Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 341

Slow Learners, or Not Learners at All?

Sometimes I wonder if I should introduce streaming here, not letting people post on some threads until they had showed themselves capable of a certain level of reason, promoting those who showed that they knew how to argue into higher streams, and bumping slow learners down to the simpler subjects if they demonstrated that they couldn't keep up. Perhaps in that way most of us could get past a couple of rather stupid and annoying arguments, which flop and wallow about in a swamp of self-imposed ignorance and irrationality, and move on to other more exciting topics.

Those who were stuck could accept the need for a bit of remedial coaching before at length catching up. Or they might accept that they weren't cut out for our high standards, and go elsewhere. A fond hope, alas.

Here's one who would struggle to get into the top class, calling himself 'Tony'. He recently wrote: 'All ten of Hitchens's anti-cannabis points could be applied directly to alcohol. And it just won't do to have Hitchens belittle this point. Alcohol consumption and, indeed, addiction is actively pursued in this country by the large alcoholic drink corporations in much the same way that cigarette addiction was pursued - by presenting alcohol as a fashionable social good. The argument that we shouldn't therefore promote the use of other substances in society is just a red herring as far as I'm concerned. What is Hitchens going to propose be done about alcohol? His view seems to be that we can't do anything about it as it is so ingrained in our culture. But so is supermarket shopping and car ownership. And he actively proposes that the state immediately step in to change those cultures. Why not also with alcohol, then? How about a 1000% increase in alcohol duty with immediate effect?'

On supermarkets and car ownership, the state could have an instant effect by simply ceasing to encourage these things as it encourages them now with all its subsidising, regulating might (though I would myself go further, actively encouraging railways, trams, bicycling, walking, covered markets, farmer's markets and busy high streets).

I have repeatedly said (and I think it would be very hard for any reader here to be unaware of this, unless his unawareness was wilful) that I support strong practicable controls on the sale of alcohol, notably the reintroduction of the 1915 licensing laws so foolishly abolished in the 1980s (and cordially hated by some contributors to this site, who bizarrely imagine I am something called a 'libertarian', when I am in fact something entirely different). Likewise I am on record as supporting strong legal penalties for persons found driving while drunk, and for persons who misbehave while drunk. These are practical and effective measures against an acculturated poison which can (unlike illegal drugs) be used in moderation by the wise, and whose abuse by the unwise can be discouraged and on occasion penalised. I am not convinced that higher alcohol duty would work. Raise duties above a certain point on a product which is still widely desired, and culturally accepted, and large-scale criminal evasion becomes practicable and worthwhile. There has to be a calculation here of practicability (the same one which shows that, in Sweden and come to that in our armed forces, strong enforcement of drug laws means fewer drug takers). In principle, as I have said, I would accept the legal banning of alcohol for myself, if I thought it would work. Anybody who has worked in my trade for as long as I have has seen at first hand the terrible things that alcohol can do to people (and to their friends and families) so I am specially irritated by dim and baseless accusations of complacency on this matter.

But I don't think a total ban would work, so this offer (though genuinely made) has no practical value as a suggestion. The plan I outline above, on the other hand, was shown to be workable when it was in force. It was abandoned not because of public demand but because of subtle and effective lobbying. It would of course make my life less convenient in a number of small ways, and those of others too, but the benefit would be far greater than the loss.

I mention the possibility of a total alcohol ban because it seems to me to be an important difference between me, a person who genuinely wishes to reduce the damage done by alcohol, and the cannabis propagandists, who couldn't in truth care less about this damage but merely hope to weaken the laws against their own selfish pleasure, and so seek to dodge the powerful case for prosecuting cannabis possession, by changing the subject. It is precisely because they don't want to give up their pleasure, and hate and despise those who would deny it to them, that they are so biliously, intolerantly militant on this subject.

These cannabis propagandists almost always, at some point or another, misrepresent my position because to admit the truth about my views would be to open their own flanks to attack. They are, in short, gross hypocrites, pretending a concern they don't really feel, for self-serving political advantage. Thus espousal of a dishonest cause makes them feeble debaters, fit only for the kindergarten stream.

I do, by contrast, think that the still-nascent use of cannabis and some other illegal drugs could be reduced to negligible numbers if possession were penalised.

Likewise I support (having initially opposed) the legal measures being used to discourage smoking in workplaces, restaurants etc. I think the scientific pretext for these bans is pretty thin, and allowed this, plus a sort of sentimentality about the smoky old days of Fleet Street, to distract me from the real point - which is this: cigarette smoking (the real target of these bans) can be quite effectively discouraged; many smokers are themselves helped to reduce and even quit a habit they often dislike and wish they hadn't taken up, by such rules. Unlike the drinking of wine, beer and spirits, the heavy smoking of cigarettes is a relatively recent development, and I suspect it can be marginalised by legal and social disapproval, just as it was spread by clever advertising, wartime misery, and general social approval. I doubt if it can ever be eradicated entirely, or made subject to the criminal law. But it can be made much rarer.

Then I think I need to see Joshua Wooderson after class as well.

He said two things which make me suspect he hasn't been paying attention, or hasn't been doing his homework.

Here's one: 'As for the statement [made by me, P.Hitchens], "I doubt whether many of those involved in the violence of recent weeks are in fact students in any serious meaning of the word", whilst we know that many were in fact hooligans looking for trouble, is there any evidence that the majority of protesters weren't students with a genuine conviction that the fee rise was unfair?'

Careful readers will note a basic logical slippage. I refer to 'many of those involved in the violence'. Mr Wooderson quietly alters this, so that I am assumed to have referred instead to 'the majority of protesters', which I didn't do. As is clear after a moment's reflection, the two are not only not the same, but utterly different, so altering my meaning to the point of misrepresentation. Unless Mr Wooderson believes, as I do not, that the majority of the protestors were involved in the violence, he is attacking me for a sentiment I haven't expressed, and which he must know I haven't expressed, since he has carefully and correctly copied out my exact words. I seem to remember from my long ago studies of logic that J.S. Mill had a fancy name for this slippery trick. But I call it 'bait and switch'. Why do people do this stupid, self-damaging thing?

Mr Wooderson then turns his attention to the bed and breakfast question. 'What I wonder is whether Mr Hitchens would defend somebody's right to turn away a black couple on the basis that giving accommodation to other races was against his or her Mormon beliefs (Mormonism was officially a racist church until very recently).'

This is a question to which he must know that the answer is 'no'. He cannot really 'wonder' since he already knows. Thus the inquiry is not what it claims to be, an honest desire for knowledge, but a rather disgusting smear, of which he should be thoroughly ashamed. He won't be, of course, until perhaps years later when he is grown-up enough to realise the sort of game he is playing. I hope for that day.

How does he already know? Well, there are two ways. One, racial bigotry is these days rightly considered such a wicked moral failing that a) to be found guilty of it means more or less total exclusion from reasoned debate, combined with a fair degree of notoriety. The idea that I could have expressed views compatible with the refusal of hotel rooms to a couple on the grounds of skin colour, without it being widely known, is absurd, even for someone who is not a frequent contributor here, as Mr Wooderson is.

My recent discussion with Matthew Parris actually turned upon this exact comparison, often made by sexual revolutionaries to smear their opponents, and I went to some lengths to express a) my abhorrence of racial discrimination and b) my rational explanation for this abhorrence, and my reasons for believing that Christian opinions on sexual morality were not comparable to racial bigotry, and cannot be equated with it by any thinking, knowledgeable person.

Further, I am not now a member of the Mormon cult. Nor was I a member of the Mormon cult during the time when it upheld racial discrimination. Nor have I ever been. I am fairly well known to be a member of the Church of England, which, flexible as it is, debars me from membership of the Mormons, whose texts and doctrines set them apart from Christianity. Before that I was a Marxist atheist, which likewise precluded attendance at the Salt Lake City tabernacle. So there is no reason to suppose that I do now hold, or ever have held, or would wish in any way to defend the views he ascribes to that cult - or felt any wish or need to defend them against just laws prohibiting racial discrimination.

Mr Wooderson later issued this qualification: 'With the racist analogy, I was merely using a reductio ad absurdum, to question whether Mr Hitchens would tolerate racist guesthouse policies. I wasn't in any way comparing racism and homophobia in terms of the genetic component. My view is that they are equally unjustified prejudices, not that race and sexuality necessarily have the same cause.'

Oh, right. That makes it all right then, especially the Latin. Or does it? I suspect that Mr Wooderson would absolutely hate it, were he to be the target of such a 'reductio ad absurdum'.

The deeper, wider arguments, about the distinction between nature and behaviour, between being and doing, are dealt with largely in my book 'The Cameron Delusion', which contains an interesting quotation from the works of one Matthew Parris about the extent to which homosexual behaviour is predetermined.

Mr Parris wrote in 'The Times' of 6th August 2006, 'I think sexuality is a supple as well as subtle thing, and can sometimes be influenced, even promoted; I think that in some people some drives can be discouraged and others encouraged; I think some people can choose.' My thoughts on this can be found on and around page 120 of the book.


Dr Thomas Writes

I'd also like to respond to a couple of other recent postings, whose thoughtfulness demands an answer, and is a refreshing change from yelling and misrepresentation.

The first is from Sean Thomas, who wrote before Christmas (but on a dying thread) as follows.

I've inserted some comments, marked with asterisks thus **

'I'm pleased Mr Hitchens has taken the time to consider my comments. Indeed, I really didn't expect it. But I appreciate his willingness to engage. Likewise for all other posters (though I can't engage with all issues for sake of time and economy). First of all, I would like to offer some clarifications, along with some rather honest (and rather shamefaced) apologies. Then I would like to provide some further details about my position on the issue of drugs. I hope I can match the succinct quality I admire in his writing (I doubt I will though).

'I have a PhD in law, and I am currently a Lecturer in Commercial Law at the University of Leicester. The reason I used my title is that I am happy to make my comments in my capacity as a professional academic lawyer (and I agree with Mr Hitchens's distaste for the prevalence of (essentially) anonymous posting). I could say: 'Google me Peter!' But I have the (mis)fortune to share a name with an author who once won the Bad Sex in Fiction award, so looking for 'Sean Thomas' on the internet can lead to amusing mistakes of identity. As my job title indicates, my speciality is commercial law, not drugs. Nevertheless, I have a longstanding teaching interest in criminal law, and my research often covers areas of property crimes, so I like to think my interest in this issue is more than that of the "interested observer". In particular I am interested in lay (as opposed to legal) conceptions of the "moral" in criminal law and policy.

'On to the apologies: I used the term 'hypocrisy' in relation to Mr Hitchens's commentary that (essentially) the pro-drug side are shrill and closed-minded in relation to the position held by Mr Hitchens. I felt that his reaction was as bad, and I thought this looked like hypocrisy. I agree it was a loose use of the term (certainly I was not implying that he was perhaps a Howard Marks in his private life: if this was what was inferred I apologise).'

** I'm grateful for that.**

'I can see now that I perhaps should have considered my language. As for straw man – we all know this is the style of argumentation whereby a real problem is expanded to unreal levels.'

**Is it? I thought it was to misrepresent an opponent's position, to refute, or appear to refute, the misrepresented position and so to claim to have won the argument, while having in fact sidestepped it.**

'Thus I think that the claim that because some people suffer badly from drug consumption, that all drug consumption is bad, is a species of the straw man argument.'

**Whereas I would say that this formulation is in fact a misrepresentation of my position. In my view self-stupefaction is self-evidently morally wrong, in almost all cases opens to the stupefier to criminal or negligent acts which he would otherwise avoid, and ought to be repugnant to any morally literate person. Its consequences are frequently disastrous to the self-stupefier himself and to those around him. Therefore, where morality fails (as it has on this issue for half a century) the law must step in. That is rather different from 'because some people suffer badly from drug consumption, that all drug consumption is bad', a crude oversimplification.**
'For now, I shall move on from that as I discuss it later in a bit more depth. So yes, the doc does disagree with you, and I should have come out and said it clearly.

**Once again, thank you.**

'You claimed that the argument that self-stupefaction is not a private matter and that it has effects on people other than the individual drug-taker. I take issue with the first claim, that it is not a private matter. I have some problems with the second claim, that it impacts on others.

'For the first claim (that self-intoxication is not a private matter): Taken in the abstract, there is no moral reason why we should prevent other people doing things to their own body, even if we disagree with those things done. If it is not our body, it is not our choice. Only the individual concerned has that right. This is very much a personal opinion, but it derives primarily from the work of the great legal philosopher HLA Hart (for which, I think his rebuttal in his book "Law, Liberty and Morality", to Lord Devlin's claim that morality and law are necessarily linked, was successful).'

**Hart's view was the more *fashionable*, and the one most acceptable to his time and to academic lawyers of his and subsequent generations. I do not think that makes it definitively correct. Hart himself seems to me to have been one of the early apostles of the permissive society, not only in his own life but in what he promoted. He cannot really be a court of appeal, or considered an unbiased oracle.

As for it being a private matter, I suppose that if drug abusers had no families, no friends, no dependents, and managed to maintain themselves in all cases without direct thieving, or without becoming parasites on the welfare state, then this might be a tenable position for an atheist, and indeed this belief that we are our own self-created property is one of the attractions of atheism for the amoral. But this practical state of affairs is very rarely the case. Even very rich heroin users have children, for instance, who suffer less than the children of poor heroin users, but suffer gravely nonetheless. And parents, and lovers, and many other elective and non-elective affinities through which their behaviour is felt and suffered.**

'As for the second claim, that self-intoxication necessarily impacts on others: I think I agree in part. Drug use can cause distress to immediate family, provided the immediate family are in fact distressed. What if the immediate family do not feel distressed? The problem disappears. (On the same point, I personally don't think family has much to do with it anyway, but I am not pro-family like Mr Hitchens. That is for a different debate though.)'

**Well, that's all right then. Just stop feeling distressed, and all manner of things will be well. And we can cope without families, apparently. Or can we? It isn't, in fact, a different debate. It's the same one, and its main concern is unselfishness versus selfishness.**

'Similarly the other claims, such as decreased competence at work or at education, or on the roads, are correct if those factors actually occur. But it is not the case that intoxication at one point in time necessarily leads to the problems at all times in the future. So if one chooses to get stoned, fine: just sober up before you interact with others. I agree that drugs do 'stick' in the body and brain (to varying degrees), but I do not agree that there is any evidence that the intoxicating aspect remains. It will over time dissipate. The presence of metabolites of cannabis does not mean one is still stoned. So my approach would be get drunk, get stoned, get high. Just don't be a drunk, or a stoner. Sober up afterwards.'

**It is not only intoxication (or stupefaction) during drug abuse or soon afterwards of which we speak, but the permanent damage done to users, most especially of cannabis, the very dangerous drug which the legalisation lobby most dishonestly seeks to whitewash. Dr Thomas must also be lucky never to have met the sort of person who thinks he is sober when he is not. Plenty of drunks are like this, and they drive cars. So, in what I suspect are growing numbers, do drug abusers who genuinely believe that they are not impaired.**

'As for the criminal aspect: I think there are many people out there who commit crimes a) when intoxicated with drugs, and b) to get money to get intoxicated with drugs. But it would be a faulty syllogism to say that all people who get intoxicated then commit crimes over and above the initial criminal act of obtaining the drugs.'

**It might well be. But there is no need to make it. If the first and second propositions are true (and they are), then we already have a problem for which the criminal law is a remedy. The rest is just a matter of undermining the huge public relations campaign mounted for cannabis, and the incessant lie that it is a 'soft' and harmless drug instead of a dangerous poison which can wreck its users' mental health forever.**

'I think this issue then devolves into the issue of whether drugs should be criminalised. I think not, for reasons I have tried to elucidate above.'

**Do please try harder.**

'As for the worries about narco-lobby, this reminds me of Gladstone's claim to have lost an election on a torrent of gin and beer! It may be true: the problem though is with the institution of lobbying, not what is the subject matter of the lobby. Governments need spine and guts.'

**This is a useless, complacent statement. Most of my critics on this subject seek not to argue with me but to complain that I am still allowed to say what I say, to abuse me for saying what I say, or to vent their rage on me for daring to say it. Currently the argument is not about the rights or wrongs of the drug laws, but about the right of the opponents of legalisation to be heard at all. Where will governments find the 'spine and guts' if the arguments for employing these things are not made? If the cannabis lobby dominates the media and captures the minds of legislators, why should government try to show courage? The question is, which argument is right and true?**

'Finally, a peace offering: I enjoy reading your work Mr Hitchens. You make me think (after I have calmed any initial rage!). I agree with some of your points, but not all. For instance, I agree with your penal policy: if you want criminal law to work you need severe punishment (though not to the extent of capital punishment). I just disagree that self-intoxication in situations where others are not actually harmed is a valid subject for criminalisation. I agree with you on the pernicious growth of 'security' in the name of liberty: I think that governmental intrusion into the personal sphere is unjust. I happen to think that criminalisation of drug usage is a species of the same problem. So although you may not read/reply to this until later, I would like to apologise for my woolly writing earlier. I know I have only covered some of the points raised, but I hope I have clarified my position. If you are ever passing Leicester, please feel free to contact me and I can see if we can arrange a more detailed discussion of these issues. Enjoy your religious celebrations. I shall enjoy my secular version.'

**Thanks so much for the acknowledgement of woolly writing, much appreciated. But no thanks for this patronising good wish. I hope I should find my way to the altar rail at Christmas even if secret policemen tried to stop me, and I don't need Dr Thomas's blessing to do so now. But what exactly is *he* celebrating? He surely doesn't believe that the Gods must be propitiated to ensure that the days lengthen again? Science, based upon Christian belief in an ordered and purposeful - and explicable - universe, long ago exploded that idea. So what has he to make merry about at this season? If he thinks Christmas silly, then why bother?

This is typical. The secularist, or whatever he calls himself, enjoys the civilisation brought about by the birth and resurrection of Christ, but denies or mocks the truth of these events. He doesn't make the connection between the two, because he recognises, deep down, that this would be to admit that he is cheating by doing so. Once everyone agrees with him that Christmas and Christianity are fairytales, then the world will be a violent and selfish chaos in which each deed is measured quite precisely by its immediate effect. Or he will be marking Eid whether he likes it or not. So he rides free - for now.**

Another Doctor Writes

And then there was this from Dr Kevin Law (again, doctor of what, please?) 'Phew – I can't help but think that sometimes newspaper columnists do seem to have a very high opinion of the importance of their own views on life.
'And certainly Peter Hitchens would come into this category.
'First the good bit. I actually admire the way Peter Hitchens has an excellent command of the facts about any subject he comments on. A lot of other newspaper columnists could learn from his methods. He is always fully informed and read on any subject and does his research. I don't think I have ever read any comments from Peter Hitchens that were not based on genuine facts rather that the sloppy regurgitation of what others have written in the media (a crime other columnist commit regularly). Plus he is consistent. He doesn't change his views depending on the way the current media trends are running. He also mounts powerful and carefully crafted arguments that need thought to disagree with. I have never read Peter Hitchens offer up an opinion he hasn't thought through. I also have to say that I am in broad, if not total agreement with him over many issues. From the climate change hoax to the duplicity of David Cameron who calls himself a conservative but who is, in reality – just a social democrat. That's the good bit.
'The bad is that like other certain columnists (Simon Heffer is another, as is Polly Toynbee) that they offer up indignant criticisms of our present political and social systems plus their "radical" alternatives with a force that suggests should society not undertake such change, then we are all somehow being both blind and deaf to the obvious. However this force majeure is not backed up by actions on their behalf. I'm sure the pen is mightier than the sword but getting paid a rather high salary to propagate these views to us each week like some unsung prophet can be both wearing and a trifle irritating to the reader. Yes, these columnists are entitled to their opinion. And no, as a reader I don't have to read their work. I can ignore them if I want. But we all have the right to opinions. But most of us don't get paid to air these opinions every week in media.
'For me the irritation lies in the fact that these columnists clearly have a very high opinion of the importance of their argument and their own importance in "spreading the good word". But to the best of my knowledge – apart from being paid to give us the benefit of these views – on very regular basis – do precious little else to bring about the change they desire whilst constantly criticizing and hectoring others who don't undertake polices and practices which would please the columnist personal prejudices.'

PH replies: Well, I'm grateful once again for the fair-minded tone of this. But I'm not quite sure about all this 'high opinion of myself' stuff. No doubt I'm as vain as the next man and vainer than some. But so what if I'm right? And I can't or won't speak for any other columnist who wishes to defend himself or herself against the accusation of self-importance.

But, as I've explained here time without number, I would enter parliamentary politics next month if it were a practical option (that is to say, if a party existed to which I could in conscience belong, which was capable of winning election to a significant number of seats, and prepared to select me to stand in one of those seats where I had a reasonable prospect of winning). But these conditions don't exist. I've done all that I can to bring them about, and my effort hasn't yet had the desired effect. I'm not sure what else Dr Law would suggest, but I'm interested if he has anything original to say. I stress the word 'original'. I've heard plenty of suggestions based upon ignorance of the political process (Why don't you stand for Parliament? being one of them. Having reported at first hand on many, many by-elections and general elections I know that my personal qualities and views would have almost no bearing on the result), but none based upon knowledge of it, such as I possess.

And that's another thing. Dr Law might look at my curriculum vitae some time. I didn't just spring, fully formed out of nowhere as a 'columnist'. I worked my way through my trade for more than two decades before I was given that singular honour, time during which I found out at first-hand how this country is run, and where it stands in the world. I tend to think not that I'm 'important' but that I have knowledge, wisdom and experience which many others lack, and which I long to apply in the affairs of my country, and cannot, except by stating them in my columns and other writings. What sort of person would I be if, knowing these things and feeling these things, and offered a platform from which to state them, I wrote about allotments, football and au pairs?

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Shaking The Archers to the Core - but how?

I am about to make a prediction about an event which will take place on Sunday evening. It's only a guess, but I think it is a good guess. See if you agree. But first, the basis of my guesswork:

I don't often listen to 'The Archers', the BBC Radio 4 serial drama set in a fictional Midlands village called Ambridge. But I have family members and friends who do, and so I am compelled to take a vague interest in its plot. I have to admit that I have also been fascinated for many years by Vanessa Whitburn, editor of the programme. Indeed, I count her as a sort of discovery, along with another of my favourite characters in modern PC Britain, the policewoman Cressida Dick. I mentioned the interesting Ms Dick many years before she became famous, in my 'Brief History of Crime' (reissued as 'The Abolition of Liberty') .But Ms Whitburn featured strongly in my 1999 book 'The Abolition of Britain'. In a chapter called 'Suburbs of the Mind', which dwelt on the propaganda effect (and intent) of so-called soap operas, I quoted Ms Whitburn as having said: 'To be PC is really to be moral. It is having a correct moral stance. PC is, in fact, my moral plank. I don't think that wishy-washy liberal ideology works anymore.'

She also once said: 'Drama always has to move you to make you think, and distress you for a purpose.'

A few weeks ago in the 'Guardian' (13th December, G2), Ms Whitburn disclosed that she planned a major plot development in 'The Archers' to mark its 60th anniversary. It would, she said, shake the fictional village of Ambridge to its fictional core.

But she would not say what it would be. But it will be 'controversial'. Knowing Ms Whitburn's provenance, her desire to distress for a purpose, and move to provoke thought, her love of political correctness, I fell to wondering what it could possibly be.

My sources among Archers listeners weren't much use. They explained the cobweb of personal hatreds, jealousies and resentments which form the drama's current plot. They went on about a character called 'Helen' who is apparently going to have a fictional baby.

No, I thought, Ms Whitburn wants to make actual news in the world outside the studio, or why has she given this interview a fortnight before the broadcast? Fictional babies won't do that.

Then I noticed something else that Ms Whitburn told the 'Guardian'. 'Where I will defend the story-lines vigorously is against the "these things don't happen in village life" argument. I brought in a raid on the village shop and a previous editor, William Smethurst, claimed it wouldn't have happened. But I had newspaper cuttings about raids on village shops, and how awful they were. If one did these big stories all the time, it would start to lose its reality, but when we do one of them the repercussions of it reverberate for a long time.'

In the past, Ms Whitburn has come up with all kinds of stuff to make the Guardian reader and the PC liberal in general happy. The one that always seemed to me to be most questionable (apart from gnarled farmers speaking in metric rather than in customary measures) was a racialist attack on a Hindu woman living in the village. I have often, incidentally, wondered why she was a Hindu, not a Muslim. Perhaps Muslims just don't live in English villages. But do many Hindus? Then there was a further plot with the same woman marrying the vicar, not to mention all kinds of sexual revolution stuff and ultra-feminist propaganda.

But if Ms Whitburn went through the newspaper cuttings of English rural life over the past year, what truly shocking plot development could be justified by recent news, which would 'shake Ambridge to the core', allow her to dispense with several played-out characters, create a whole set of cliff-hanger dramas lasting days, not to mention a long aftermath?

Why, a gun massacre, of course.

We have had two major ones (and by coincidence a more recent rural shooting incident) in the past year. Nobody could claim it was impossible, or even necessarily improbable (nor would I, but for other reasons discussed here on other occasions) this would also allow her to help propagate the standard PC belief that gun control in Britain isn't tight enough, and that it is especially lax in the rural areas where legal firearms are mainly held. In fact, almost all gun crime is committed using illegally held weapons, but who cares about such arcane details? They can always be forgotten in the subsequent frenzy.

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My father got to work even when the sea froze... then came 50 years of 'progress'

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Actually I didn't much like the Fifties, which I remember as bleak and chilly and smelling of damp raincoats, stale tobacco, suet pudding and cabbage. Not to mention the chilblains.

It is the fate of those who don't much like the present to be told all the time that they are yearning for some bit of the past, when they're not.

Even so, as I try not to laugh too loud at the pretensions of the supposedly advanced modern world, I cannot help being fairly sure that the past 50 years or so have not been a matter of unmixed progress.

I remember winters when the sea at the end of our road actually turned to ice, winters when the milk on the doorstep froze into a sort of dairy rocket, with the foil top perched on the solidified cream, winters when our garden was full of gigantic snowballs for weeks on end.

And as far as I can recall, my father still went off to his work each day and so did everyone else. The trains and buses continued to run, the roads and pavements were swiftly cleared of ice and snow.

In that Britain of town clerks, rural district councils, bus conductors with peaked caps station masters, the Gas Board, unreformed county boundaries, yards, feet, inches, pounds and ounces, we somehow managed to be far more efficient than we are in the days of chief executives, Metropolitan Authorities, Network Rail, centimetres and kilograms.

And I think more and more that we have mistaken newness, modernity and packaging for reality.

Yes, of course, the narrow, shabby restrained country of 50 years ago had its drawbacks.

What is interesting is how many of them we have managed to retain in our frenzy of change – the deep and wasteful class divisions, the bad diet and general poor health, the neglect of the old, the grim cities – though now they are grim in a different, more modern way.

Our supposed progress, by contrast, is often a shallow matter of possessions, plastic and paint, accompanied by a shocking level of incompetence and defeatism, which afflict us when we face any sort of challenge – from foot-and-mouth disease to a few inches of snow.

At Christmas, in some strange but powerful way, the past lives in our minds as at no other time. Perhaps those of us who still remember it should recognise honestly during this moving and reflective season that in our haste for change and modernisation, we have lost at least as much as we have gained.

 

 

Finally, a glimmer of light at the biased BBC

The BBC's Director-General, Mark Thompson, deserves credit for being the first to begin to grasp the problem of the Corporation's heavy cultural and moral bias to the Left.

As well as admitting that such bias was rampant in the Eighties, he has now said several things that go to the root of the matter. Here are two of them: 'Avoiding party political bias is a subset and only a subset of impartiality.

It's possible for all major parties to agree on a given subject and for there still to be a legitimate opposing view which should be heard and scrutinised', and: 'People sometimes confuse impartiality with centrism, ie a bias towards more "moderate" world-views as opposed to more "radical" ones.'

This is strong, thoughtful stuff, not that he will be glad that I think so. But then, I'm biased.

 

Why put filth in the mouth of our King?

As far as I can find out, there is absolutely no historical warrant for the idea that King George VI was urged to use the f-word by his speech therapist during his attempt to cure his stammer.

So why did the makers of the film The King's Speech feel the need to insert a scene in which this happens?

Even if it did happen, there are other ways of letting us know that it did, apart from showing it.

If the British Board of Film Classification had any courage or resolve, they would have stuck by their decision to give the film a '15' rating and so sharply reduced its market, solely because of this passage.

The producer, director and scriptwriters could not have been certain that the BBFC would cave in. They were prepared, therefore, to risk significant commercial damage for this cause.

I know that, to get their laughs, many modern 'comedians' rely almost completely on the f-word's fading power to shock. But I think there is more to it than that. In much of the entertainment industry there is a militant desire to destroy taboos and upset the gentle, for its own sake. Revolutionaries love to debauch and corrupt.

How better to do this than to portray the trembling, retiring Bertie, who never wanted the throne and was happiest at home with his small family, spitting out dirty words?

I'd say shame on them if I thought they understood words of more than four letters.

 

Evidence piles up that Britain has secretly recognised a Palestinian State, to please the Arab world. Careful readers of the list of newly commissioned officers from Sandhurst will find among those who 'passed with a view to being commissioned into the armed forces of their countries' (the official wording) two cadets destined for the as yet non-existent army of an as yet non-existent 'Palestine'.

A few weeks ago, the Foreign Office told me that a Press notice from our Jerusalem consulate, describing William Hague's 'first visit' to this 'country', was a mistake. They refused to say if anyone had been reprimanded for it. Our national duplicity in this part of the world knows no bounds, but if there is a War Against Terror, which side is the dodgy Ramallah regime on?

 

A former KGB agent in London between 1977 and 1984, Yuri Kobaladze, writes in a Moscow newspaper: 'Some of our best sources were British journalists . . . I had some real friends among those English reporters.' I have long suspected something of the kind was going on and I think Mr Kobaladze would be doing us all a favour if he would kindly name some names.

What got Vince Cable into real trouble was his hostility to Rupert Murdoch, who has a mighty say in our Government thanks to a secret pact with David Cameron. But why is Mr Cable still in the Cabinet?

Not because Mr Cameron has to keep him there but because he wants to keep him there. A Minister who blabbed conservative thoughts would have been sacked in minutes.

The Liberal Democrats are not the junior partners in the Coalition, but Mr Cameron's indispensable allies against the Tory Party which still cannot understand how completely it has been kippered by liberals and social democrats.

 

Modern Britain encapsulated: Sitting deep in conversation with each other in a suburban chain coffee bar, two PCSOs in uniform and presumably on duty, ingesting large hot drinks surmounted with volcanoes of whipped cream. In the lavatory, not 15ft away, in constant use by mothers and young children, a junkie's used syringe rolling on the floor. Happy Christmas, anyway.

Our gutless rulers get in a flap over one unhinged killer - but do nothing to stop 100 others

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Our elite and our media are always worrying about the wrong things. We fret and legislate about matters we cannot alter, and we do nothing about things we can change.

Here's an example. Our absurd obsession with terrorism is encouraged by long-faced 'security experts' and used to justify enormous state spending on surveillance and other creepy activities.

Currently we are in a new frenzy of concern about suicide bombers. We examine the life of Taimour Abdulwahab Al-Abdaly, who blew himself up in Stockholm, and wonder how we could have known that he would do this, and so have stopped him.

We couldn't have. His life did not follow any obvious pattern which would lead to this disgusting end. Compare this with the known fact that each year 100 entirely innocent people will be killed at random by mental patients released on to the streets by our indefensible 'care in the community' policy.

Many of these killers give many clues to their likely future actions.

Many will have had their brains scrambled in the first place by using the technically illegal drugs a feeble State has allowed to spread throughout society.

The deaths they cause are often just as gruesome as those in terror attacks. The victims' families are just as stricken.

By a simple reform, the ending of 'care in the community' and the recreation of proper mental hospitals, we could avoid almost all these killings. By following the severe Swedish policy of penalising drug use, we could reduce the number of unhinged people in our population.

But we do neither. Just as we refuse to take the basic steps which would enormously reduce crime and disorder, especially reintroducing the preventive police foot patrols which everyone wants, which are promised constantly, but which never happen.

If there is a covenant between government and people, it is based on one thing: the ruler is given power in return for his ability and willingness to guard the population from evil and danger.

Our current governing class lacks the courage, the decisiveness or the sense to do this. It prefers the noisy pretence to the dogged and unspectacular reality. That is why it is time it was replaced.

Militants looking for trouble

Irish Republicans used to travel many miles to attend, and be offended by, the Orange Parade at Drumcree in Northern Ireland. When they got there, they would stand about for hours, making sure they were thoroughly upset by the ghastly sight of red-faced, middle-aged men hobbling by in bowler hats.

Is something similar now happening among the nation's militant homosexuals? I only ask because I really cannot see why a homosexual couple would have sought out Chymorvah, the seaside hotel currently being sued for its policy on allocating bedrooms.

Has anyone asked this pair how often they stay in such establishments, or how they came to choose it? I haven't seen the answer if so.

It seems to me that the law on this subject is now being used as a sword for militants rather than as a shield for the wrongly persecuted. Who wants or needs this?

A dopey day in the life of 'Bob the Beatle'

I rather like Bob Ainsworth, a relatively straightforward man among the menagerie of slimy, fanged creatures that populates Westminster.

But, alas, as he proved beyond doubt last week, he is an ill-informed, susceptible nitwit who has swallowed whole all the dishonest and mischievous propaganda of the 'legalise drugs' lobby.

Lots of people who ought to know better fall for this stuff, when a tiny bit of research would show them it is folly.

You can always spot them, when they talk about 'Prohibition', as if Eliot Ness of the Untouchables were stalking the land, smashing up drug dens with an axe, when in fact cannabis possession is effectively legal (most users get off with a meaningless warning, if the police bother them at all) and millions of pounds of your taxes are spent on dosing criminal heroin users with legal methadone, to keep them stupefied and happy.

They also babble about a 'war on drugs'. Well, if the lavishing of money and social workers on deliberate criminals, who are encouraged to continue in their criminal way, is a 'war' then the word doesn't mean what I thought it meant.

These thought-free burblings will earn Mr Ainsworth applause from supposedly intelligent media commentators such as Simon Jenkins, once editor of The Times, who really ought to know better. And of course they are given enormous prominence on the BBC, which I suspect is crammed with former and current drug abusers, just like David Cameron's Tory high command.

But they will earn him the curses of parents whose children's lives have been – or are yet to be – ruined by drugs, and of a society which will find out too late what it is like to live in a state where pleasure and self-stupefaction have driven out self-discipline and the work ethic.

What, you may wonder, leads a middle-aged white-collar trade unionist into the wacky world of drug legalisation?

I have no idea. Was it something they discussed during those meetings of the International Marxist Group that Mr Ainsworth once attended? Or is the moustache a giveaway?

Like so many of his age group, did Mr Ainsworth see the 1967 release of Sergeant Pepper – and the druggies' anthem A Day In The Life – as a seminal moment in the cultural revolution?

Does he imagine himself sitting among the Fab Four, suspended above reality atop a sweet-smelling cloud? It would explain a lot.

Kosovo, a dry run for our great Iraq disaster

The seeds of the Iraq War were sown in Kosovo.

There, we were told, the evil Serbs were oppressing the saintly Kosovars. Our Armed Forces (having been forbidden to fight our actual enemies, the IRA) were ordered into action in support of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a sinister outfit of evil repute, as all serious observers knew at the time.

Now, and not a moment too soon, the grisly truth about the KLA has begun to emerge, including credible stories of victims murdered, as they pleaded piteously for mercy, so that their corpses could be harvested for organs. I have no doubt that Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia committed many evil deeds.

But I did not think then that they were the only people in the Balkans who were guilty. And the crude anti-Serb propaganda which was used to bamboozle the British people into supporting the bombing of Belgrade was a dry run for the worse manipulation which took us to Baghdad.

Will we learn from this that it is unwise to go to war on the basis of emotive propaganda? I doubt it.

Now that their hero Julian Assange has a) fallen victim to the European Arrest Warrant and b) is the subject of anonymous accusations of sexual assault in which there can be no indisputable evidence, can we expect the same Left suddenly to discover that these things – over which they have long been complacent – are pernicious threats to liberty and justice?

If the Irish people wish to abolish their admirable laws protecting unborn children from murder, then that is up to them. But it is no business of bureaucrats in Strasbourg calling themselves a 'Court of Human Rights'.

An Advent Message

I shall not be posting - apart from my Mail on Sunday column - until some days after the Feast of the Nativity (commonly called Christmas Day). In fact I doubt if I shall be posting until after the Holy Innocents' Day, on which I hope as many of you as possible will recall with sorrow the continuing massacre of innocent unborn babies, our society's greatest and deepest shame, and the one of which it most hates to be reminded.

As it's not yet Christmas, but still the penitential season of Advent, I'll save any Christmas greetings for when the twelve days have actually begun.

I hope that the coming months will see a continuing rise in the standard of discussion here. Work has begun on the promised index, which will enable us to avoid re-teaching new pupils various simple lessons, from which most contributors to this site have already benefited. I'm grateful to those who have stepped up to repeat the simple position on drugs which I have so often stated, and to rebut the 'wot abaht alcohol, then?' drivel, presumably taught these days in PSHE classes by dope-smoker teachers, which so many pro-cannabis contributors wearisomely repeat.

None of my critics has grasped the simple point I make about crime statistics - that by their nature they simply do not cover all matters which most sensible people regard as crimes. Therefore their claims that 'crime has fallen' cannot be taken as a rebuttal of my counter-claim that the general level of lawbreaking and disorder is far too high (immensely higher than at any time in modern British history), and continues to rise. Both sides here are working in the dark. Both have opinions and are entitled to them. The mistake is to claim that the opinion of the state is a fact, when it's not. Oh, and of course I 'have an agenda'. Who could doubt it, as I am utterly clear about it? But doesn't the state have an agenda? Doesn't the BBC? Doesn't the Academy? Would that they were as clear about their 'agenda' as I am about mine.


Meanwhile a short message to Mr MacDougall. He may well be right that the government is very hard on car owners. But this is simply because of its unceasing desire for tax revenue, not because it wishes to discourage car use and encourage people to use other forms of transport. On the contrary, it continues in its planning to assume ever-increasing car use. If it really wanted to persecute the motorist out of his car and on to his feet, or his bicycle, or the bust, train or tram, I'd support it. But he should believe me when I say that the lot of the railway user (and the bus user, come to that) is no better. As for us cyclists, we are not fooled by a few miles of cycle lanes, so brightly painted that they are visible from the Moon, but which function mainly as car parks and which end abruptly where they are most needed.

The Rapid Reaction Unit writes...

I've placed answers to postings by Mr Charles, Mr 'Craze' and Mr Everett in the appropriate threads. I'll make responses to some other comments here.

If Mr Puhse thinks I am 'out of my depth' with cannabis, whatever that means, can he explain in what way? Otherwise I shall just conclude that he disagrees with me but is not prepared - or able - to state the grounds on which he does so.

'Malcolm' from behind a name which does not actually identify him, claims that Robin Murray, a noted professor, has been 'discredited'. This is a serious allegation. Can he please tell me when and where and by whom this alleged discrediting was done? Or I shall conclude that what he means is that he does not like what Professor Murray says. Which is not the same thing.

Doctor (of what?) Sean Thomas says: 'I am fed up with Peter Hitchens' hypocrisy (in terms of using false argumentation and sophistry), and I have a particular distaste for his use of the straw-man. He states: "The contention that self-stupefaction is a private matter with no effect beyond the individual (false in a hundred ways) is directly negated by this furious, hate-filled pressure group, which almost invariably prefers misrepresentation to debate, and abuse to argument." Just one point for now: how is the contention (that self-stupefaction is a private matter...) "false in a hundred ways"? Since I'm feeling generous, I'm happy to give you the opportunity to provide ten distinct reasons. But 100 is nonsensical hyperbole, and deserves retraction (or at the very least, modification).'

I had not heard this definition of hypocrisy before. I thought it consisted of publicly preaching one form of behaviour while privately practising another.

If his use of language is this imprecise, one has to wonder about his doctorate in whatever it is.

Nor is the example he cites an example of the straw man, so far as I can see.

What he means is that he disagrees with me. Presumably he does not wish to say this, as he will then need to explain why. And he does not wish to do so, or is unable to do so. Easier by far to attack me instead, eh, doc?

Here are several ways in which the user of illegal drugs might have an effect on lives beyond his own.

1.Personal distress to his immediate family (I will list this as one, though it encompasses so many different griefs, disappointments, miseries and pains, from despair and loss to actual theft and violence that it really counts as dozens)
2.Disadvantage to work colleagues who have to cover for his decreased competence and diligence (accompanied by his invariable inability to recognise that they *are* decreased)
2.Disadvantage to those who suffer from the crimes he is more likely to commit, especially theft
4.Disadvantage to those who will suffer from his inattention, sloth or incompetence on the roads
5.Disadvantage to those who might suffer from the above in his workplace
6.Disruption of the education of those who are at the same educational establishment
7.Costs to society in general of his damaged health, wrecked education and diminished productivity
8. Cost to society in general in the increased need for drug testing and surveillance as drug abuse becomes more prevalent
9. Increased level of crime caused by the demoralisation of each individual who seeks stupefaction through drugs
10. Decreased liberty of law-abiding individual in areas where drug users congregate

All these factors radiate outwards in dozens of different ways into any society which tolerates drug abuse. Two other effects are the growing vociferousness and power of self-serving lobbies demanding that society be made worse to suit their greasy pleasures. Ultimately, if they are successful, we could see political parties and governments subsidised by the makers and sellers of narcotics, and find ourselves, openly or covertly, living in a corrupt narco-state. I doubt whether any of these is enough for Doctor Thomas. I wonder why that would be.

Tarquin states: 'It's a pity that you cannot prove what you say about crime figures. It may well be true, figures are fiddled, crimes are unrecorded, but without any sort of evidence aside from selective horror stories found usually in this dear publication, we have no way of knowing how bad crime is.'

I don't know about 'selective horror stories'. They are only selective in so far as they are a small minority of the huge catalogue of crimes of which newspapers are aware, which have to be increasingly horrifying and spectacular to attract the notice of national media at all. I sometimes see murder reports in my local paper so full of grisly violence that they would once have been national newspaper front page leads, but are now so commonplace that they are relegated to inside pages in provincial weeklies.

My case is that those who claim that official figures 'prove' that crime is falling are both naive and wilfully self-deluding. They misunderstand the nature of official statistics, which are not gathered or presented in a neutral fashion or with neutral purposes. And they ignore my clearly reasoned point, that by their nature they do not record a great deal which the public regard as crime.

I have also pointed out one of the major flaws in the BCS, which 'Tarquin' simply ignores.

What seems clear to me is that the experience of most people is that they are less safe in their homes or in the streets than they used to be, and that disorder of the kind I describe, which is regarded as important by its victims and as trivial by the authorities, is growing and uncontrolled.

'Tarquin' suggests: 'How about bringing a solution to the table so we can actually find out how bad it really is?'
I'd reply that we know all too clearly how bad it is. The immediate solutions are the restoration of preventive police foot patrolling and the restoration of the principle of punishment in the justice system, backed up by a long-term restoration of the married family and parental authority in childhood. I do like that word 'restoration'. Yes, you can turn the clock back.

I refer William MacDougall to my chapter on cars and railways in 'The Cameron Delusion'.

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Matthew 'Twister' Parris, Dope and the Guardian, Prisons and Punishment, Bed and Breakfast accommodation, Parasites - All Human Life is Here

Amazingly, there are still readers of this weblog who believe government statistics. There are two rules about such statistics, which ought to be grasped by all informed persons. One is that all politically important statistics are massaged. The other is that in socialist societies governed by utopian idealists (such as ours) most statistics are subject to what is known as the 'Bikini effect', namely that what they conceal is more interesting than what they reveal.

One such believer is Grant Price, who (as well as using the ghastly dead cliche about the 'Elephant in the Room', a cliche which ought to be shot) writes: 'The statistics clearly show the country heading in the opposite direction [to the one suggested by me]. Crime is falling, and falling significantly, and when one considers that a staggering proportion of crime is perpetrated by foreigners (thanks to Labour's incontinent immigration policy), the level of criminality amongst the British is falling even more rapidly, despite decades of "liberal" misrule.'

I'm sorry. But where do I begin? 'Recorded' crime is that which has been recorded by the police, which is to say that which the police have entered on the forms which they have to fill in. By definition, that which is recorded excludes that which is not recorded. Much modern crime is not recorded. How might a crime not be recorded? Well, one common case would be when the victim doesn't think it worth reporting. So (for example) the multiple victim of burglary on the sink estate, who probably never had insurance and certainly doesn't now, so has no need of the 'crime number' which is the sole police response to most crime these days, has no reason to report the latest, and many reasons not to. Becoming known as a 'grass' in these parts of our country is a ticket to utter misery.

Then again, the police (who long ago maximised crime figures in order to press for higher funding) now have many ways of massaging them downwards to satisfy ministers (of all parties) who currently want to claim that crime is falling.The first and easiest way of doing this is to be largely absent from the streets, to close police stations or move them to remote locations, to take a very long time to answer the phone and to be of no great help if and when they eventually do arrive at a crime scene. If people (known contemptuously by the police as 'civilians') continue to persist with the charade of calling the constabulary for crimes which the force, I mean service, regards as 'trivial', then thefts are reclassified as lost property, multiple burglaries in one building somehow appear as one crime, etc etc. Not to mention murders somehow ending up in court as manslaughter.

I agree that some figures can't be fiddled, and some aren't. Totals such as those of arrests (though these are often unobtainable) or of convictions are incontrovertible. But these do not represent accurate figures on the numbers of crimes actually committed. Even the remaining diligent and anti-crime police officers (as shown in my 'Abolition of Liberty') are justifiably reluctant to embark on the form-filling nightmare which follows an arrest. They have an incentive to avoid it.

Homicide, I suspect, has sometimes fallen absolutely as hospital trauma surgery skills have increased (and they have, enormously) and as ambulance services have grown faster and more effective, and their crews better-trained in keeping the badly-injured alive. It has certainly fallen in relation to the amount of homicidal violence taking place. Put simply, it is now much easier to make a savage attack on someone without killing him or her. I have said many times that if we still had the medical techniques of 1965, we would have an annual homicide rate far higher than it is. Many who would have died 40 years ago now survive, and their cases are classified as wounding or attempted murder. (See my book 'A Brief History of Crime'.) Bank Robbery is increasingly the resort of the unbelievably stupid, as precautions against it are now so elaborate that the chances of a successful theft are virtually nil.

Then there are those things which are perceived as crimes or as illegal disorder by many of us - mainly to do with loutish gatherings of youths in streets, the kicking of footballs against homes, other similar miseries perpetrated by the young and strong against the old and vulnerable, the feral harassment of the old or handicapped or different (see the case of Francesca Pilkington), uncontrolled public drunkenness, which in the not so distant past would have been dealt with by the police and which they now simply ignore. These are pandemic in urban areas, but almost totally unrecorded. As for the possession of drugs, I think we may be sure that the enormous number of cannabis warnings given are a fraction of the number of offences to which the police turn a blind eye, or about which they do not know because they are not specially interested in finding out.

Above all there is the increasing switch from classic crime statistics to the British Crime Survey as the main source of supposed information about this subject. The British Crime Survey is not an assembly of gathered figures, but an opinion poll with all the faults of such things, and a rather flawed one at that, specially bad at noticing crimes committed against the young, who are the principal victims of many offences. Those who wish to believe that crime (and disorder) in this country are genuinely diminishing are welcome to their belief, even though it must be hard to maintain for any but the most sequestered. But they are deluding themselves. You might equally well believe that the amount of dangerous and careless driving has diminished, when the opposite is obviously the case, or that hardly anyone ever uses a mobile phone while driving, or hardly any cyclists run red lights. Of course they do, but it goes unrestrained by authorities who have ceded the Tarmac to the motorist, and so it also goes unrecorded.

Twister Alert

How can I get it across to some readers that my pursuit of Matthew 'Twister' Parris is not motivated by personal distress, or because I am 'upset' - but by a desire to uphold truth and pursue justice, both of which have been wounded by this episode? It is the truth which has been insulted, not I.

On the matter of truth, Mr Parris twisted my words in a public place, ignored my immediate protests and my subsequent ones, and refused multiple chances to put this right in a civilised fashion. He lives by his tongue and pen, which are surely devalued by the twisting of the words of others. He also has a reputation for being a 'decent guy', 'reasonable' etc, which in my view conflicts with this behaviour.

On the pursuit of justice: Some of you may have begun to guess that the more often I mention Mr Parris's behaviour, the more references to it will find their way on to the World Wide Web, and the harder it will be for him to encounter people who are unaware of his twisting of my words. He may put this right at any time by admitting that he twisted what I said and (preferably) apologising so that I can forgive him, as I wish to do - but currently cannot.

Mr 'Richie Craze' (really? I suppose it's possible) states: 'Perhaps you can explain what part of what Mr Parris said you said you disagree with?'

Well, Mr 'Craze' should know that I have done so here and here (scroll down to 'What I said....')

Though whether Mr 'Craze' actually reads anything here, or just imagines it all to suit his own prejudices, I don't know, given what he goes on to say, which is: 'Given that you've consistently written scornfully of homosexuals, or gays, to use the modern parlance;'

Have I so?

Perhaps Mr 'Craze' could produce examples of these 'scornful' writings.

Mr 'Craze' then adds: 'and stand in opposition to giving them equal rights (I believe you stated not too long ago that decriminalising homosexuality was as far as you would have liked the law to go)'

This on the other hand is more or less correct, though there are important qualifications about the loaded phrase 'equal rights'.

Mr Craze then lurches over a set of non-existent points on to the track he wishes to be on (a common fault in my critics, who even so seldom realise that they have become derailed) by adding: 'then surely Mr Parris's comment was merely an extrapolation of a view you do in fact hold?'

Well no, it surely wasn't - as I have been at pains to explain. I might add that it also certainly wasn't what I said or intended in the discussion at issue. Mr Parris, to his credit, has not sought to seek refuge in this dispute by the wretched excuse that this is what he thinks I meant in general (as opposed to what I actually do think) about the subject, therefore it is all right to pretend that it is what I actually said on this specific occasion, when in fact I didn't. So I advise his defenders not to do so either. It makes them look very cheap. If you say somebody said something, then it is wise to be able to show that he said it, rather than that you thought he thought it.

Bed and Breakfast

Some contributors have mentioned a curious case at Bristol County Court - once again a Bed and Breakfast run by a Christian couple seems to be the object of a mighty legal action. Wasn't the last one about Muslims being upset? This one is about homosexual rights.

There are many interesting things about this case, but what fascinates me about it (and I have yet to see any reports which answer my question) is why the homosexual couple involved chose the Chymorvah House private hotel given that there must be so many such establishments in the area? Was it personal recommendation? Did they search the web? Or what? Even if they had no idea of the hotel's policy stated upon its website ('Here at Chymorvah we have few rules, but please note that as Christians we have a deep regard for marriage (being the union of one man to one woman for life to the exclusion of all others). Therefore, although we extend to all a warm welcome to our home, our double bedded accommodation is not available to unmarried couples – Thank you.'), how did they happen upon it?

I'd also be interested to know how often they go on bed-and-breakfast seaside holidays together or singly, and when was the last time and where it was?

Just curious, I guess.

Prisons and Punishment, a 'New Parties'

Mr Everett ludicrously misrepresents an answer I gave to a question seeking examples of actions a conservative government might take which I regard as desirable and which would be against the interests of capitalism. He turns this into a programme for a 'new party'. I mentioned neither programme nor party, nor set these forward as such. Why do people do such things? There can be no new party until there is a vacancy, and the electorate showed at the last election that they did not wish to create such a vacancy, being content to be controlled by the existing social democratic political class. I have laid aside talk of political reform until it once again seems practicable. But I'm happy to discuss those things which I favour.

I do not care, by the way, that my wish to place heavy restrictions on private motor cars might make me unpopular. No worthwhile cause exists without this risk. I think the growth of private motor traffic is so damaging to civilisation, peace and beauty that I believe it is time someone addressed it directly. I am sure many others (including many involuntarily enslaved by our car-worshipping society) share this view but fear to express it.

The fact that many goods are distributed by road does not mean that they *should* do so or that no better way can be found than this filthy, destructive, dangerous, noisy method, which makes us dependent for our transport and economy upon some of the nastiest and most unstable regimes on earth.

Likewise, the fact that most car use is irrational and wasteful, and much of it dictated by town planning which creates the need for cars where none existed before, does not mean that all use of private motor vehicles is irrational. There's an excellent case for taxis, and for private cars in remote and hilly rural areas which cannot be practically reached by rail.

Oh, yes, and prisons. I'd like to repeat here a response I left on the previous thread to Mr James Staunton: 'James Staunton, in a post dripping with knowing and superior scorn, accuses me of making a "sweeping assertion" that most criminals don't reach prison until they have a long string of previous offences behind them (he then gives an oddly partial quote from what I said).

'Try this, from the Government's own "Sentencing Statistics, England and Wales, 2009" (p.76) "Those offenders with a substantial previous criminal history are most likely to receive a custodial sentence. In 2009, 38 per cent of sentenced offenders with 15 or more previous convictions or cautions received a custodial sentence compared with 15 per cent for those with only one or two previous sanctions. Although there are a substantial number of sentenced first time offenders receiving custodial sentences, 26 per cent in 2009 compared with 18 per cent in 2000, these are offenders whose first conviction is for a relatively serious offence in contrast to the majority of offenders who have a longer criminal history of minor offences.

' "In 2009, seven per cent of juveniles receiving a custodial sentence had no previous criminal history compared with 10 per cent for adult offenders. For both age groups the proportion of custodial sentences given to offenders with 15 or more previous sanctions has risen steadily since 2000."
'The accompanying Table 6.2 backs this up. I would go into more detail, but alas the Ministry of Injustice confesses that it does not possess or tabulate statistics on this subject which address the matter more closely. I have no doubt that, were they available all figures would back up my contention. Does Mr Staunton know any better?
'He also objects that I don't provide the Soma report, as mentioned. I had thought I'd given enough co-ordinates for anyone to find it. He might try here:
'http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/attacheme...'

Guardians of what?

Some of you may have seen my brief article in 'The Guardian' today. (Wednesday 15th December)

This arose out of a brief letter I wrote to the Guardian in my defence, after Decca Aitkenhead's original article was published. The paper's comment section generously and properly offered me a little extra space in which to make my point. The response to this which came from the readers of that newspaper is very telling. Hardly a single comment actually addressed the point I make. Almost all were marinated in personal fury, resentment and loathing. It is shocking to realise that most of these people probably imagine themselves to be well-educated.

After reading these comments, I reflected that:

I didn't say I have no prejudices - of course I do, and so does any man. But I did say that I don't let them get in the way of facts, as Ms Aitkenhead and Professor David Nutt had suggested in the pages of the Guardian. To support this defence I cited evidence of scientific concern about the effects of cannabis on mental illness, a matter on which I had wrongly been accused of 'baseless alarmism'.

And I pointed out that in this case the facts were on my side, as Professor Nutt had made a statement about the treatment of cannabis possession in which he appeared to have let prejudice get in the way of the facts.

That, basically, was it. I am more and more convinced (and there is evidence of this here too) that drug abuse makes its victims angry and intolerant lobbyists for selfishness. I don't mind them disagreeing. But I am alarmed by the intolerant, censorious rage with which they attack my freedom to disagree with them. The contention that self-stupefaction is a private matter with no effect beyond the individual (false in a hundred ways) is directly negated by this furious, hate-filled pressure group, which almost invariably prefers misrepresentation to debate, and abuse to argument.

Parasites

Some points. No, I don't regard children, incapable of fending for themselves, as parasites. Nor do I regard old or sick people, who through age, accident or illness must now rely on the rest of us to care for them, as such. I reserve the term for those who could shift for themselves but prefer to rely on others, and - while doing so - sink their teeth into the hand that feeds them. I doubt whether many of those involved in the violence of recent weeks are in fact students in any serious meaning of the word.

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Time for Some Dialogue

Today I'll try to respond to some points raised since Sunday, and perhaps to one or two older issues still alive on earlier postings.

The Blair-Hitchens event in Toronto

I'm asked to comment on my brother's encounter (styled by some a 'debate') with Anthony Blair in Toronto, recently broadcast on BBC radio. Delighted as I am that the BBC (which can and often does reduce an important Parliamentary event to three jokey minutes) has taken to broadcasting debates on major issues on Radio 4, I do wonder whether the habit will last, and why this particular one made it so swiftly on to the air.

I haven't in fact heard it in full, and don't expect to, though I've read a few accounts. I have in the past watched or listened to YouTube versions of many of my brother's meetings with opponents. These were at least interesting because his opponents were in fact opponents, and in many cases also scientists or theologians of note.

But I know from long experience and observation that Mr Blair is not an intellect of any kind, knows little about anything important and speaks (with a vacuous charm that passes me by) in cliches, both mental and verbal. I've also had for some time a grave problem with his self-description as a man of faith. When his actions are questioned, on Christian grounds, by leading exponents of that faith, Mr Blair tends to assume that he is right, and to imply that, in that case, we really ought to find another Pope, Archbishop, Moderator etc. He certainly took that view on the Iraq war, and I think his views on the Church's positions on sexual politics are of a similar sort.

Which is my second reason for reluctance to bother with this occasion. I'd also place Mr Blair - who famously said in Stevenage in April 1997, days before he came to office, 'I am a modern man. I am part of the rock and roll generation—the Beatles, colour TV, that's the generation I come from' - very much on the same side as my brother in the moral and cultural arguments of our time. Perhaps he should really have said 'Rolling Stones' rather than 'Beatles' to achieve full congruence. He would now, but at that stage he was worried about votes.

I used this quotation as the opening epigraph in the original version of my 1999 book 'The Abolition of Britain' (it's not in the new edition, which has a new and different introduction) and was recently fascinated to discover on the web an account of the Stevenage evening by that fine writer Ian Jack, in the 'Independent'. In this, it's clear that Mr Blair greatly pleased his audience by promising not to spend any money on the Royal Yacht, and by underlining his commitment to sexual liberation.

In fact, I'm quite sure that both men owe a lot of the popularity and success of their lives to being in tune with the post-1968 Age of Aquarius ethos of a whole generation of successful, prosperous and self-satisfied baby-boomers. The two men's radical interventionist, anti-sovereignty, utopian support for the Iraq War (though entirely consistent with this position) goes a little too far for most boomers, whose strong sense of their own goodness forbids them to support any sort of war. I seem to recall an occasion a couple of years ago when my brother actually took a ride in Mr Blair's armoured car, for a friendly chat about the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

But, interestingly, most of my brother's fan club are prepared to forgive and forget about Iraq, and even for his sympathy with the Blair creature, because what really matters to them is the liberation from 'old-fashioned' and 'mediaeval' and 'repressive' moral systems, which is the real foundation for 21st century militant Godlessness. And it is his espousal of that position which has propelled him into intellectual superstardom in the USA. The ditching of Christianity is, alas, an idea whose time has come among the college-educated young of the USA.

After all, the same people generally still hate and despise me (where they've heard of me), even though I opposed the Iraq war, which they also opposed. And it's my attitude towards sex, drugs and rock and roll which causes them to do so.

Whereas what passes for the conservative movement in the USA (and to some extent here) is actually much more comfortable with my brother (thanks to his enthusiastic anti-Islamism, the badge of membership of the neo-conservative movement) than it is with me, with my inconvenient insistence on domestic conservatism which they find difficult and unattractive, and my preference for actual liberty over illusory security. My opposition to mass immigration (which some of my sillier critics like to pretend I never voice) also has something to do with this.

This is most educational, and it was pondering upon it which caused me to write 'The Cameron Delusion', where these paradoxes are addressed.

I'd also say that my brother gives more or less the same speech at all these debates, whoever his opponent is. I've joked for years that there was a major problem with the sound system at our clash in Grand Rapids, which meant that the speakers could not hear what the other one was saying properly (at one point I sat on the edge of the stage trying to catch what he was saying, and it was still so difficult to hear that I pondered going to sit in the audience. I probably should have done, and stayed there). While this bothered me quite a lot, it didn't trouble him, since he would have said pretty much the same thing whatever I said, and his assembled fan club (mystified by their very recent discovery of my very existence, and none too pleased by that discovery) would have whooped with joy over it.

Like many jokes, this is founded in truth. If I hear that thing about North Korea and the Celestial Dictatorship one more time, or the one about 'Created sick and commanded to be well', my eyelashes will start to ache. One of the pleasures of our recent non-debate, rightly described as a 'conversation', in Washington DC was that neither of us was performing, and so there were one or two genuine exchanges.

So I doubt if I'll get around to listening to the whole thing. And the reason I place the word 'debate' in inverted commas is that, like many others, I wondered - when I heard about the event - who was going to be on the other side.

By the way, a few words about the votes on these occasions, under which one side or the other is said to have 'won' - often because of a large switch of votes during the evening. I am suspicious, even when I win by these rules. Very few people come to such debates with an open mind or anxious to hear the other side. The system of taking a preliminary vote (in which the voters know that they will be polled again at the end) is an invitation to the mischievous and partisan to give a false or misleading vote the first time, and follow their real inclinations at the end - thus giving a false and misleading impression of the debating powers of those involved. This is so obvious, and such an obvious trick to play, that I am amazed nobody else ever seems to even ponder it, and that such votes are taken at face value.

I'm told by someone who was present at my brother's (and Stephen Fry's) attack on the RC Church in Central Hall Westminster that the size of the pro-RC vote at the beginning was absurdly out of tune with the whole mood of the audience. Of course that 'vote' had collapsed at the end.

This is no surprise. The debate-going classes in central London are far more likely to be urban secular liberals than suburban Christians, for a thousand obvious reasons.

Drink versus Cannabis - again

Mr Steve Tracey accuses me of 'playing fast and loose with the statistics'. He adds: 'It may be true that more people had taken cannabis than other "hard" drugs, but that does not mean causality. I'm sure that a far higher percentage of the recently convicted had consumed alcohol or a cola type drink in the in the four weeks prior to their crime, this does not mean that it was the cause.'

Well, I object to that because I rather feel I had detected the Injustice Ministry playing fast and loose. And when I compared the Green Paper with the Ministry's own 'compendium on reoffending' I also found the following interestingly conflicting statements. The Green Paper observes that '44 per cent of offenders assessed in 2008 had problems with alcohol misuse which may have required treatment.'

The compendium, by contrast, says when discussing the recently imprisoned that: 'Alcohol was also a problem, but was far less widespread than drugs, with only a minority of the sample likely to be problematic alcohol users.

I've no doubt that the laxity of the licensing laws leads to more crime, and support (to the rage and derision of some 'libertarian' contributors here ) the reimposition of the 1915 licensing laws which seemed to me to work pretty well, and whose abolition has been followed by, if not wholly responsible for, the recent explosion of drunkenness on British streets.

But I've never seen why the undoubted dangers of alcohol are an argument for permitting any more intoxicating poisons. If alcohol's bad, that's surely an argument for restricting its sale as far as possible, not for legalising dope.

I'm also accused of wanting to throw all current cannabis users into prison. Those who claim this are either stupid or disingenuous. Leave aside that I have repeatedly said here that I favour a system of: First conviction - Warning that subsequent use will lead to immediate imprisonment. Second conviction - Immediate imprisonment (briefly, but under harsh and austere conditions). Third conviction - immediate imprisonment (same conditions, longer period). Etc.

A few months of this policy, effectively applied, and the use of cannabis would drop very sharply, I think. The number of people in prison for this offence would inevitably rise during the initial months, but, once it became clear that the law meant what it said, would rapidly reduce. Lawbreaking is almost invariably a rational calculation of odds, costs and benefits. Most lawbreakers are highly rational, as is demonstrated by their excellent knowledge of their legal rights on arrest.

If I am right, many other crimes would also reduce in number, once drugtaking, with its generally demoralising effects, began to decline. A fascinating paper produced by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), 'Soma, the Wootton Report and Cannabis law reform in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s', demonstrates that the use of this dangerous drug was a minor problem before the successful campaign to semi-legalise it mounted by a rich and powerful lobby (read the paper) in the late 1960s.

Now for the point about causality. I don't think even Mr Tracey contests that large numbers of lawbreakers are also abusers of illegal drugs. They may also be drinkers of cola, as he facetiously says, imagining he is clever but in fact walking straight into a Heffalump Trap of his own devising.

The fact that they are both does not mean either a) that the two things have equal effects on them (though in the case of alcohol an argument can be made, and of course many mix alcohol and cannabis) or b) that the fact that cola-drinking has nothing to do with their criminality means that cannabis use is equally irrelevant.

Why should the use of cannabis promote criminality? One, the use of such drugs is itself an immoral and selfish act, the seeking of euphoria which is undeserved by work, human love or achievement. This attempt to break the link between reward and effort is a step down the pathway to dishonesty and theft (which is permitted by the same fundamental belief - that a person has a 'right' to things for which he has not worked). Combine that with some of the effects of cannabis use, which renders its users less fit for work than others (and, I might add, less fit for work than they believe themselves to be) and you then have a baleful combination of circumstances. A self-stupefying, selfish transgressor, who has dispensed with one of the most essential moral rules of any advanced civilisation, who desires things he cannot afford and is not capable of working for the money to pay for them, nor does he believe he is required to. Bravo! What do you think might happen next?

On Parasites

My glancing blow at student demonstrators as 'parasites' has excited some harsh and angry reactions. I don't really see why. If you are not paying for your own keep, either by current work or savings from past labour, a parasite is what you are - and you ought to be aware of it and guide your actions by that knowledge.

Yes, I was a teenage parasite myself, indeed I was a parasite until I began regular paid work in September 1973. Should I, as suggested, pay back the college and university grant and fees money provided for me by postmen, coalminers, school dinner ladies and others, out of their taxes all those years ago?

Well, I am in favour of restitution where possible. Some years ago I shamefacedly returned the cutlery I had dishonestly 'borrowed' from various York University dining halls 30 years before. By putting it back I turned my initial lie into a sort of truth, but I think the lapse of time was pretty indefensible. I have one or two other outstanding debts which I have not yet found a way of paying, and some which, alas, I shall never be able to pay in this life. But I believe I have paid so much tax since I began work that I have more than covered the cost of my youthful parasitism. The essential thing is to understand that this is what it was - and still is. I was not entitled to what I was given, and I would have been a better person - and less sure of my own righteousness- if I had realised that. I hope others will make the same discovery earlier than I made it.

So what is a liberal, exactly?

Mr Powlesland complains: 'For someone who consistently (and justifiably) complains of others misrepresenting and fabricating his views, I would submit that your simplified and stereotyped views of what "liberals" believe are the height of hypocrisy. If you do not like others ascribing opinions to you that you do not have, or misrepresenting your opinions, why do you feel it is acceptable to do the same for millions of liberals? For my own part, I consider myself a liberal and disagree with some of the views you ascribe to me.'

I think there is a sharp distinction here between ascribing views to a political and cultural tendency, and ascribing them to an individual.

Mr Powlesland also isn't very good at distinguishing his views from those I describe. For example, he cites one of my summaries of liberal opinion: ' "Q. Why can't we simply build more prisons?
"A. Liberal answer: Because prisons are horrid, crime is caused not by human wickedness but by deprivation, and we don't like being responsible for such a harsh system."
'Actually, I (Mr Powlesland) believe that when we are apparently so poor that we cannot afford to educate our young people, spending billions of pounds on new prisons is not a spending priority.'
This is just shifting the question about. Priorities in spending are at the heart of real politics, and are decided by moral, social and cultural views. A person who believes a) that greater education spending means better education and b) that enforcing the law might not be as important as educating the young (for who then will protect all these educated people from violence and theft?) is making political statements. He is just making them in a cryptic way, rather less honest than I find desirable. Does Mr Powlesland truly maintain that views such as the ones I set out haven't influenced him towards his chosen spending priorities?

But there is a question here about the definition of 'liberal' which is undoubtedly troubling. It is made worse by the fact that no existing political party openly and clearly stands for election on the programme of social, moral and cultural liberalism which it actually follows. So we have to deduce their positions from their actions. What I describe as 'liberal' positions are those which seem to me to have been followed by various governments of supposedly differing parties for many years (see my book 'The Abolition of Liberty'). Note, by the way, my inclusion of Michael Howard's vacuous 'Prison Works' slogan as a liberal position. When tested, it turned out to mean that prison 'worked' solely by keeping criminals off the streets while they were inside - but not as a systematic means of imposing punishment aimed at altering future behaviour, or as a deterrent to those criminally inclined but rationally influenced into good behaviour by the realistic fear of effective retribution.

I note that a lazy Internet critic has claimed that I take the view that 'Prison works', when in fact I say the opposite. How typical of my critics, who can only sustain their assaults on my arguments by directly misrepresenting what I actually say. Which is not what I have done to Mr Powlesland.

Matthew 'Twister' Parris - latest developments

Some of you may have been disappointed that I was unable to continue my pursuit of Matthew 'Twister' Parris in my most recent column, because I devoted the whole page to one subject. So here is the latest news. Interested by what I had said, the London 'Evening Standard' approached me and Mr Parris, to ask if we would write our own accounts of the dispute, in which I maintain that Mr Parris twisted my opinions in a speech to a large London audience.

I said 'Yes'. Mr Parris said 'No'.

I think this tells us quite a lot.

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Never mind rioting yobs. The real enemy will soon be roaming your street, giggling and blank-eyed ...set free by this bumptious idiot of a Tory

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The parasites and bawling wreckers who invaded London on Thursday did David Cameron a favour. They helped to draw our eyes and minds away from a much more frightening event.

This was the Government's surrender to lawlessness and disorder, bumptiously trumpeted by Kenneth Clarke last week.

The Prime Minister was very worried about this announcement, which was delayed several times because of his fretting. He was not concerned because he disagreed with it, for he is wholly in tune with Mr Clarke. He was nervous in case Tory voters finally grasped what sort of Government this is. But the poor dears sleep on, still fooled.

Luckily for Mr Cameron and for Mr Clarke, sympathetic media and a series of other events swiftly buried Mr Clarke's Green Paper.

When its effects are felt over the coming years, few will realise that their intolerable, besieged, vandalised lives, their smashed front doors and violated homes, their drug-ruined children, their distraught and bloodied family members weeping powerlessly for justice and not getting it, are the direct consequences of Mr Cameron and his deliberate decision to stop even trying to protect the public.

This year this country reached a moment of decision. It has been coming for some years. The amount of crime and disorder, caused mainly by the deliberate destruction of the married family and the abolition of fatherhood, is now enormous. Up
till now, it has mainly affected the poor, though I am not sure this will continue to be the case.

Past governments have tried to cope with this in many ways. Recently they have sought to pretend it isn't happening by fiddling the figures. But this cannot conceal the fact that the prisons are getting fuller and fuller of bad people, even in spite of letting as many of them out as quickly as possible.

Mr Clarke's solution is to stop sending large numbers of bad people to prison at all, and to use so-called community punishments instead, even though their feeble uselessness is proven by a recent report from Policy Exchange. Currently such punishments often go uncompleted, and frequently involve such stern retribution as working in charity shops.

The reoffending rate is appalling.

Here I'll try to set out what is really going on, and what it means. I've given two answers to each question – the liberal elite view, and the truth.

Q Why do we imprison more people per head than any other Western European country?

A Liberal answer: Because we are too tough.

True answer: Because we have far more crimes per head than our neighbours.

Q Why can't we simply build more prisons?

A Liberal answer: Because prisons are horrid, crime is caused not by human wickedness but by deprivation, and we don't like being responsible for such a harsh system.

True answer: We have built more prisons. But we don't use them properly (see below) and the criminally-inclined are not frightened of them. So the criminally-inclined become actual criminals. And we cannot build them fast enough to house the growing criminal underclass our policies have created.

Q Many claim that 'prison works'. Does it?

A Liberal answer number one: Yes, but only by keeping criminals off the streets till they offend again, which isn't much use. Liberal answer number two: No, huge numbers of prisoners reoffend after serving time. So prison makes them worse.

True answer: Prisons are purposeless warehouses, where criminals are corralled for a short while with other people like them. The nastier they are, the more they are left alone by increasingly powerless staff. They are given taxpayer-funded drugs, or a blind eye is turned to illegal drug-taking. They are seldom made to work and – as we saw with the case of the gangster Colin Gunn, who has forced officers to call him 'Mister' – they are treated with absurd generosity.

With the exception of those who commit a few specially heinous crimes, most criminals do not get sent to prison until they are already habitual law-breakers, with a long line of cautions, unpaid fines and suspended sentences behind them. Then when they arrive in prison they are given drugs, TVs and pool tables. No wonder they reoffend.

Q Why have we failed to reduce the drug-taking which leads to so much crime?

A Liberal answer: We have not tried hard enough to treat this sickness, and must devote more resources to reducing the harm of drugs and to providing treatment for these poor unfortunates.

True answer: If the possession of illegal drugs is not treated as a crime, it will increase. After the Wootton Report of 1969, we began to give up punishing -possession of the most serious and common illegal drug, the slickly marketed mental poison cannabis. Its use has increased incessantly since 1973, when the Tory Government gave in to the wealthy, powerful cannabis lobby, largely funded by rock stars. Penalties were sharply reduced and

Lord Hailsham told magistrates to stop imprisoning people for possessing it.

The lie, that it is a 'soft' and harmless drug, is still widely accepted in the establishment. Last year, most people caught in possession of this substance were let off with a meaningless warning, despite its recent ¬restoration to Class 'B'.

In a disgraceful act of concealment – which amounts in my view to dishonesty – Mr Clarke's Green Paper hides the fact that cannabis is the criminal's drug of choice. In paragraph 18, it says: 'A significant proportion of crime is committed by offenders who have multiple problems. Evidence tells us that: 64 per cent of newly sentenced prisoners report using a drug during the four-week period before custody (30 per cent heroin, 28 per cent crack cocaine).'

I went to the source of these figures. It states that 46 per cent of these newly sentenced prisoners, far more than had used heroin or crack, had used cannabis. When I asked the Ministry of Injustice to explain why they had left this out of the list, they pathetically claimed there was no room for the information.

We get a lot of talk from politicians about how they are against 'appeasement'. They were against the 'appeasement' of Saddam Hussein, and look where that got us. They are against the 'appeasement' of the Afghan Taliban, and the coffins keep on coming home to prove how tough they are, and Headley Court is always busy. Lots of them say they are against the 'appeasement' of Iran and North Korea, and I tremble to think where this fake toughness will get us.

But in the real confrontation on our own streets, where the slouching, blank-eyed, grinning enemy lurks and giggles, his mind scorched by drugs and his moral sense shrivelled to the size of a lentil by our sad and violent culture and our useless schools, appeasement is the path our leaders have chosen – appeasement of drugs, appeasement of the crime they cause, appeasement of criminals themselves. We all know that eventually the appeaser is destroyed by the very menace he seeks to buy off, but many others have to be ruined first.

A High Standard of Debate?

A very brief reflection here on a couple of contributions to Friday's House of Commons debate on Berlin Time, the official record of which can be viewed on the Parliament website.

As I said in my MoS column, the arguments in favour of this pernicious Bill depend very heavily on assuming the truth of various projections about (for example) tourism which are wholly speculative, and on a bizarre and mistaken belief that road deaths fell during the last period of 'Darker Later' tyranny when in fact they rose. Note here the limits of my argument: I don't know why deaths rose, or if they would have risen more or less under different circumstances, or even fallen - though several major changes in road conditions and traffic laws were beginning to be felt around this time. What I do know is that they did in fact rise, and that therefore, whatever the reason for this rise, it is impossible to claim that they fell, or to speculate on why they fell.

The Minister, Ed Davey, made in many ways the best speech of the debate, which acknowledged many of the facts and arguments deployed against the Bill by the Mail on Sunday. I am still unclear if the government will now quietly adopt a version of the idea, which I am absolutely sure has not gone away. I shall be looking into this.

But I would like to record two (Tory) contributions. One is from a Mr Ben Gummer, whom I think I once met while speaking to an undergraduate society in Cambridge (he made a strongly pro-EU point in response to what I said, in summarising my book 'The Abolition of Britain') but have not since encountered. I gather he attained a very good degree and has written a book on the Black Death, so he is obviously not a fool. He is the son of the notable Tory Europhile and social liberal John Gummer, a very clever politician (with an equally clever brother in the shape of Lord Chadlington) let down in this febrile, lookist age by his overgrown schoolboy appearance and by his perfectly reasonable decision to let his daughter eat an unpalatable but risk-free hamburger in front of photographers, in a justified attempt to stem the ludicrous BSE panic.

The other is from Mr Tobias Ellwood, someone for whom I would normally have some time, given his upbringing abroad and his army service - both likely to broaden the mind and strengthen the character - and his personal courage recently demonstrated when he confronted a group of louts in the street (and was quite severely beaten for his pains).

Note that, despite what I am about to reproduce, I have taken the trouble to find out a little about these people, and to stress their abilities and achievements.

Contrast that with what follows, two abstracts from Hansard, the official record of the debate:

Ben Gummer: 'May I put to him an argument that has not been put so far? The unofficial opposition to the Bill appears to have been mobilised by Mr Peter Hitchens. Is that not the clincher in favour of a successful passage for the Bill, or does the Hon. Gentleman wish to find himself in alliance with Mr Hitchens?'

And a little later.

Tobias Ellwood: 'But let us get back to Peter Hitchens. [Laughter.] He is one of the few voices that are against the daylight saving, but I believe that he now acts as a drag anchor against that great British newspaper the Sunday Mail- [Interruption.]-I am sorry; The Mail on Sunday. He is anti-change; he is anti-technology, so the idea of moving the clocks abhors him. That is slightly odd. Because he does not like inventions and technology, one would have thought that using the light bulb less might appeal to him, but he does not put that argument forward. He would rather put forward a wartime rhetoric with references to Berlin time to foster prejudice against the Bill.

' "Why Berlin time?" it has been asked. "Why not Gibraltar time, Madrid time, Paris time or Rome time?" Clearly, those descriptions would not conjure up the same worrying image as the UK crumbling to the mighty powers of Berlin after the sacrifices that we made in two world wars. I say to him, "Peter, you are potty. Clearly, you are a very, very angry man and stuck in the past. You are a cross between Alf Garnett and Victor Meldrew but without the jokes." He is a restless regressive: the King Canute of politics, fighting the tide of change. He will never lose sight of the past because he has chosen to walk backwards into the future. This is nothing to do with Berlin or wartime images.'

I can't say this with certainty of Mr Gummer, since he makes no reference to me other than to jeer. But I am quite sure that Mr Ellwood has not read what I have written about this, or that if he has he has not understood it. If his research on me and my opinions is an indication of the level of his research on the issue of changing the clocks, I think we can safely discount what he says. Meanwhile I challenge him (and Mr Gummer) to a public debate, preferably in front of his Constituency Association, on this subject.

By the way, this morning's 'Guardian' also contains another instance of the automatic assumption in the establishment that 'Right Wing' commentators are axiomatically stupid, wrong and ill-informed. Ms Decca Aitkenhead has interviewed Professor David Nutt. She was not that impressed with him or his case, and some of the druggie posters here will not like what she said about his much-touted report. She wrote: 'Last month Nutt's new foundation published its first major report in the Lancet, which ranked 20 different drugs according to 16 different harms they do, both to users and to wider society. Alcohol came top, higher than heroin, crack and crystal meth, while ecstasy and LSD were ranked among the least damaging. It was, undeniably, the most comprehensive study of their respective risks ever conducted – and as someone who has enjoyed certain recreational drugs far more than I've ever liked alcohol, it would suit me very well to welcome its findings. But its shortcomings seemed pretty glaringly obvious, even to someone as unscientifically minded as me.

'The rankings did not allow for the drugs' current legal status – and therefore availability – and so as Nutt himself has acknowledged: "Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used." But by that token, I suggest, one could say that drinking tea is more dangerous than climbing Mount Everest. Just because lots of people have been scalded by a popular drink, this tells us little about the risks of a minority sport such as mountaineering. If we're trying to establish the objective danger of a specific substance, in order to formulate policy, surely we can only calculate its harm in the context of its prevalence?'

But at least she tried to ascertain what the Professor thought and what he knew. Not in my case. No need. I am dismissed thus: 'He [Professor Nutt] is also very good at exposing the confusion of much political thinking on drugs, as well as the baseless alarmism of media commentators like Peter Hitchens, who don't want facts to get in the way of prejudice.'

So that's all right then. All that work I did on the facts of criminal sanctions for cannabis possession, not to mention all Robin Murray's work on cannabis and mental health - on which I base my justified alarm - doesn't exist. Half the problem conservatives have is simply getting anyone to pay attention to what they actually say. And when those who refuse to pay attention include Tory MPs, I think it safe to say that my contention that the Tory Party is part of the liberal establishment is pretty much proven. Though of course 'HM', that steadfast and unshakeable believer in BBC neutrality (even when the organisation's own senior figures own up to it), will presumably continue to insist that I am imagining this treatment, and 'Bert' will presumably argue that none of it has any significance to anyone but me, and that I am merely 'thin-skinned', and unable to cope with personal slights. Good Lord, if that were so, I should have gone home in tears long ago.

As it happens, I rather enjoyed being personally attacked in the Commons, which I fear is as close as I shall ever get to taking part in a debate there - something I once longed to be entitled to do. But I didn't let my pleasure cloud my concern about the argument.

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