eat a fried egg with a spoon in Cannon Row police station) quite reasonably alarms US law-enforcement bodies. As I get closer and closer to qualifying for a senior citizen's railpass, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a straight face while trying to explain this moment to youthful consular officials. They look at me narrowly, as if I were trying to wind them up.

I just wish that Britain made it as tough for foreign passport-holders to get in here as the US does there. And that the US would do something about the vast illegal immigration (followed by amnesties) which it tolerates from Latin America. I don't at all mind filling in all those forms or even giving the USA my fingerprints, provided everyone else has to do the same.

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'My son played Russian roulette with cannabis - and lost': Patrick and Henry Cockburn tell their story

Here is Patrick and Henry Cockburn's account of Henry's own descent into mental illness, extracted from their book 'Henry's Demons: Living with schizophrenia.' Everyone should read this.

On February 8, 2002, I called my wife Jan from Kabul where I was working as a foreign correspondent. Jan sounded more anxious than I had ever heard her, and I felt a sense of dread as I realised there had been some disaster.

Henry, our 20-year-old son, had nearly died when he swam across the River Ouse estuary at Newhaven, East Sussex, fully clothed and was rescued by fishermen as he left the near-freezing water. The police had been called and decided Henry was a danger to himself. He was now in a psychiatric hospital.

This was the beginning of eight years of mental illness for Henry. During much of that period Jan and I lived with an almost constant sense of dread and disaster.

As Henry started to recover - and this recovery is by no means complete - about three years ago, I began to think we should write about our experiences. Henry is well enough to write but not so distant from his psychosis that it has become ancient history in his mind. I believed we could serve a broader purpose by making mental illness less of a mystery. I ran the idea past Henry and he liked it.

Henry had been an enchanting child. With his blond hair, he looked like a friendly cherub, smiling frequently, responsive to others, with a strong sense of fun and a great appetite for life. He moved from speaking single words to complete sentences with disconcerting speed.

He was sociable and got on well with other children, but was easily cast down if they rebuffed him. I remember trying to comfort him as he sat on my knee at the end of his fifth birthday party. It had all gone horribly wrong for Henry, who was in floods of tears because another child had blown out one of the candles on his birthday cake before he could.

I am a journalist, as was my father, the radical author Claud Cockburn. I have covered crises, rebellions and wars, everywhere from Haiti to Afghanistan, working first for The Financial Times and later for The Independent. So I have been away from home a lot but over the years I had become used to reading reports from Henry's teachers praising him for being able, likeable and articulate, but often adding that he could be spectacularly disorganised and was forgetful of rules.

From an early age, his artistic talent was apparent. His paintings were strikingly original and he had no difficulty getting into art college in Brighton at the end of 2001, after five years at King's School, in Canterbury, one of Britain's leading private schools.
When I saw Henry that Christmas, he had seemed to me to be his usual intelligent, charming, and humorous self. I asked how he was enjoying being a student, and he said: 'I have never been happier in my life.'

After Jan's call I rushed home to Canterbury where my wife, who teaches English literature, described the sinister changes she had seen in Henry since Christmas. It was, she said, as if another personality had been invading his mind.

The first incident had happened two weeks earlier when Henry had been arrested and spent some hours in a police cell. Passers-by had seen him, barefoot and dishevelled, climbing a railway viaduct, and reported him as a potential suicide. He claimed he had simply been trying to get a better view of Brighton.

Jan was worried enough to go to see him for lunch the next weekend, taking his 13-year-old brother Alex with her. Henry was not there when they arrived but the door of his room in the halls of residence was open so they went in. The place was an appalling mess, with empty coffee cups, discarded meals and dirty clothes all over the floor. Henry's mobile phone was lying on a desk but it had been taken apart.

They waited for three-and-a-half hours before Henry turned up, saying he had been 'lost in town', though this seemed strange, as he had been living in Brighton since October.

'Why did you ask Alex and me to lunch and then stand us up?' asked Jan. 'I'll make you lunch right now,' Henry replied.

As he prepared the food, Henry explained he had become an almost total ascetic: he no longer ate meat, drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes or cannabis. He said he felt better for this self-denial.

The next day they went to lunch at Henry's favourite cafe. He insisted on walking on the other side of the street from Jan and Alex. At lunch, Henry talked away about eco-lifestyles: 'Everybody should live only in the daylight, get up at dawn and go to bed at dusk. We should not get our orders from clocks.'

'Do you really think clocks tell us what to do?' asked Alex. When Jan told a therapist she had been seeing for depression, after a series of family deaths, about Henry's behaviour, the therapist said it sounded as if he was heading for a psychotic breakdown, adding: 'He needs to see a psychiatrist as soon as possible and be put on medication.'

But Jan could not quite take in what was happening. No more did I.

Henry's final decline was swift. Jan had insisted he reassemble his mobile phone but as soon as she and Alex left he dismantled it again as part of his suspicion of all things electronic.

Over the next few days Jan repeatedly called him but failed to reach him. On Friday morning, the university called Jan to say that he was in the Priory Hospital in Hove, and had been there since Thursday evening.

Aghast, Jan called the hospital and was able to speak to Henry. Asked if he wanted anything, he would say only that he would like some nuts but, he added, there must be no raisins with them.

Jan was unable to get to Brighton until the next day. Henry was pleased to see her but did not want to speak much. He ate the nuts but was uninterested in the flowers and toiletries she had brought.

The flowers were added to a small heap of rubbish, consisting mostly of old orange peel and crisp packets, that Henry had placed on the floor of his neat room.

When I arrived at the Priory, Henry was standing in the middle of the room, looking baffled, but his face lit up when he saw me, and we embraced. He told me he had felt the urge to walk barefoot back to Canterbury.

'The doctors put you in here because they are worried that you might have been trying to kill yourself,' I said.

'No, I wasn't trying to commit suicide,' said Henry with some exasperation. He said the police and the doctors had misunderstood his eccentric lifestyle.

For several hours I sat on the bed in his room while he lay on the floor. Sometimes he beat out a rhythm on the bottom of an upturned wastepaper bin and chanted snatches of rap, but mostly he was listless.

Dr Duncan Angus, the consultant psychiatrist, later told me Henry might be in the initial phase of schizophrenia but he had not made a final diagnosis and would not do so for ten days. During that time, Henry would be under observation. Dr Angus said that usually 'one third of people diagnosed with schizophrenia recover completely, one third have further attacks but show improvement and one third do not get better'.

I visited Henry every day for the rest of that week and began to see changes in him that had not struck me at first. He disliked wearing shoes, socks and underpants. He was suspicious that the smoke alarm in his room was monitoring him. Every so often there were fleeting references to visions and voices.

Instead of describing them in detail, he spoke vaguely of religious and mystical forces, often using the imagery of The Lord Of The Rings to express paranoid fears of prosaic objects. He would ask me if I thought there might be secret tunnels under Brighton.

When not with Henry, I was trying to learn as much as I could about schizophrenia. I discovered that an American doctor had described schizophrenia as being to mental illness what cancer is to physical ailments. The average age for the onset of schizophrenia is 18 for men and 25 for women.

There were said to be 250,000 diagnosed cases of schizophrenia in Britain, though the true figure may be closer to half a million if the undiagnosed are included.

Symptoms do not include violence but the suicide rate is high, and people with the condition attempt suicide 50 times more frequently than the general population.

The causes of schizophrenia have been the subject of rancorous debate among scientists. People generally develop the disorder because they are genetically predisposed to do so but genes are not solely responsible.

Tests show that if one of a pair of twins develops schizophrenia, the other has just a 50 per cent chance of developing it. This must mean that there are other forces at work.
Its onset might be brought on by some stressful personal disaster or it might, as many studies appear to prove, be the result of mind-altering street drugs such as cannabis.

Henry says he smoked cannabis continuously from the age of 14, though Jan and I did not realise this. I was shocked when, in 1997, Henry went on an exchange with a French student but was sent home after he had offered the French boy some cannabis.

Jan and I were upset but we thought cannabis was fairly harmless. It wasn't until Henry was in hospital that we learned of its possibly devastating impact on somebody genetically predisposed to schizophrenia.

Three-quarters of consumers may take cannabis with no ill effect but the remaining quarter, the genetically vulnerable, play Russian roulette.

By a strange coincidence, one of Henry's maternal grandmother's brothers was Sir William Paton, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University and one of the world's greatest experts on cannabis.

Sir William published many papers with his colleagues in the Seventies, revealing for the first time evidence that even limited social use of cannabis could precipitate schizophrenia in people who previously had no psychological problems.

He discovered that smoking a single joint could induce schizophrenia-like symptoms such as hallucinations, paranoia and fragmented thought processes. These were not fashionable ideas in Oxford in the Seventies but Sir William's findings were confirmed by a series of other studies. An American study found that after cannabis became widely available in the US army in Europe, the incidence of schizophrenia among troops increased 38-fold.

Henry would later tell Jan that at one point he had been smoking five joints a day but insisted that had nothing to do with his illness.

Jan and I were almost certain that Dr Angus was going to say that Henry had schizophrenia. Our main worry was not the diagnosis but Henry's reaction to it. Since Henry did not accept there was anything wrong with him, it was doubtful that he would take whatever anti-psychotic drug the doctor prescribed.

We were told that if Henry agreed to take the medication - olanzapine - he would be classed an 'informal' patient and could even leave the hospital. But if he refused to take the olanzapine, he would be 'sectioned' - detained under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act as somebody who is a danger to himself.

As expected, the doctor said Henry was in the incipient stage of schizophrenia. He said Henry should take olanzapine and, if he showed signs of responding to the drug, he would be free to leave the Priory. Henry replied that he would not take the medication because there was nothing wrong with him.

Jan began to weep, saying: 'I can't take this any more. I can't face the fact that you may never get well.'

Henry, moved by his mother's distress, said: 'Well, all right, then, I will take the olanzapine.'
It would be several weeks before we would know if it was having any effect. There was nothing much I could do to help except keep Henry company.

I soon got a sense of what he found attractive and what he did not like. He preferred small things to large. I took him to the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, the exotic palace built for the Prince Regent with its Oriental-style domes and minarets.

Henry dutifully walked round, but preferred studying the twisted shape of pieces of driftwood on the beach.

There were good days and bad. Once I felt encouraged when I saw Henry find a lost mobile phone that a man was desperately searching for on the beach. But my morale would slump when I saw Henry attracted by dark alleys and heaps of garbage, which he would often want to use as a lavatory.

Once I bought him a mango and watched with despair as he tore at it with his teeth, juice and pieces of fruit smearing his unshaven face as he gobbled it down.

'Do you think I am mad?' Henry would ask me sadly. I would fudge the answer, saying: 'You are not exactly mad, but you are not in your right mind part of the time.'

Then in March, just before my 52nd birthday, Dr Angus told us Henry was responding to the medication. Pleased though we were, we were coming to understand that schizophrenia was a calamity from which there would be no swift escape. The olanzapine we had taken such trouble to persuade Henry to take was not going to cure him.

We agreed he should spend Easter at home and if that went well he'd leave the Priory. The visit passed without major incident and nine weeks after he had slipped into the water at Newhaven, he came home.

Jan and I had been told it was important for him not to have more than one schizophrenic breakdown, that if there was only one, the chances of his resuming a normal life were good. This seemed possible, since Henry's consultant in Canterbury said we could aim at seeing our son go back to his art college in Brighton the next academic year.

On the morning Henry was to return to Brighton, he said he did not want to go back. Jan persuaded him at least to look at his new room. They walked on the seashore, and Henry said he would 'like to live off the land'. His mood became more positive and he told Jan: 'Thank you for making me come back here.'

Over the next couple of months I could see he was not getting better. Once he disappeared overnight. He came back badly scratched and he had lost his shoes, trousers, keys and bank card.

He stopped shaving or washing his hair and went barefoot, so his feet became septic. He also soiled his jeans more than once and exhibited signs of infantilism. He admitted he was scarcely taking his medication.

Henry came home for Christmas and briefly rallied. I had expected him to go back to Brighton for his second term after his birthday on January 4, 2003, and had timed a stint at a think-tank in Washington to coincide. But within a day of my leaving, he began to have a breakdown.

The evening of the day I left, he had gone off for a walk with his closest friend, a gentle young man called Peter, and did not return for a day and night.

Jan traced Peter, who said he would take her to see Henry, who was undergoing a mystical experience.

They found him under a hedge in a quarry near Canterbury. He declared he was not going back to Brighton, and when Jan agreed, he walked home with her. He had soiled his trousers and when they got home, he threw them out the window.

His condition worsened over the following week. Jan wrote a letter to Henry's doctor in Canterbury describing his deterioration: 'He won't use a key to the house. He insists on getting in by climbing over the wall at the back of our back yard and in by the back door.
He won't eat anything but vegan food, and a narrowing range of that...He won't help prepare it - he doesn't like seeing vegetables chopped up. He tends to scatter bread crusts, nutshells and rinds around the house. He doesn't like using the lavatory and prefers to urinate out of doors if possible.'

The end came quickly. At about 8am on January 22, Henry left the house. Jan was cooking when there was a knock on the door. The policeman asked: 'Do you have a son called Henry Cockburn?'

'Yes.' 'Well, he's been standing naked in your neighbour's garden for 20 minutes and she's reported him to us. We could charge him, only we think he might have a mental health problem. We can either let him go, or if you think it's more appropriate, we can take him to a safe place.'

'Does "a safe place" mean a mental hospital?'

'Yes, it does.' For about 20 seconds, Jan agonised over what to do before agreeing to let Henry go to hospital. Later, she got a telephone call from St Martin's, an NHS psychiatric hospital in Canterbury. The hospital asked for formal consent to Henry's sectioning or legal restraint.

Jan agreed. Henry was to spend the next seven years in a variety of hospitals and institutions.

I felt the trees and animals urging me on

By Henry Cockburn

Looking back, I spent most of my time at college in a stoned, drunken haze. I took a lot of marijuana between the ages of 14 and 19. I lived in Canterbury, where I had friends from my private school and local friends. It was through drugs that I met the latter.

My teenage years would have been different without marijuana. Did I take more of it than others? Not really. Why did we smoke so much? Maybe it was because the music scene, which I wanted to be part of, was drug-orientated. My generation smoked more dope than the one before.

I was taking a lot of hash, maybe an eighth of an ounce, which cost £10. It would have been better if I hadn't but about half the people I knew in Canterbury were smoking dope.
The worst thing about smoking weed when you are a kid is that you never really grow up. On the flip side, as I said, you meet a lot of people but when you do meet them, you don't really talk.

I was naturally shy and getting stoned made things worse. I'd go to somebody's house and start off quite talkative and then, after the first joint, you'd be lucky to hear another word out of me. Most of my family and friends believe that my being sectioned was because of drugs.

After I swam the estuary at Newhaven, I was taken to hospital. The doctor told me it was common for people of my age to have mental illness. I didn't think of it as an illness but as a spiritual awakening.

I had started out that morning from my college walking barefoot along the edge of the sea. I went east towards my home in Canterbury.

I felt brambles, trees, and wild animals all urging me on. It was as if they were looking at me and I could feel what they thought. I walked along the seashore beside a high sea wall. The wall seemed 100ft high. I believed there were prisoners behind it and I sang to them.

I walked ten miles. As I entered Newhaven, I saw the letter D painted on the road and I thought this meant D for 'daemon'.

I felt people were following me. I went to the estuary and hid by a low wall. I didn't want to go into the water at first but finally I did get in and heard somebody shout: 'You stupid b******!' I thought I was going to die.

It was about 20 yards across and after I got out on the other side, it was freezing. It was so cold that I went back in the water and I was there when a fisherman held out his hand.

Sometimes at the Priory, I felt I was mad and at other times that the magical experiences I had been having were real. A nurse there told me how Australian aborigines put stones in their mouths so they produce saliva and have to drink less under the hot sun.

The next day my father and I went to the beach. I thought the nurse's story related to me but in a different way.

I recalled that birds have no teeth and swallow stones to digest, so I thought if I swallowed a stone I would turn into a bird and be able to fly away from all my troubles.

I was scared that I would choke but I plucked up my courage and swallowed a black stone and then a grey one. I bought some cockles and swallowed them whole.

One day I decided I'd start smoking again. I had a couple of cigarettes when my dad took me out. When I got back, my friend Gregg offered me a spliff.

I thought: 'What the hell,' and we went into my room to smoke it. Before we sparked it, he said: 'Do you know how the system works?' I said no. 'Cameras inside televisions,' he said.
At the end of two weeks at the Priory, they said they would section me if I refused to take the olanzapine.

I didn't agree with it, as I didn't think I was ill. Also, I didn't agree with taking substances that would affect my mind. But I didn't want to be sectioned.

Finally, Mum burst into tears, so I had to take it.

I tried to counteract the olanzapine with tobacco by smoking lots of cigarettes because the word began with the letter O and 'tobacco' ended with the same letter.

Eventually, the doctors agreed to let me go back to Canterbury for the weekend. I felt so depressed one night that I wanted to hang myself. I heard my friend Phil's voice saying: 'No, Henry, don't do that.' The next day I went to see Phil. I had a pipe of hash with him.

It was at the Priory that I first regularly heard voices from people, rather than from trees and bushes. It was as if I could hear what they were thinking. At the same time, I thought most of what happened to me at the Priory was persecution. I don't think I was a danger to anyone.

I would have been better off wandering around Brighton. Once you are in the system, it is difficult to escape it.

Do I have schizophrenia? My mother and father and the dreaded psychiatrist believe I am schizophrenic. They have grounds for their belief, such as my being found naked and talking to trees in woods. Yet I think I just see the world differently from other people. Being locked up for so long really damages your spirits. You feel forgotten.

© Patrick Cockburn and Henry Cockburn 2011

Henry's Demons: Living With Schizophrenia, by Patrick Cockburn and Henry Cockburn, is published by Simon & Schuster at £16.99. To order your copy at the special price of £12.99 with free p&p, please visit www.Maillife.co.uk/books

 

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Staffed up like the Chinese army, the Sickness Maintenance Service

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

We have forgotten what the NHS is for. Most of us, I suspect, are wearied by talk of more reforms. We suspect this will mean a lot of new signboards and more bureaucracy.

Various dogma-driven politicians have pushed the health service this way and that for half a century, and I do not think they have done much good.

We mix up sentiment with argument. Of course our hospitals contain plenty of hard-working and competent people. But they are not, mostly, doing their work for nothing.

While we should be glad that they help us when we are injured, ill or afraid, this is what we hire them to do. We don't condemn the whole NHS because of one bungle (and there are plenty of those).

So we shouldn't canonise it because of one good experience.

The worst thing is that it has become a cult. This is because it is the one lonely success that socialists can point to.

They have wrecked the state schools, made a colossal mess of housing, given us one of the worst transport systems in the Western world and corrupted a generation with welfare. But at least medical treatment is free to all at the point of use.

And so it is. And, having actually lived in the USA and experienced the alternative, I am glad of that. But I know from conversations with senior doctors that levels of surgical competence in our hospitals are falling fast, partly because of poorer training and partly because of the effects of EU limits on working time.

Most of us, if we are honest, also know that standards of nursing are far lower than
they used to be, because proper nursing relies on virtues of discipline, obedience and conscientiousness that have vir¬tually disappeared from our culture. The people who do the job think that its most necessary tasks are beneath them, a problem in almost every trade and profession these days.

Criticism of this kind never makes any impression. This is partly because of the sacred character of the NHS among the socialist-minded people who rule our culture. But it is also because of its true, unmentionable function in politics.

It exists first of all to employ people, and only after that to tend to the sick. That is why it is now the largest employer in the world after the Chinese army and Indian railways.

But it is not in fact a Health Service. It is a Sickness Maintenance Service. Despite all the billions spent and borrowed, we long ago stopped getting healthier.

Much of the original work of the Forties health service involved treating the victims of dangerous, dirty and unhealthy industries, or of slum conditions, which left men and women broken and sick by the time they were in their 60s.

Now, when those industries and such slums have vanished, we are all unhealthy for completely different reasons. We seek ill health in our daily lives, and duly achieve it.

My nearest hospital has to be reached by passing through two concentric rings. The first is that of the smokers, piously barred from the hospital grounds, who are working hard on becoming patients in the cancer and cardiology wards.

And then there are the acres of car park, filled with thousands of the machines which we use to avoid the exercise that would ward off so many of the ills we suffer.

A real health service would reduce the taxes of those who looked after themselves, rather than waiting for people to fall predictably sick and then cutting them up or cramming them with expensive pills. But even to discuss this is to be accused of sacrilege, so it's probably not worth bothering.

It's not a phobia, Baroness – just reasoned debate

Should Muslims adapt to Britain, or should Britain adapt to Muslims?

The answer is obvious to me, but David Cameron's appointment of Sayeeda Warsi to several high positions suggests he wants Britain to drown its past in multiculturalism.

Baroness Warsi's weird outburst about dinner parties and Islamophobia came only a few days after she made a great fool of herself by unjustly denouncing her own party's 'Right wing' for not working hard enough in the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election. It will make it difficult for the Tory leader to sack her (could she have thought of this?) without himself being accused of 'Islamophobia' by gullible twits.

We're all quite entitled to distinguish between extreme and moderate Muslims, and to object to Sharia law, to polygamy, to the third-rate legal position of women in Islam and the merciless treatment of those who convert out of the Muslim faith.

This isn't a 'phobia' but a reasoned disagreement about what kind of country we wish to live in.

But every cloud has a silver lining. Baroness Warsi is an asset to people like me, who carry on getting up each morning largely because they hope the Tory Party will collapse in a politically correct heap, and don't want to die before this happens.

The 'soft' drug myth laid bare

I long for the day when the selfish people who make light of the dangers of cannabis meet justice face to face. They desire that their own greasy pleasure should be licensed, not caring that its ready availability in every school is actively ruining young lives. They are happy to sacrifice other people for their own convenience, a shameful thing.

But I wish even more that some of them would read Patrick and Henry Cockburn's account in today's Mail on Sunday's Section 2 of Henry's own descent into distressing mental illness. Patrick is one of the finest writers of his generation, a quietly courageous reporter who ventures often into terrifying places and makes no fuss about it.

In honest prose, chilly and clear as spring water, he describes exactly what happens to a family when a clever, happy and engaging child has his reason overthrown. Henry himself bravely gives his own version of events.

I think there is little doubt that cannabis, its easy availability and its false image as a harmless and 'soft' substance, are to blame for what happened. It will probably make you cry when you read it. I rather hope it does.

But above all, I hope that it makes a complacent generation think again about this grave menace.


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The simple question the Chilcot Inquiry won't ask Anthony Blair, but should:
'Isn't the truth that you were too scared of Washington's wrath to pull out of the Iraq invasion, even though you knew it was illegal?'


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As I suspected they would, the Christian hotel owners, Peter and Hazelmary Bull, came off worse in their courtroom struggle against Politically Correct Britain.

The law believes such people have no right to follow their own morals, except in private. The law also now states that homosexual partnerships are equal to heterosexual marriage, which New Labour tried to pretend was not the case.

Perhaps most importantly, the homosexual couple had their action paid for by us. Britain's embryonic Thought Police, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, provided the money on your behalf and mine, whether we like it or not.

This is not the end of the revolution we are passing through. By the time it is finished, I will not be allowed to write or say this. Don't believe me? Wait and see.

For the Avoidance of Doubt - a Wicked Lie Squashed Once Again

A Mr 'Iam' alleges: 'Alcohol cannot be controlled, according to Hitchens'.

This is demonstrably false. Indeed, it is a contemptible flat lie for which I can find no excuse. If I thought this pseudonymous person likely to return here, I would require a withdrawal and apology from him. But I expect he is a hit-and-run raider.

I believe alcohol can and should be controlled and have long argued for this to be so. I just don't think that it would be practicable to make possession of alcohol a criminal offence. I do think that it would be practicable to make the possession of cannabis a criminal offence. I think he does too, which is why he fears what I say, hates me for saying it and tells lies about me.

The stringent controls I advocate (disorderly drunkenness a criminal offence, driving while drunk a criminal offence, the keeping of disorderly premises a criminal offence, alcohol licensed for public sale only during limited periods of the day and at a limited number of outlets, alcohol forbidden to minors etc) are aimed at those who use alcohol as all dope smokers use cannabis.

In the unlikely event that I and Mr 'Iam' ever shared the same bar, he would find that I, and many other people, do not drink to get drunk, or stupefied, or intoxicated. There is no other purpose in smoking or eating cannabis, apart from self-stupefaction.

Prejudice or Postjudice? Common Sense, Cannabis and Hypocrisy

'Ben Johnson' writes, quoting me 'Further, I would say that many if not most of these drug apologists are themselves users of alcohol and tobacco, probably excessive ones, and have no genuine disapproval of them'.

And comments 'Does anyone believe that the phrase 'probably excessive ones' is based on anything more substantial than simple prejudice against the wrong sort of person?'

No, It's based on postjudice and common sense. By definition, most dopesmokers are tobacco smokers, and I think it would be very rare to find a dopesmoker who didn't also smoke tobacco. And by definition dopesmokers are people who seek self-stupefaction, so if they drink alcohol you might reasonably expect that they drink it with that purpose too.

I am called upon to campaign on tobacco and alcohol with equal vigour to that which I use when campaigning against cannabis, so as to prove that my purpose is genuine, and so that the dope lobby can listen to what I say. My purpose is genuine and disinterested, and I defy anyone to show otherwise, whereas they are in all cases self-seeking.

They never will listen to what I say, and seek to prevent others from doing so too. They hate anyone who opposes their greasy pleasure, and seek to harry me into silence with lies and hypocritical propaganda of this sort (much like the BNP, who have a similar loathing for me and have made similar attempts to overwhelm me with hostile comment) .

There is no logic in this argument - that I must campaign equally on all three for my campaign on one to be valid. Huge government-sponsored efforts are made to reduce tobacco smoking, efforts I support. Many forces are willing to campaign for restrictions on drinking, restrictions I support and have always supported. I am, on the other hand, almost alone in continuing to resist what I regard as the dangerous introduction of a third legal poison in our civilisation. And it is extremely urgent.

What cannot be escaped is that the alcohol and tobacco diversion is a cynical and unscrupulous piece of hypocrisy by people who would in fact be horrified and severely personally inconvenienced if anyone took them at their word.

I am accused of being rude to the dope lobby. They deserve much more severe vituperation than I have at my command. By comparison with the human evil which they promote, the abuse which I justly heap on them is mild. The irreversible and tragic damage they are condoning, to many young lives, is appalling. They are happy to let this continue for the sake of their own selfish enjoyment, a classic instance of moral evil. I repeat my hope that at some point they will eventually meet justice face to face.

A Reply to Cary, voting analysis, and that stupid 'New Party' for what I hope is the last time

'Cary' posts: 'I'm disappointed to have to disagree so strongly with his (PH's) analysis of the by election.' I posted the result of the election under another article, but it needs to be re-stated (in brackets are the general election numbers, together with the change in number of votes between the two polls).

Labour - 14,718 (14,186; +532)
Liberal Democrat - 11,160 (14,083; -2,923)
Conservative - 4,481 (11,773; -7,292)
UKIP - 2,029 (1,720; +302)
BNP - 1,560 (2,546; -986)

'Cary' continues: 'There is no evidence that any Tories switched to the Lib Dems; if that were so, where did all the erstwhile Lib Dem voters go? Certainly not to Labour who seem to have attracted a relatively small number of previous Lib Dems supporters. The simplest explanation is that sizeable numbers of Lib Dem and Tory supporters at the general election (especially the latter) did not vote this time. And thus Labour increased their majority from c100 to c3,500.

'The result is good news for Mr Hitchens and those of us who consider ourselves proper Conservatives: faced with the party they support covertly urging them to vote Lib Dem, most (ie over 50%) of Tory voters stayed at home, some continued to vote Tory and a small number probably switched to UKIP. Hardly any bought David Cameron's attempt to nudge Conservatives in the direction of the Lib Dems.'

Evidence of actual switching is hard to come by in a secret ballot. However, please note that the figures which 'Cary' cites are on a substantially reduced poll, so the size of the Labour vote actually represents quite a sharp increase.

Total votes cast for the parties listed in the General Election were 44,308, compared with 33,948 in the by-election.
If Labour's vote had held steady as a proportion of the turnout, it would have been something like 11,000.
If the Lib Dems had held steady on the same formula, they would have got about 10,500. If the Tories had held steady on their share of the vote, they would have got about 5,500. If anything, the Tory vote might have been expected to be higher than that, since their voters have a greater propensity to turn out at all times.

So we have to explain an increase in the Labour vote of almost 4,000, despite a drop in the total number of voters of 10,000. Where did these votes come from? Some of them will have resulted from the anti-Brown bounce, as voters driven away by Gordon Brown returned. But what of the rest? Direct switches from Tory to Labour are rare at all times, and I doubt if these formed any serious part of the Labour gain. Much more likely is that some of this was caused by Liberal Democrat defections, positively and demonstratively to Labour rather than to abstention, on quite a large scale. This is a credible result, and one everybody had predicted, especially after the tuition-fee volte-face.

That's the easy part. If anyone has any reason to doubt it, please produce evidence and arguments. The next bit is the interesting one, and the one which was not expected or predicted (though the MoS poll before the vote did show a surprisingly high proportion of Tory supporters willing to vote LD) and the one which fascinates me. The above explanation requires a switch of a large number of votes from Liberal Democrat to Labour. That would have left the Liberal Democrats with as few as 6,500, or (if a lot of Labour defectors returned from the wilderness of abstention) as many as 8,500.

But they didn't get 6,500 or 8,500. They received a far more creditable 11,160, a vote so healthy that it left Nick Clegg pretty much in the clear.

And the Tories, who ought, according to proportion, to have received at least 5,500 and probably rather more because of their ageing vote's high differential turnout, came out with only 4,481.

At least 1,000 Tory voters, and probably rather more, can I think be assumed to have switched to the LDs on this basis. Meanwhile, I daren't even begin to speculate on the size of the UKIP vote, which remains largely irrelevant and would surely have been much larger if there were any substantial conservative-minded discontent with the Coalition among Tory voters.

Some who abstained at the general election (and may have been potential Tory voters) may also have been encouraged to support the Liberal Democrats by the nods and winks of David Cameron. But I can see no reason why this result is good news for me.

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

I am asked: 'Do you see any significance in the news on Conservative Home that David Davis and Jack Straw are joining forces to oppose the motion to allow prisoners the right to vote? Could both represent the conservative elements within each of their own parties?'

I wish it were so, as I have long hoped for such an alliance. But I wouldn't have thought Jack Straw would be its standard-bearer.

I sometimes use phrases such as 'skoolz n' ospitals' to make the point that those who claim to be concerned for these things speak without thought, and are not in fact worried about health or education, but about the money spent on these objects and the jobs so created.

Once again (groan) I'm urged to start a new party. Once again I beg the person involved to think for five seconds, and see that a) in a two-party system you cannot found a new party until there is a vacancy. There isn't such a vacancy. I tried to create one, and failed utterly.
b) the British people vote tribally, not rationally (hence the problem above).
c) I don't have the billions of pounds necessary to establish such a party against the competition of the state-funded or millionaire-funded or trade union-funded existing parties, which have the allegiance of the political reporters, and which possess guaranteed access to broadcasting worth hundreds of millions of pounds, simply because they are established.

I do hope this is the last time I have to squash this silly, thought-free suggestion, whose only result would be to destroy the hopes of anyone who followed it. I urged those who took this view to take a real practical step towards political change by refusing to support the Tories at the last election. They ignored my plea on various, and varyingly stupid, boneheaded, unresponsive and dim-witted grounds. The Tory party, which ought to have collapsed, survived and mated with the Liberals. Consequently we have the Social Democrat David Cameron as our Social Democratic Prime Minister, probably for at least another nine years, by which time I shall quite possibly be dead, and Britain will almost certainly be so. Give me strength.

I have since then abandoned any serious hope of making any impression on parliamentary politics. I carry on trying because I am forbidden by my religious faith to despair, and I have to accept that I might be wrong. But I see no evidence that I am wrong, and plenty that I'm right.

By the way, to the person who breezily and superciliously mocks my suggestion that attitudes towards opposition leaders are formed by trends of opinion within small and organised media cliques, I recommend a reading of 'The Cameron Delusion', in which this process is described and explained in detail. He doesn't have a clue how this country works. That's why he is so dismissive.

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

Old and Sad. Can the Coalition survive? Should it?

I've received several snappish little lectures this week, mostly from the dope lobby whose members so tirelessly promote their freedom to fry their own brains at the expense of any other poor fools who believe its lying propaganda and start the slow journey to the locked ward.

Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, go the fried cerebral cortexes, unable to absorb or to respond to facts or logic - I imagine this is because they' re overcome with that most powerful foe of truth and reason - their own dogged self-interest. I can't conceive of any intelligent, disinterested person espousing this slippery, selfish and evil cause.

I've replied to their feeble case, and various other critics, in the thread itself.

But I'll spend a little longer on the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election. Why? Because the result is so shocking, and such a departure from normal behaviour, that I remain amazed that it has attracted so little careful attention.

The issue is not who won. That's unimportant in the scheme of things. It would have been important if Labour had lost, since the seat was naturally theirs, and such a defeat would have changed the position of Edward Miliband, a man who is now so crudely and constantly attacked by cartoonists, sketch-writers and the rest of the conformist army of conventional wisdom that it is quite shocking. Why did this never happen to A. Blair or D. Cameron when they were novice leaders of the Opposition? Who decides who gets this treatment? Do readers of this stuff not realise that anyone could be its object if the whim of the time were different?

The cartoons in one Tory-supporting newspaper are quite astonishing in their continuous, obsessive hostility to the Labour leader, forgivable if directed at a head of government but almost totalitarian when directed against the constitutional Leader of HM Opposition. I have barely met Mr Miliband, and have no reason to suppose I agree with anything he thinks, but this sort of treatment, especially from within the steamy, lowing safety of a herd, is despicable.

We were told, as if it mattered constitutionally when it didn't, that Gordon Brown was 'unelected'. Well, he was an elected MP, and we don't have directly-elected premiers in this country, so the jibe was untrue and constitutionally meaningless. What was true was that the Labour Party had not put him through a leadership election. So what? The Tories did the same favour to Michael Howard after the putsch against Iain Duncan Smith, and nobody ever complained, which emphasises that this was not a serious question. Nor did Anthony Blair ever face a serious challenge in the Labour leadership.

Edward Miliband, by contrast, has fought and won an election to become his party's leader. But, like Mr Brown, he is not approved by whatever media coven it is that decides who is and is not fit to be Prime Minister (the same coven once rejected William Hague, too, though now it slobbers sycophantically at his feet). So his election is not deemed to count. It was won, they say, thanks to the trade unions. Let us leave aside the interesting question of whether the trade unions should have any say in the choice of the leader of the Labour Party, founded to advance their interests. I still have news for those who claim to be outraged by this. Mr Blair, whom they loved so much, also won the Labour leadership thanks to the trade unions, whose leaders fixed it for him from the start. So that can't be it, can it? Anyway, what really won it for Edward Miliband was his frank willingness to say unequivocally that the Iraq war was wrong. Anyone who has the faintest understanding of the Labour Party grasps that whoever was prepared to do this would have been almost certain to win the leadership against whoever was not, all other things being equal.

But back to the Coalition. You can decide for yourself whether its guiding principle is 'The Noble Lie' or the old and cynical belief 'Never let a decent crisis go to waste'. It adds up to the same thing. The founding myth of this government is the triple idea that Labour left Britain in a terrible economic mess (true), that nobody knew how bad it was till the books were opened (piffle) and that George Osborne alone understands how to fix it (Olympic piffle).

I am often chided here for having no interest in economics, but I think I can state here that the scale of the British economic crisis hugely dwarfs any of the measures proposed to deal with it, much as a mountain range dwarfs a sandcastle. They are simply not in the same scale of magnitude, and are mainly designed to restore confidence in the bond markets, since confidence is all that stands between us and the death of money, with all the Babylonian and apocalyptic results that would have. Heaven forfend.

Further, as I have already stated, these measures actually end by increasing the level of public spending, and will leave us in five years much as we are now, a grossly bloated welfare state living off a largely unproductive economy which has developed several ingenious ways of hiding the huge structural unemployment which has resulted from years of severe decline.

But of course they provide the opportunity for the government to pursue a number of long-cherished targets (notably severe and permanent reductions in military spending so that the money can be transferred to 'skoolz 'n' ospitalz') which the establishment has long wanted but not so far been able to achieve. My own county council likewise has long had its eye on several rather nice public libraries (I have my ideas as to why) which it now proposes to close, more or less on the grounds that this is some sort of national emergency. Personally, I have little doubt that an audit of its spending could produce many other possible cuts which would be more desirable. But that is not the point. The crisis is an opportunity to do what they have always wanted, and they are jolly well going to seize their chance.

About 400 people turned up to a public meeting in my Oxford suburb last week to protest against one of these library closures. I haven't seen a public meeting of this size since the 1970s, and - judging by the contributions - it was remarkably all-encompassing in terms of age, politics, etc. So perhaps parts of this agenda will actually become so unpopular that coalition will lose its momentum and raison d'etre.

But I doubt it. Much more likely, the council will retreat where it encounters steel, and try something else instead. People who will rightly rally for a beloved library, a simple and in my view unimpeachable cause, will often be highly resistant to any general political implications of the planned closure. And in any case they have no leadership. There's no movement, let alone party, in this country consistently campaigning for rational, real, lasting cuts in public spending based on a major revision of social welfare policy, and there's not likely to be. The coalition is, however, pretending quite successfully to be such a thing - and to be an emergency, crisis government - and has as a result gained the support of a large chunk of the conservative middle classes.

That's why Tory voters did that astonishing thing in Oldham and Saddleworth last week, and voted in large numbers for a Liberal candidate. That's why, as long as they can be persuaded that this is a crisis government , they will continue to do so. And, having got into the habit - and having laid to one side the many conservative desires that I listed in this week's MoS column - they will continue to do so. I believe they will also cooperate with whatever Lib-Con pact, preferably informal, they are presented with at the 2015 general election. A formal deal might be a bit too much to take - yet. Hints and twitches of the eyebrows, and private advice, are better - as was shown in Oldham and Saddleworth, where nobody ever said openly 'Tories should vote Liberal', yet thousands did.

Taboos once broken soon vanish as if they had never existed. It is extraordinary how quickly people can abandon the habits and even opinions of a lifetime, if they are given a good pretext to do so. (The Global Warming panic is another successful way through which conservative-minded people are diddled into believing all kinds of rubbish because of the supposed existence of a crisis, and the alleged existence of a plan to deal with it.) So the supposed Tory right-wing revolt among discontented MPs has been squashed before it really got under way. Tory voters in the country don't want it and regard it as unpatriotic. And since this revolt offered no profound and principled challenge to Cameronism, it has no lasting force or shape, and will swell and shrink according to mood and circumstance. I believe it will in the end get nowhere, much like the fabled Labour left which was likewise rendered irrelevant by Blairism, which it never understood.

The strains in the Coalition will not come from the right, which is either fooled, squared or cowed. They will come from the Liberal Democrat left whose MPs and councillors face direct challenges from Labour. I suspect Mr Cameron, who has proved himself an astute strategist in his dubious cause, is aware of this risk, and that his plans for electoral reform (largely unexamined, though I intend to examine them soon) are meant to deal with this. Let us see. But the glimmer of hope which I optimistically espied a couple of weeks ago has been thoroughly doused by this by-election, yet more proof that optimism is invariably a mistake.

I still cannot see why more people are not dumbstruck by the willingness of Tory voters to vote tactically, en masse and without formal instructions to do so, for a Liberal candidate. It is quite momentous, and changes all calculations.

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

The index opens

We now have an index. It's incomplete, as I'm still working on the years 2008 and 2009. I hope to finish that soon. But large parts of the archive are already included, so I've decided to open it up anyway.

For obvious reasons, the number of subjects covered is limited, and the system won't support an index as detailed as a book would have. If you cannot find articles you're searching for (and which you know to exist and whose date you recall) then please let us know and we'll try to fill the gap as soon as possible.

I recommend a two-stage search - first look in the index under the general topic of interest - all postings involved are then displayed. Then I'd recommend continuing to search using keywords and Control 'F'. All helpful suggestions, where practicable, will be considered.

The crazed smile that says: It's the little packets of madness that we really need to fear

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Smugly and with a superior smile, liberal Britain looks down on those trigger-happy Americans and their loudmouth politicians. What happened in Tucson could never happen here in our nice, civilised, gun-free, peaceful country we assure ourselves.

It isn't so simple. Nowadays, we suffer plenty of gun massacres and rampages of our own.

Yet back before 1920, when Britain's gun laws were more relaxed than Arizona's are today, the only major shooting episodes involved foreign terrorists (as at the famous siege of Sidney Street, 100 years ago).

And harmonious Switzerland is full of powerful guns and ammunition, stored in almost every home, thanks to its sensible military service laws.

If the USA is a more violent country than some (and in parts it still is), this has less to do with the presence of legal guns than it does with the bitter heritage of slavery which will divide and sour that country for centuries to come.

But – without that excuse – we are quietly catching up with America in the violence league.

As a people, we are far readier to resort to the fist and the boot – and the knife – than we were 30 years ago.

Our suburbs are much less safe than America's. And, as guns seep into the bottom edge of our society, our criminals will also be readier to use them.

Hardly any crime is committed in this country with legally held weapons. Lawbreakers use illegally obtained guns, not legally bought ones. And the criminal gangs of our big cities know very well how to get such weapons.

There is another aspect of this case that the smug media seem to be avoiding. Look at the strange picture of the alleged killer Jared Loughner. He has just been arrested for a crime for which he could be put to death, if convicted. And he is smiling.

From this, and from many other things we already know about this man, it seems likely that he has lost his reason.

Why and how? The most likely cause is Loughner's daily cannabis-smoking habit. The link between this drug and serious mental illness grows clearer every day. Wickedly, the dope lobby still tries to deny this and seeks to legalise it.

Loughner has been, for much of his short life, a habitual smoker of this so-called 'soft' organic drug. This is not in doubt. Police records, the testimony of U.S. army recruiters who rejected him partly on these grounds, and the accounts of several friends confirm that Loughner is a marijuana victim.

Yes, I know. Not all cannabis-smokers lose their minds. And not all cigarette-smokers get cancer. But in both cases the risk is enough to cause concern.

When police caught him driving a car that stank of marijuana, Loughner was let off,
as he would have been here. So much (as usual) for the non-existent 'war against drugs'.

Cannabis is now effectively legal in Britain and in several parts of the USA, where this dangerous and unpredictable poison is ironically permitted for 'medical use'.

Arizona voters, fooled by years of cynical and shameful 'cannabis is harmless' propaganda, approved just such a stupid law in November.

The town council of liberal Pima (scene of the murders) last week took the first step towards licensing 'dispensaries' for dope.

Arizona has always had plenty of guns. America has always had heated political rhetoric. What is new is that it now has legal dope as well.

Those who are seriously interested in public safety should worry less about guns and radio shock jocks, and more about the little packets of madness on sale in every school.


A Tory tribe without principles

The New Liberal Conservative Party has fought – and nearly won – its first by-election. The amazing willingness of Tory voters to turn out and support a Liberal candidate is one of the most significant moments of our times.

This is very bad news for the country. It means that we are now settling into a new political arrangement in which we have a non-choice between Left and Lefter.

Conservative voters have apparently accepted that their views on crime, immigration, education, taxation, national independence and the rest will henceforth be ignored by the party they believe is their own. They have shown they care more about having their tribal chiefs in office than they care about actual policies.

On the other side of the line, decent Labour voters are also drifting back to their old loyalties in spite of the contemptuous way in which their fears, needs and aspirations are ignored by the metropolitan bohemians who long ago seized control of their party.

Westminster can now happily settle back into misgoverning the country, safe from any real danger of punishment or dismissal.


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We're all missing the point of the case of Miriam O'Reilly, dumped from TV for developing wrinkles. The problem is that TV concentrates entirely on the superficial, which is why we shouldn't watch it and should all listen to the radio instead.

Until her tribunal case came up, I had no idea what Miriam O'Reilly looked like, and didn't care – but I had heard and thought highly of her radio reports.

I remember many years ago urging a rather beautiful and very intelligent radio reporter not to go into TV, as it was obsessed with looks. She ignored my advice (people usually do), did superbly to begin with, and was then cruelly dumped because she was no longer young.
It may, alas, have been worth it.

The wretched truth is that you don't exist in public life unless you are on TV. But that is only because so many of us have lazy imaginations, and won't make the effort to read or listen.


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How unforgivably foolish of the police to accept the loan of a 168mph Lotus to 'patrol' the motorways of the Midlands. A spokesmoron commented: 'The Lotus is a visually stunning machine which offers us the opportunity to engage with the public and reinforce the life-saving messages of road safety.'

No it's not. It's a silly toy for immature show-offs worried about their masculinity, the dream vehicle of the tailgating cretins who make driving even more miserable than it needs to be.

The police shouldn't be giving it free advertising, or endorsing the daft idea that they're employed to mount dangerous and futile high-speed chases. Everyone involved should be given a pair of boots and put on foot patrol.

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The USA wouldn't exist if the French (assisted by a few rebels) hadn't beaten us and our German mercenaries at Yorktown. So it's perfectly reasonable for Barack Obama to nuzzle up to President Sarkozy and say that America has 'no greater friend' than France.

But what really matters about it is this: France doesn't suck up to Washington. France often refuses to do what Washington tells it to do. As a result, France has a perfectly good relationship with Washington. We could do the same, and would be a lot better off if we did.

So who's in charge tonight at the Prison With No Warders?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Who thought of having open prisons in the first place, and why did nobody laugh? The whole idea is blatantly silly, like 'Dry Water' or 'Hot Ice Cream'.

But it is nothing like as foolish as having a Prison With No Warders.

Two staff were in charge of almost 500 convicted criminals, and not just ordinary criminals, but the sort of lawbreakers that even Kenneth Clarke and his liberal Injustice Ministry are willing to lock up.

As we found when they set the place on fire rather than be breathalysed, these are not nice people. Do you really think Ford is the only British jail where illegal drink and drugs are regularly being consumed against all regulations?

I wonder what the staffing levels were at all this country's other prisons on New Year's Eve. I wonder what they are tonight.

It would be funny if it did not matter. But it does matter. And the truly shocking thing about the Ford events is that they have led to no national scandal. A prison has been set on fire (and we shall have to pay for the repairs).

It has been revealed to be, to all intents and purposes, unstaffed. The local population were entirely exposed to what anyone in this anarchic encampment of criminals chose to do.

Nobody has resigned. The story has faded from newspapers and broadcast bulletins. The 'Opposition' has not taken it up with any vigour. And yet we, the people, have been treated with complete sneering contempt.

Our political elite do not believe in punishment or justice. Sniggering behind their hands, they put on a sort of cardboard street theatre to fool us: police who never patrol; courts that hardly ever send anyone to prison; sentences that are never served; prisons with no guards.

You would have thought, when this was exposed in flames for the fraud it is, someone would have been embarrassed, and someone in mainstream politics would have been angry on behalf of the undefended population of these islands.

No such luck. Meanwhile, the wicked will have observed and remembered. And they will feel still more free to do exactly what they want to do.

Pitiful Prescott, a picture of vulgarity

How sad to see the pitiful figure of John Prescott reduced to advertising cheap car insurance. Does he really need the money? What for? I had thought more highly of him.

Just before I heard this sordid news, I had listened to a 1959 recording of Labour's titanic Nye Bevan, who in the Forties and Fifties must have been young John Prescott's hero.

Bevan was filled with prophetic scorn for the nasty new Britain he saw growing up under Harold Macmillan's 'never had it so good' society.

He spoke of the 'delusion of television', and the way in which debt was taking hold so that 'the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land', warning of 'a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud'.

Well isn't Mr Prescott's miserable commercial a sign of just such a society?

The tired Tories, like an old labrador on its last legs

For a moment, the Parliamentary Tory Party has woken from its long, complacent doze. It is like an incontinent, smelly old labrador slumbering by the fireside, which has begun to notice that its owner isn't quite as affectionate as he used to be.

The chocolate treats have stopped. There's a snappish, exasperated tone in His Master's Voice, and that new poodle puppy is getting all the attention.

Could it be that, before all that long, there'll be a melancholy trip to the vet from which there will be no return?

Well, of course it could. Young Master Cameron is not a sentimental man, and he's had all the use he ever hoped to get out of the Tory Party.

One of his faults (in his own terms, not mine) is that he's just not very good at hiding such feelings.

And so Mark Pritchard and the other Tory MPs have begun to mutter, loyally of course, about what looks startlingly like an unstated pact between the ex-Tory Party and the ex-Liberal Party.

They have immediately been reassured. Oh no, nothing like that is planned. The very idea. They can all go off back to sleep in front of the fire.

And so it will go on until the day when the car turns into the vet's gateway, and through their rheumy old eyes they will at last see and understand the fate that's long been planned for them.

I'm sorry to say this, but they deserve it – as do all those who trade principle for office.

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Silence, or silly stuff about women wanting rich husbands, has greeted a devastating pamphlet from Dr Catherine Hakim, which tears to pieces the false propaganda of the ultra-feminists who want to force us all to be equal when we're not all the same.

Feminist Myths And Magic Medicine can be read online. It shows that boot-faced, state-sponsored campaigns for equality do not work, and that the lowest pay gap between men and women in the world is not in Scandinavia but Swaziland.

The truth about the Left-wing paradise, Sweden, is so startling that it alone makes reading the booklet worthwhile.

My favourite fact is that the pay gap for men and women was higher in ferociously feminist East Germany than in the West. Read it. Harriet Harman never will. Theresa May ought to.


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I am setting this down because I have never seen it in a British newspaper (maybe I was living abroad when it was published) and it is important.

The Communist Party of Great Britain was directly subsidised by the Kremlin, whose diplomats secretly handed over large leather bags full of banknotes to a CPGB functionary.

This continued from 1956 (as a reward for the party's support of the invasion of Hungary) until 1979 and at times was as much as £100,000 a year – more like a million in today's money.

What does Comrade Dr Baron John Reid, a party member during the years of subsidy, think about this? Or Comrade Peter Mandelson, a keen member of the Young Communist League in the early Seventies?


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I cannot for the life of me see why we should be worried that a British chemist has
sold the State of Arizona the chemicals it needed to execute a murderer, Jeffrey Landrigan. Landrigan gruesomely murdered Chester Dyer while already on the run from a 40-year sentence for murdering his supposed best friend, Greg Brown. While in prison he had nearly murdered another inmate, stabbing him 14 times. What sort of person gets into a state of outrage over the lawful execution of such a man in a free country? Outside the BBC, most people think that Arizona has a more sensible justice system than we do.