Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 342

The Kalashnikov Paradox

The sight of a steam train storming through the snow in Yorkshire's North Riding didn't just fill me with a warm glow of memory. It evoked a thought (below) and a particular recollection, of something I am fairly sure that I saw aged four, namely the last run of the old Princetown railway, on a wintry March Saturday in 1956.
Can the engine have been blue as it went sadly through the hamlet of Dousland where we then lived, on its last journey? I don't think so, in fact all experience suggests a sooty black was more likely - but memory, that lying jade, insists it was blue. The line (much of my childhood seems to have been spent near or riding on now-defunct railway lines) ran up from Yelverton to the top of Dartmoor and was the only link between Dartmoor Prison and the outside world if the snow came down hard and the roads became impassable - though in one really bad blizzard it had once been closed. My father pointed out, as we watched the final train chuff by, that one day they'd wish they'd kept it open. Though of course helicopters can always make the journey in an emergency, so perhaps they haven't. I don't suppose my father, born before 1914, had completely adapted to the idea of helicopters by 1956.

I now learn that heavy old filthy old steam locomotives can easily conquer snowy conditions, whereas modern electric and diesel engines, being too light and too dependent on sensitive computers which don't like the cold, will shut down.

This comes as no surprise. Steam will work when almost everything else doesn't. When I lived in Moscow, I visited a vast park full of enormous black steam engines, each with a red star painted on its smokebox, waiting to be recalled to service when the great day came. The park's existence had until recently been a secret. The thinking behind this was fascinating. All motorised transport, and even aircraft, would be knocked out by the Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) from nuclear weapons. The only machines which would continue to function were steam engines and bicycles. So the Soviet Army had maintained a reserve of steam engines, ready to roll westwards in case there was no other way of invading Germany. This would have run into trouble in Poland, the only non-Russian country which in those days had lines built to the wider Russian gauge. But I suppose the construction battalions could have done a high-speed widening job on Western tracks if necessary.

But maybe they just kept them anyway, in case of something turning up. Most people know the old joke about the US space programme spending millions of dollars developing a ballpoint pen that would write in orbit, in weightless conditions - whereas the Soviet solution was to give their cosmonauts pencils. I don't know if it's true, but it expresses a truth.

Most Soviet equipment was extremely crude. But it was also easy to mass produce, wasn't made to tiny tolerances, didn't depend on high levels of maintenance, or on temperate and dry conditions. That's why, if a conventional Third World War had ever been held, the USSR would probably have won. NATO planes would have been grounded by drizzle. Soviet MiGs would have flown in all weathers in huge numbers. NATO tanks, with their superb fire control, would have suffered ceaseless computer glitches. Soviet tanks, crude and simple, would have lumbered on regardless and kept shooting. Etc etc.

And of course the Kalashnikov AK-47 weapon would have carried on firing when everything else had jammed. The AK-47 is the absolute proof of the contention that simple, crude, reliable devices are often more use than over-engineered, needlessly complex ones. American soldiers have been known to throw their own M16 weapons away and to swap them for Kalashnikovs, and it is easy to see why. Does this have any implications for the way in which we design and build such things as railways, now?

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

The eternal Coalition: Perfect for politicians, lousy for the rest of us

This is Peter Hitchen's Mail on Sunday column

The monstrous birth of a new Liberal Conser¬vative Party is now certain. One of its midwives is Sir John Major of Maastricht and Black Friday.

A few weeks ago I drew attention to the amazing remarks of Francis Maude, a close ally of David Cameron, who said he would prefer a coalition to a Tory majority after the next Election. I am sure Mr Cameron agrees with this. Now, Sir John – another close Cameron ally – has called for a permanent alliance of two of our three parties against the people of Britain.

Not that he put it quite like that. In a little-noticed but important speech in Cambridge, he said that he liked the Coalition and hoped some way could be found 'to prolong co-operation beyond this Parliament'. This, he said, could lead to a realignment of British politics.

He recalled that the Tories had an informal pact with the Liberals in 1951, which probably saved that party from oblivion. He didn't say – but most Liberals know – that they will need something similar to save them from massacre at the next Election.

This is revolutionary stuff. And I am grateful to Mr Major, whose strange, mealy, roundabout way of speaking often reveals more than he means it to. Because he also explained the attraction of coalitions – to politicians: 'Two parties are more likely to enjoy a tolerant electorate for policies that are painful.'

Or, in other words, that a coalition can ram through unpopular policies (Mr Major is an expert on those) more easily than one-party governments.

This is, of course, even more the case when the third party actually agrees with the Coalition about almost everything, and is still trying to work out how to pretend to be the Opposition, when it doesn't really want to oppose.

What a perfect outcome for the political class – two liberal parties in permanent power, pro-EU, pro-crime, anti-education, anti-marriage, warmist. And an Opposition that doesn't oppose. A pity about the rest of us.

Taken for another ride by the warmists

Aaaaah! Look at this lovely picture of a polar bear cub riding on its mother's back. It appeared in a number of papers this week with stories – inspired by the lobbying group WWF – suggesting that this was a new development, caused by global warming.

This is propaganda garbage, just like the piffle talked about another famous picture of polar bears perched on a melting ice floe. That was taken in August, when ice in Alaska always melts. Land was close by. Polar bears can swim for hundreds of miles if they want to.

The piggyback picture is just as misleading. It isn't remotely new. I have established that it was taken by the charming Mrs Angela Plumb on a holiday in Spitsbergen more than four years ago, on July 21, 2006.

It then formed the basis of a scientific paper written by the equally charming Jon Aars, a Norwegian polar bear expert. I have read this paper. It speculates that the cubs may ride on their mothers' backs to avoid the cold water, as they don't have the thick layer of blubber that allows adult bears to swim in icy temperatures for hours.

But there's no proof of this, as polar bears can't speak English or Norwegian so cannot tell us why they do what they do. The paper accepts that bear cubs may always have done this.
Jon Aars himself said to me that polar bear cubs have ridden on their mothers' backs for ages. 'What we do not know is whether or not it is happening more frequently than it used to,' he says.

So we don't know. Once again the almost invariable rule applies. If any picture is produced to support the warmist panic, it will turn out to be suspect. Oh, and by the way, how much use have all those stupid windmills been during the cold snap?


Jail – there to help the poor old crooks

I went to prison again on Monday, for a debate sponsored by BBC2's Newsnight about crime and punishment.

It was unintentionally revealing. Our Left-wing Establishment believes crime is a sickness to be treated, rather than a deliberate act that needs to be punished.

Prisoners are even given heroin substitutes at our expense, because of the myth – swallowed by the Injustice Secretary, Ken Clarke – that immediate withdrawal from heroin is dangerous. It is generally just unpleasant – and so it ought to be. Nobody needs to poke this filth into his body.

In a kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome, prison governors and Ministers begin to identify with their captives. They entirely forget that those captives are in prison because they have done serious damage to innocent people.

Listen to this astonishing statement from the governor of High Down Prison, Peter Dawson: 'The thing I want to say first about sending someone to prison is that it always does harm to the person in prison. My job is to mitigate the harm done to the person who is sent to prison and those that care for them on the outside.'

And this is where your taxes are going. It is sometimes hard to decide who commits the greater crime – the thief and the lout, or the politicians and civil servants who fail to punish and deter them.


Metric snow, and its pathetic result

The intensifying campaign to force the foreign, unwieldy metric system on the British people continues apace.

Broadcasters and newspapers have virtually abolished the yard (still lawfully used on thousands of road signs) and the foot. But their most determined campaign is against the inch.

Why do the weather people insist on telling us that 10cm of snow have fallen? Partly, they do it because they are fanatics. Partly because it sounds much worse than 4in. A country halted by 4in of snow sounds – and is – rather pathetic.

 

While reading John Major's Cambridge oration, I discovered an amazing fact about him. He writes poems, which he promises eventually to give to the Churchill College archive which houses the rest of his papers. I can't wait. If only we had known this when he was in Downing Street. Still, he's lucky. Quite a lot of things rhyme with 'Edwina' and with 'Currie', and also with 'Redwood' – though 'Bastards', 'Portillo' and 'Maastricht' are tougher.

 

Time myths tick on

Watching the Commons debate on the Berlin Time Bill – in which my name was frequently taken in vain – I was struck by two things.

One was the way in which this plan's advocates present guesswork as fact – and ignore actual fact.

And the other is the way they largely get away with it, as few non-Scottish MPs bothered to do any serious research into the matter. The scheme is a potential disaster. Let us hope it is now quietly strangled.

A message to Matthew Parris, the Left-wing Cameron supporter and anti-Christian who recently spread a gravely inaccurate version of what I had said in a radio debate: I'll stop telling the truth about him if he apologises for misrepresenting me. And I recommend he pauses for thought on this matter.

In Prison Again

I spent Monday afternoon in one of Her Majesty's Prisons, and Monday evening at Eton College, travelling between these two institutions in the front seat of a Bentley (provided by the BBC as an emergency back-up after the Ford minicab they'd booked failed to turn up. I feel for the Corporation executive who got the minicab instead when he was expecting the Bentley). Thus I experienced yet again the wonderful truth that a journalist's life is the most interesting and varied that anyone can possibly hope for. Normally, by the way, I don't use BBC cars, but High Down Prison to Eton is not possible by public transport unless you have most of the day to do it.

It was the BBC who put me in prison - specifically the Newsnight programme, which wanted to hold a discussion on crime and punishment inside a gaol. This event was transmitted on Tuesday evening and can be found on the BBC i-player here.

I played, in the end, a rather minor role in the discussion, which was dominated by the self-serving reflections of convicted prisoners (who have never done anyone any harm, in their view) and a jolly interview (by Jeremy Paxman) with the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, in which he made it plain that he hasn't a clue what to do about our justice system, and is resorting as usual to gimmicks and to ways of keeping more and more serious and violent convicted criminals out of prison. Mr Clarke also revealed that he has swallowed whole the 'French Connection' myth about the supposed physical dangers of ceasing to take heroin.

As is so often the case, I had to push my way into the discussion, and my contribution therefore has a completely different character from that of the conventional contributors who were politely invited in. I began by assuming that I would be invited to take part myself, since the BBC had gone to some lengths to persuade me to be there at all (I voiced doubts about whether it would be worth my while). But it seemed increasingly clear that this was unlikely to happen unless I seized my chance, as I did. No doubt some contributors here will chide me for my 'aggressive' approach. I have, however, discussed this problem in previous posts and mention this episode as more evidence of the problem that unconventional and non-mainstream opinions have with the BBC.

By the way, the think tank Policy Exchange has recently published a devastating report on the supposed 'alternative' to prison, community sentences (reachable here), which anyone interested in this subject should read. Did you know that many convicted criminals end up paying their debt to society by working in charity shops?

That'll show them.

In fact it will show them what many have already begun to suspect much earlier in their career of crime - that the state does not disapprove of what they have done and is not prepared to take any resolute action against them.

Let us take two statements made by persons in the 'Newsnight' discussion, both of which are particularly striking.

'I stole from a shop, which I find is the only crime I can achieve money that I need without affecting anybody in the community.' The same prisoner (now being given methadone at your expense during his short stay in prison) complained that after a previous sentence he had been unable to get his methadone supply outside on release because of bureaucratic delay, and he had been advised (by whom was not clear) to go out and buy some heroin while he waited.

Is this person being punished or in any way deterred from the drug-taking that makes him more likely to be a criminal, or from the criminal behaviour which he thinks is justified whenever he needs money?

Well, it would seem not by the prison governor, Peter Dawson (with whom I later had a slight off-air disagreement). Mr Dawson took this opportunity to make the following extraordinary statement: 'The thing I want to say first about sending someone to prison is that it always does harm to the person in prison. My job is to mitigate the harm done to the person who is sent to prison and those that care for them on the outside.'

One other thing in the debate that the uninitiated might be confused by is the statement by the female governor of next door Down View prison that all her prisoners work. What is not clear from this intervention (though it is the case) is that Down View is a prison solely for women, who are generally in prison because their lives are hopelessly broken (often by drugs) rather than because they are violent and dangerous to others. It is of course much easier to find work in outside establishments for women prisoners.

But - to avoid going into too deep a discussion of a subject already discussed here when I republished my article on Wormwood Scrubs, one point which emerges from all this is that professionals in the prison system develop a sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome, identifying with their captives, and allowing their misdeeds to recede into a fog of amnesia. I think this is one of the causes of the system's grave failure.

It is startling that the prison system is the one state institution whose senior employees seem free to make strong public criticisms of that system, and a permanent flow of condemnatory reports from Her Majesty's Inspectors, none of which ever addresses the possibility that prisons are full and nasty because they are not punitive or under the full control of the authorities.

Oh, as for Eton, I talked to a small but interested and thoughtful group of people about the Churchill myth and its effects on British foreign policy from the 'Finest Hour' to the 'Dodgy Dossier'.

Going to prisons always lowers my spirits, because of the triumphant evil that emanates from them, and the horrid thought that any innocent and harmless person may be alone and friendless in such a pit. The warders, by contrast with the bureaucrats and the politicians, are generally men and women of sound common sense, but severely limited in what they can do.

Visiting the great public schools always fills me with frustration, because of the way in which we have ensured that a really good education is now a privilege of the rich. Try as these places may, they cannot through bursaries or scholarships replace the lost grammar schools or the destroyed direct grant system.

But nobody would gain, and the country would lose, if these great schools were abolished or brought low, as many on the left would like to happen.

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

In passing...

... as I have rather too many obligations today to do the sort of posting I'd like to, a few comments on various arguments going on on several threads.

Some dogged oppositionists here seem to disagree with me whatever I say. I suspect that one of these is Harold Stone, who jeers at me for allegedly having 'been on holiday in Scotland' as a child. Actually, I lived in Scotland as a child, to be precise in Somerville Road, Rosyth, then (and possibly still now) Royal Navy married quarters. As I have often said, many of my earliest memories are of Scottish landscape and of Scottish voices, I still remember how sad I was to leave, and I have never been able to share or particularly understand the silly hostility that some English people have for Scotland and the Scots.

Likewise, every time I have visited either part of Ireland I have felt myself among friends and among a people who have done much to make our culture and civilisation as great as they are. Our language would, especially, be much poorer without the Irish (and Welsh) contributions to literature. Our Christianity would not be anything like so deep-rooted without the Irish contribution to it. Of course we are all different. But a great deal unites us, and I am tired of all those petty nationalisms which would Balkanise us ready for dissolution into the EU soup. I've seen shamefully little of Wales, but think that's a failing in someone who is generally well-travelled both in this country and elsewhere. I intend to put it right when I've time.

Various people, prominent among them the person who pretentiously posts under a long Greek name, wilfully misunderstand my dispute with Matthew Parris, imagining that I am distressed because Mr Parris has said something rude about me. They say I have a 'thin skin', as if this were personal and to do with abuse or name-calling. Mr Parris did in fact make a cheap jibe against me, as I recorded, but I haven't asked him to retract that or apologise for it. It is of no importance, though I suspect Mr Parris is faintly ashamed of it anyway.

I believe that he has, on the other hand, offended against the truth by giving a deeply misleading account of what I said to him, to a large audience - and failing to make any gesture of retraction or repentance despite many chances to do so and an open invitation to come here and explain himself.

Before the mists of time close over this episode, let me set out…

What I said...

Mr Parris launches into his equation of racial bigotry with Christian sexual morality.

I respond. 'It's a false comparison.

'Racial bigotry is irrational, stupid and indefensible. It is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. There is no difference between people of different skin colours apart from their colour.'

At this point Mr Parris interrupts, rather bizarrely.

'That is what you say, Peter.'

To which I retort:

'You don't think that? I think so.'

Mr Stourton intervenes to prevent Mr Parris interrupting further, and I continue:

'I am completely opposed to racial bigotry precisely because it is irrational and stupid. The argument about homosexuality is a tiny side-issue of the major point - which is, "is lifelong heterosexual marriage the only sexual relationship which society is prepared to endorse, or not? Which used to be the case, and is now not the case."

'That is a different argument and involves the application of reason and a number of other things. It is not to be compared to racial bigotry by any serious and thoughtful person - and to do so is simply a smear.'

At this point the discussion is brought to a brisk end by Mr Stourton, against my pleas for more time.

What Mr Parris said I said

'Among his [Peter Hitchens's] arguments, I recall, was the assertion that discriminating against gays is OK because it is an objective fact that gay relationships are inferior, whereas discrimination against Blacks or Jews is not OK because it is an objective fact that this is sheer prejudice.'

The full details of this are still available in a posting placed on this site on 4th November.

But when I posted those, I left it to readers to conclude that the difference between the two versions was serious and disturbing.

I now feel compelled to explain why, since it has obviously gone past at least some of them, and maybe Mr Parris himself.

First of all, I was arguing about marriage versus non-marriage, not about homosexuality. Mr Parris wished to argue about homosexuality and so, as far as I could see, did the BBC presenter involved. As to why this might have been, readers are welcome to speculate. I regard this as a side issue and a dead end in this discussion, and resolved some time ago not to be lured into it any further, unless it was absolutely necessary.

Note that I do not refer directly to homosexuals in the discussion at all. I refer to the status of lifelong heterosexual marriage. Nor do I say anything about 'inferiority'. I speak of society's endorsement. And I say that a rational argument can be had about whether society should give this endorsement only to lifelong heterosexual marriage.

If there are implications of 'inferiority', then they are primarily directed at heterosexuals who either don't get married or choose to dissolve their marriages in divorce or by desertion. These are immensely more numerous, and important in their effect, than homosexuals.

Now, to 'discriminate' against people on the grounds that they did not engage in lifelong marriage is actually *not* to discriminate between them and homosexual couples. It is to place all non-lifelong, non-monogamous arrangements in the same bracket, whether homosexual or heterosexual.

It is also to 'discriminate' on the grounds of behaviour and action in public, not on grounds of inner nature, fixed or otherwise (though Mr Parris has written interestingly about this tricky subject, as is mentioned in my book 'The Cameron Delusion'). In fact it is to offer privileges to one group, and not to the others, whether homosexual, celibate or heterosexually inconstant.

Thus, to portray this careful (if perforce unfinished) statement as my saying 'discriminating against "gays" is OK' because 'it is an objective fact that "gay" relationships are inferior' is not merely a crude caricature of my argument. It is actually so misleading as to be false. No such words passed my lips. No such thought crossed my mind. I am utterly opposed to the persecution of individual homosexuals, either in law or in our culture, as I have many times said. To be opposed to homosexual equality is not to be in favour of such things, and it is time this was clearly understood.

I do not in fact use the phrase 'objective fact'. However, I would have argued, had I been given time, that the objective facts do show that the outcomes for children are far better in a society where lifelong heterosexual marriage is the accepted norm than in one where it is not. That is why I think reason and facts have a part in this discussion. As is so often the case, Christianity is the force which argues most strongly for the position which also turns out - in the long term - to be reasonable and fact-based, but I will leave others to wonder why that might be. But a wholly secular reasoned case can be made in favour of lifelong marriage.

The sexual liberation movement is in fact overwhelmingly heterosexual, but has learned to use people such as Mr Parris so as to portray its opponents as bigots rather than moralists, precisely through this sort of distortion. If it can persuade a fickle mob to think that Christian moralists are anxious to persecute homosexual individuals, and comparable in nature to the South African apartheid state (which incidentally found many of its toughest and most uncompromising opponents in the Anglican Church) then that mob will not listen to anything else that is said. QED.

The matter is explored at greater length in my book 'The Cameron Delusion', if anyone is interested in debate rather than in name-calling.

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

He may chat to parsnips, but Charles MUST be King

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Prince Charles must succeed his mother when that sad moment comes. Opinion polls suggesting that we pass the throne to Prince William over his father's head are both ­constitutionally stupid and slightly sinister.

Most opinion polls need to be viewed with a lot of suspicion, and read very carefully. It was because I took this view that I was the only commentator in the country who correctly predicted that David Cameron's Liberal Tories would not win May's General Election.

So please believe me when I point out that such polls do not just ­happen. Someone decides to commission them, for a reason. This costs a lot of money. And the questions that are asked can themselves be used to create opinions where none existed. They are a device to manipulate public opinion, not a device for measuring it.

Just asking people this question is a form of propaganda. The whole point of the monarchy is that it is not a popularity contest. That is how it stays above politics, which increasingly resembles Strictly Come Dancing, since all the parties agree and we can only judge them on their leaders' staring eyes, bald patches, fluent German, nice clothes, children, wives, unwives etc.

We all know that today's public darling is tomorrow's burned-out case. The fact that a fickle public, asked a question in an internet survey, prefers the youth of William to the quizzical permanent middle age of Charles tells us nothing of value. William will age as well. If he became King because he was young and good-looking, he could pres­umably be removed the moment he began to get lined and bald.

How silly. In an era when our politics is full of callow young men with no real experience of life or the world, Prince Charles is a reassuringly wise figure, whose thoughts on many things are a good deal less weird than the Prime Minister's hurriedly invented bilge about Big Societies and Gross National Hap­piness. Someone has obviously told Mr Cameron that he needs a philos­ophy to be respectable. So he has got Mr Steve Hilton to levitate for a bit and come up with one.

No wonder Charles talks to members of the vegetable kingdom. It must be far more rewarding to chat to the average parsnip than to listen to the careerist PR men, California gurus, retread Marxists, Europhiles and backstairs-crawlers who now infest the upper reaches of the ­British political class.


Last chance to halt Berlin Bulldozer

Please use the next few days to contact your MP and let him or her know that you do not wish to be subjected to Berlin Time. The key vote is this Friday, a day when many MPs don't bother to turn up in the Commons unless they know you care.

What strikes me about the breezy 'Darker Later' campaign – whose supporters probably never see the sunrise except on the way home from all-night parties – is its arrogance in
the face of objections from minorities.

Scots who must be plunged into winter blackness, Orthodox Jews whose prayers must be disrupted, people who get up early every day and don't want to do it in the dark for long extra months, people who don't want to be kept awake till nearly midnight on summer evenings, all must bow before this campaign's questionable claims of benefits, based on guesswork, dubious statistics and little else.

Our current arrangements are a compromise, which may not suit everyone, but at least takes into account the needs and fears of people without a big lobby to back them.
The Berlin Bulldozer doesn't care.

For a real illustration of its arrogant, London-based attitude here's the alleged comedian David Mitchell, writing in support of 'Darker Later' in the Left-wing 'Observer' last April: 'As an added bonus, it's likely to upset Scottish people and farmers.' Ho ho.


Poor Gove, reduced to gimmicks already

How sad, but how inevitable, to see my old friend Michael Gove reduced to the usual airy, grandiose boasts of Education Secretaries of both parties for the past 40-odd years – that bad teachers are to be sacked, spelling is to be taught, discipline restored, etc. None of this will happen.

It can't be done without the return of grammar schools, the reintroduction of corporal punishment, the lowering of the school-leaving age and a mass cull of the education establishment, dedicated as they are to spreading ignorance in the pursuit
of equality.

Watching Mr Gove promising to fix the schools without these things is like watching a carpenter trying to make a decent table without a saw, a chisel or a plane. In the end, he'll be reduced to shouting, plus stunts and gimmicks like, er, getting soldiers to do the teaching.


A nation's pride sent for scrap

Knowing that we were going to scrap our last serious chunk of sea power was one thing.

Seeing it done was another. The absence of a proper patriotic opposition has never been more painfully obvious, as the Ark Royal is condemned to the breakers, and the Harriers that flew from her are prepared for sale abroad.

On Wednesday we saw decades of experience, skill, courage and tradition dissolved in a few tear-stained minutes on the decree of politicians who clearly have not the slightest feeling for the history of their own country, and who are using the debt crisis as the universal pretext to make cuts that would normally be politically impossible. In this
case, the cut ought to have been impossible.

The scrapping of Ark Royal is plain stupid.


*******************************
The Left-wing former Tory MP, now journalist and BBC favourite, Matthew Parris is mainly famous for his shampoo-free locks. Perhaps he has failed to apologise for misrepresenting me, despite being so often asked to do so, because he is too busy not washing his hair.


*******************************
Well, so much for the Government's promise to put a serious limit on immigration. Not only are they quite unable to control arrivals from the EU. They have left so many loopholes in the rules for non-EU migrants that our wholly unacceptable levels of immigration will
continue as before. Why, when we have so many graduates and so many jobless people, do we need to import any workers at all?


*******************************
Of course we should help Ireland in its time of need. I care little for the Irish government, which has all the charisma of an ashtray and has for years been in the pocket of the EU.

But we owe a debt to the Irish people who, despite the dogmas of their leaders, have so often come to our aid in their thousands in time of war, despite many reasons why they might feel bitter towards us. I hope one day all the peoples of these islands can again live together in a properly united Kingdom. For all our quarrels, we have more in common with each other than with anyone on the Continent.

Far from gloating over Dublin's long-delayed recognition that EU membership means being a vassal of Germany, we should realise that we are in a similar fix, and it has done neither of us any good.

Political Party Admits it Was Wrong. Nobody Notices

During the frenzy of unreason which followed the July 7th bombing in London and the various thwarted and theoretical bombs involving liquids, underpants and shoes (none of which has ever actually gone off in non-laboratory conditions), the government decided it needed the power to lock terrorist suspects up for 42, and then for 90 days without charge or trial.

Many of us objected to this on the grounds that it breached a principle of the law, which forbids imprisonment without trial. And, that principle once having been breached, who knows where it might end?

Now Edward Balls, once a prominent member of that government, accepts that this was unnecessary. He thinks we could settle on 14 or 28 days of arbitrary imprisonment.

Well, it's an improvement, and a welcome admission of a mistake, for which Mr Balls should get some credit. I doubt, though, if anyone would be admitting it was a mistake if wiser people had not campaigned so fiercely against these deeply unpleasant and unjustified measures.

I'd just about be ready to allow 48 hours at an outside stretch, though I think it far wiser to stick to 24. If the police really can't think of a holding charge by then, or come up with a good reason to deny bail, then the magistrates should automatically order the release of the arrested person.

As for the supposed 'terror' danger, isn't it axiomatic that a person known to the authorities is more or less useless to any serious terrorist plot, which relies totally on surprise to achieve its aims? Once a person has been so much as interrogated, his name will always attract attention on any passenger manifest, his movements will always be subject to a certain amount of surveillance, and only a complete incompetent would use such a person in any terror enterprise.

The reasons advanced for the reintroduction of arbitrary detention for the first time in 300 years (outside wartime) were not only feeble. They were deadly dangerous to the real liberties we enjoy (instead of the fanciful ones, like the alleged ability to choose our rulers, actually non-existent).

Why? Because arbitrary detention, as the wise authors of England's (and the USA's) Constitutions knew, means that the state has arbitrary power to ruin the individual's life. Such power will always tend to grow up anyway, and only constant vigilance will keep it at a manageable level. An increasing amount of British law effectively abolishes the presumption of innocence (particularly in some cases involving children), and badly needs to be reformed.

Anyone who has committed a real objective crime, for which evidence can be produced, will not in any important way be protected by these ancient safeguards. If there is convincing evidence against him, he can be found guilty and punished all the more severely because of the strong likelihood that he is actually guilty. What makes these safeguards so worthwhile at any cost (and I note some judge complaining about the cost of Jury trial as if a price could be set on liberty) is that they make it very difficult for those in power to use the courts to persecute their critics and opponents.

This is the reason for the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, for the existence of Jury Trial, and the presumption of innocence which is meaningless without it, the Petition of Right in 1628, the Bill of Rights of 1689 which reasserted its principles. And that in turn gave rise to the US Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, whose authors consciously traced their roots to England's Great Charter and the long battle between Parliament and the House of Stuart. I have mentioned here before that, during the making of a programme on the growing threat to liberty, I was allowed to hold in my hands the actual vellum original of the Bill of Rights, and found myself trembling as I did so.

Yet these tremendous documents are now largely forgotten or unknown by supposedly educated people, and their hard, old lessons ignored in the modern passion for 'Human Rights', which sounds as if it is the same but is in fact a wholly different thing.

Wise and learned men, whom we look down on as ignorant country squires but whose minds were in many ways richer and more informed than ours will ever be, knew one big thing - that power would be abused if it were not restrained. They knew it because they had seen it at first hand. They protected us against the thing they feared by hard, unrelenting laws which said that the state could not do certain things.

The language of their documents is not usually flowery and rhetorical, like the various Declarations of Rights of Man which have so often been a prelude to dreadful assaults on men. The one exception to this is the American Declaration of Independence, which is rather lovely, but which had to be ballasted and contained soon afterwards with the workmanlike carpentry of the Constitution and the emergency repairs to that Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights.

In the grumpy tradition of Coke, Selden and the other authors of the Petition of Right, the British and American Bills of Rights are bald, cold, hard limits on power.

'Congress Shall make no law …' they say.

As in: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.'

Or, in the English original of a century before: 'That the pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal;

'That the pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal;

'That the commission for erecting the late Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature, are illegal and pernicious;

'That levying money for or to the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal;
'That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal;

'That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law;

'That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;

'That election of members of Parliament ought to be free;

'That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;

'That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;

'That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders;

'That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void;

'And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Parliaments ought to be held frequently.'

Or, from the Petition of Right: 'No freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of his freehold or liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.'

And: 'no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common consent by Act of Parliament; and that none be called to make answer, or take such oath, or to give attendance, or be confined, or otherwise molested or disquieted concerning the same or for refusal thereof; and that no freeman, in any such manner as is before mentioned, be imprisoned or detained; and that Your Majesty would be pleased to remove the said soldiers and mariners, and that your people may not be so burdened in time to come; and that the aforesaid commissions, for proceeding by martial law, may be revoked and annulled; and that hereafter no commissions of like nature may issue forth to any person or persons whatsoever to be executed as aforesaid, lest by colour of them any of your Majesty's subjects be destroyed or put to death contrary to the laws and franchise of the land.'

All of this led to the USA's even harder, clearer and more codifed defences of free debate, protection against arbitrary arrest and the punitive billeting of troops, not to mention the right to bear arms which, technically, all British subjects still possess (though see my 'Brief History of Crime' for a discussion of how this important liberty has been bureaucratically revoked by stealth). And that is why, despite a startling Germanic culture of bureaucracy and over-willing acceptance of authority, English liberty has survived as well as it has (though now much under threat) in the USA. It has also survived (in different conditions and with different) in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The simple point is that humans can only be free where the state is restrained. 'Human Rights' being an attempt to codify a secular morality on the basis of competing group rights, actually strengthens the state by making the courts the umpires in this competition. It also gives the courts the power to legislate, because its showy vagueness allows them to 'interpret' various phrases to their own satisfaction.

Now, it is true that the US Supreme Court has managed to do this with bits of the Bill of Rights, notably the phrase 'cruel and unusual' (itself taken from the 1689 English Bill). But this is obviously intellectually shabby, as no serious person could imagine that the men who drafted this thought that the death penalty was cruel or unusual, or intended that meaning to be conveyed. But it is so much easier to do with the various universal declarations, European Conventions, Canadian Charters and now the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.

This last is full of horrible weasel phrases whose effect is often quite different in practice from its apparent meaning. Nobody may be deprived of his possessions 'except in the public interest' (Article 17) which is as tough as wet tissue-paper. The rights of freedom of expression and to privacy ('private life') inevitably conflict. The right to marry and found a family conflict with non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, which alter the meaning and status of the word 'marry'. The promises of religious 'diversity' make all faiths equal, thus diminishing the role of the one faith which has actually defined Europe and shaped its distinctive civilisation- Christianity.

The rights of children are in effect the rights of states and their agencies to intervene in supposedly free families.

Articles 47 and 48 on 'Justice' are airy, open to subjective interpretation (and without any means of enforcement). What is a 'reasonable' time? Who judges the impartiality of a tribunal?

We should be prouder of, and better-informed about, the keystones of the astonishing and unusual liberty which we enjoy in these islands and which also exists in the rest of the Anglosphere (though nowhere else). Many other countries may appear on the surface to be as free and open as we are. Switzerland alone has a comparably powerful (yet utterly different) set of mechanisms for keeping the state at bay.

Examined closely, most of the world's post-1945 democracies aren't that free. And we are becoming more like them. If Mr Balls, and others, are prepared to reconsider their rather ruthless view of these matters (and of such monstrosities as identity cards) then it is a good thing for all of us. It is beginning to dawn on lots of people that the terror bogey is an excuse for governments to take powers, rather than a real issue seriously addressed by relevant measures.

But if we are to continue to educate Mr Balls and his colleagues on such basic matters, we must know our own history better. It would help if Oxford graduates had heard of the Bill of Rights.

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

How to Miss the Point....and How to be 'Skewered' by Matthew Parris

I had planned to spend much of today at an interesting London debate, but - having read the responses to my weekend posting (which is also my MoS column) - I really couldn't resist the chance to deal with a number of remarkably silly and obtuse contributions, of the kind I wish to discourage.

Here goes. Someone calling himself 'Dennis' informs me: 'Most people have realised that it is the drug dealers themselves who lobby the government to keep cannabis illegal because it keeps their prices high. Nice of you to act as their spokesman.'

Now, were I to use a formula as sloppy as this 'most people have realised' that (say) cannabis is linked with mental health problems, I would be besieged by pro-druggies attacking me for generalising without evidence - even though the work of Robin Murray, often cited here, demonstrates that there appears to be a link. None of the pro-druggie enthusiasts for 'science' or evidence' ever seems capable of dealing with the Murray work, understandably preferring to ignore it.

But I'll be amazed if any of these 'science' and 'evidence' enthusiasts appear here to criticise the bravely anonymous 'Dennis' for his evidence-free claim, combined with smear.

This is not argument. It is heckling.

Next we have 'Tony', again so bold that he dare not let us know his surname. He opines: 'Twice now the whole idea of linking "Berlin Time" to a nasty Euro conspiracy has been roundly kicked on the Mail website as little other than a fantasy that cynically attempts to exploit any lingering WWII sentiment, or even resentment toward a long dead and irrelevant Kaiser. When that failed, he calls "foul," arguing that the voice of the people has been strangled by an obscure single interest group. More likely, Mail readers simply agree with the idea of more daylight toward the end of the working day. After all, at this time of year we're all going to work in the dark or near dark. Setting the clocks forward another hour makes no difference to that, does it? I couldn't care less if the sun was due south at 12 noon or 1pm, quite frankly. No one is going to be able to tell the difference. Perhaps Mr Hitchens would care to engage the debate on more adult terms instead.'

Well, on the contrary, my original article traced the invention of Central European Time to its historical source, namely Wilhelmine Germany. It pointed out that the same empire had imposed CET on conquered territories in the 1914 war. And that its direct descendant, the Third Reich, had done the same in the 1945 war. And that when those countries were briefly released from German pressure, they reverted to a time-zone closer to their own meridian.

'Tony' presumably knows little of the process by which the European Union has sought to integrate the economies and transport systems of its members, nor has he noticed that this integration has all been one way - that is to suit the interests of Germany, the country whose enormous power the EU was designed to contain and channel into peaceful rather than warlike forms of dominance.

Nor did I call 'foul'. I truthfully pointed out (reproducing on this site the actual posting) that 'Lighter Later' has urged its supporters to post on the site. I discovered this by a simple process of deduction. Large numbers of postings had appeared (much greater than the normal level of comments on such articles) using such politically correct terms as 'xenophobic', not much favoured by readers of these newspapers. They also seemed to have been written by people who had not read the article. So I looked at the 'Lighter Later' website to see if such a call had been made there. And it had. The following day a similar message was posted about a poll on the website. Some people may think this is legitimate. I just believe that, when it happens, it ought to be recorded that it has happened.

If anyone still resents the Kaiser, I don't know who he is. Even my grandfather, who lost most of his friends in the 1914 war, and only survived himself because he had the luck to be posted to India, had softened on the subject by the time he died many years ago. But a lot of people, in my view rightly, see that (as Otto von Bismarck once said) many of Germany's interests are advanced 'in Europe's name'. If different countries co-ordinate their time, there is a simple 'who whom?' question. Who is conceding to whom? Since time is not abstract, but based upon the rotation of the earth, the country which gives up its own meridian, and switches to that of another, is objectively and demonstrably the 'whom' - the weaker, servile part of the relationship.

As I pointed out yesterday, no free and independent country in the world, outside the influence of German economic and diplomatic pressure, has adopted a time zone 15 degrees of longitude away from its own meridian. No more have they abolished their own borders (another amazing achievement of German diplomacy, absurdly unsung). And attempts to shift time so far from nature in this way in Britain, the USA and Portugal, have been rejected in the past precisely because they were so unpopular with normal human beings.

I have also referred to known evidence of covert propaganda by the EU and its supporters in this country, particularly the Connaught Breakfasts, details of which were revealed in the BBC programme 'A letter to The Times', broadcast on Radio 4 on the 3rd February 2000 and jaw-droppingly revelatory. There is no doubt at all that this has taken place in the past. Why should it not still be going on?

If, as 'Tony' claims, this matter is so unimportant, and makes so little difference, why have so many attempts (seven since 1994) been made in the British parliament to switch us to CET?

This is an entirely adult discussion, and I suspect 'Tony' is sulky because it is not going his way.

Still Missing The Point about That Hat

Now let us turn to 'John Wright', whose style seems faintly reminiscent of someone else, but I can't quite recall who.

Here he goes: 'How on earth is anyone meant to enter into a rational argument about Samantha Cameron's hat?'

Quite easily, actually. See below. But the point I made was that, had Cherie Blair worn such a hat on such an occasion, she would have been criticised for it. Whereas Mrs Cameron wasn't. The hat was a Fedora, and it was jaunty, as male apparel sported by attractive women so often is. Most of us know the basics of the language of clothes, that one does not turn up to a black tie dinner in jeans and t-shirt, or to Glastonbury in a suit. There are some subtleties in between and most of us have made mistakes (there's an amusing and illuminating angle on this in Sebastian Faulks's novel' Engleby', in which the central character's complete inability to wear the right clothes for the right occasion alerts the reader to a far, far deeper problem).

The Labour leader Michael Foot was torn to pieces (metaphorically) some years ago for turning up at the Cenotaph in a coat (now on display in a museum in Manchester) which Fleet Street described as a Donkey Jacket. It wasn't a Donkey Jacket, but Michael Foot was at that stage officially bad, so that it was what it was called. The rest of the language of clothes, though arguable, remains pretty easy to read. I asked a number of people with varying opinions what they thought of the hat. Most felt it was wrong for the occasion, and I tend to agree with them. Mrs Cameron, as it happens, got away with it entirely.

Still Missing the Point about the Professor


Mr Wright continues: 'Professor Nutt seems to have produced an interesting paper on the effects of drugs - both legal and illegal - within our society. I feel that his conclusions are valid and should be more widely debated.'

Well, if Mr Wright paid any attention here, he would have seen them debated at length on previous postings here, and they had a substantial and sympathetic airing throughout the liberal media on 1st November.

But as it happened, this odd and dubious report was not under discussion on this occasion. It wasn't even mentioned. What was plainly under discussion was whether Professor Nutt's professorial title qualified him to pronounce with authority on matters not connected to his discipline. Two such pronouncements were quotes, both linked by a theme, the first that 160,000 people had suffered 'criminal sanctions' for possessing cannabis, and the second that 'criminalising' such people was more dangerous to them than cannabis itself.

Not merely was the Professor far from his zone of expertise here. His statements seem to me to be thoroughly misleading, and propagandistic. Not only does he seem unwilling to acknowledge Robin Murray's work (and Professor Murray has drawn it to his attention). He suggests that the criminal law is far more punitive towards cannabis than in fact it is. And he suggests that a person who deliberately breaches the criminal law is in some way a victim of a process called 'criminalisation'. Which is logically absurd.

That is what I believe 'stinks' - as any competent reader of English can clearly see, if his mind isn't clouded by prejudice. Now, if anyone wishes to set up as a propagandist for drug law reform, that's fine by me. But he should be introduced as such when he's doing this, not by an academic title which has no bearing on the issue (and whose implied rigorous standards he is not applying in his research into the facts). The public and the media shouldn't imagine that his scientific qualifications, unless directly involved in what he says, automatically entitle his statements to respect. Mr 'Wright' misses this whole point because it does not suit him to engage with it. Were he to do so, he would have to concede that my use of the scientific method - careful research, demonstrable facts etc - was in this case superior to the Professor's.

Plus the Simply Untrue

And now we have Mr Jim Whitehead, who contributes: 'Peter Hitchens: your blog posts are becoming increasingly ill-argued. You have admitted elsewhere that you do not understand the peer-review process, the foundation of modern scientific research.'

No, Mr Whitehead, I have never 'admitted ' (or indeed said) anything of the kind. I asked, on the 'Today' programme, rhetorically 'What does Peer Review mean?' I didn't ask this because I do not know what it technically is, but because I doubt very much that it provides the seal of scientific approval which it is often claimed for it.

Mr Whitehead continues: 'Here you deign to suggest that Professor Nutt - by providing figures you reluctantly admit to be correct - is somehow abusing his position as a professor. He is not. His assertions, wherever I have seen them, have been supported by factual references to reputable studies.'

I do not think Mr Whitehead knows what 'deign' means, though it is always a pleasure to use it. I do not 'reluctantly admit' (that little word again) or even say that Professor Nutt's figures were correct. Nor was there any reluctance involved in making this the lead item of my column.

The number of impositions of criminal sanctions is a clean different thing from the number of recorded offences for which such sanctions might be applied in law. In fact it is in the gap between the two that the entire argument lies. And if Mr Whitehead, who has the brass neck to attack me for my allegedly 'ill-argued' posts had read the item with any care, he would see that it is an exploration of the chasm between the number of recorded offences and the number of sanctions imposed. It is also an exploration of those 'sanctions', which in many cases are not 'sanctions' at all in any serious meaning of the word.

I might add that more than 22,000 recorded cannabis offences do not seem to have attracted any penalty of any kind at all. If they did, they are not recorded. Thus on basic arithmetic, even if one accepted that a 'Cannabis Warning' or a Caution or a PND was a 'criminal sanction', Professor Nutt is out by 22,000. He has made a basic category error, confusing the recording of an offence with its outcome in the criminal justice system.

I do not think this distinction involves any great precision of language. But even if it did, a Professor of anything should surely be expected to be fastidious about precision.

My figures and my descriptions of 'Cannabis Warnings', 'PND's and 'cautions', come from the relevant government departments (Justice and Home) and from the Association of Chief Police Officers. I am sure anyone else could replicate them if they chose to do so.

Whose posts are 'ill-argued' now, Mr Whitehead?

A Funny Sort of Skewer

And now back to Mr 'Wright' again. He says: 'I also note that you are particularly prolific in dishing out insults to anyone from Stephen Fry to Tony Blair via mostly everyone to the left of you (which, apart from the resident droolers on this blog, is, well, everyone).'

Well, I'm happy to own to having referred to Mr Blair as 'Princess Tony', a just punishment for his use of the phrase crafted for him 'The People's Princess', and his general takeover of the Diana mourning moment. But I felt, and feel, that he was big enough to look after himself. And the name seemed frivolous after he became instead a bloodstained warlord and a national disgrace.

I'm also proud to have spread to a wider audience the wonderful description of Mr Fry in the 'Dictionary of National Celebrity as 'A stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like'. And to point out how immensely puffed up he is. But again, Mr Fry is quite capable of fighting his own corner, as he showed in a recent debate on the Roman Catholic Church where, as I understand it, he took no prisoners.

Mr Wright continues: 'You are rather over-sensitive though when it comes to criticism of your good self, a major character flaw.'

Well, I have several times explained that my complaint is not over being called names, an experience I have been undergoing since I entered my first school playground more years ago than I can remember and which, though I don't enjoy, I reckon as being a reasonable occupational hazard.

It is over the obdurate unresponsiveness, and unwillingness to argue properly, which is typified in these posts.

What do I mean by unresponsiveness? Well, the opposite of what I have demonstrated above. In this posting, I have taken the meat of the charges against me, and rebutted it in detail. I haven't ignored what's said or pretended it hasn't been. Nor have I misrepresented my opponent's case. Indeed, any visitor here knows that a lot of time and trouble is devoted to providing accurate quotation on which to base arguments.

Mr Andrew Bishop asks: 'Do I get the impression that you want comments, only if they express views similar to yourself?' To which I can only reply that if he has that impression, he hasn't got it from me. I strive to keep this site open to all opinions. I ask only that they stick to facts and logic, and that they respond to the arguments of those they disagree with. I could easily ban all attacks on me if I wanted to. But I don't. No serious person studying this blog could claim that criticism of me or my arguments is stifled.


This is a Skewer? Get me Rene Magritte. Fast

But it is misrepresentation, and the obtuse misunderstanding engendered by a dogmatically clouded mind, that I most object to (though I have to say banal statements without any argumentative force such as 'The times are changing' (why not 'Where have all the Flowers Gone?' or 'The Answer is Blowing in the Wind'? Times that can change in one way can change in another. The statement has no value of any kind) or 'what you want will never return' (why not? How do they know?) or 'get with the project' (why should I? I don't like the project and can explain why) do make my heart sink, mainly for the wretched, dank state of mind which they reveal.

And my heart also sank when the former Tory MP Matthew Parris misrepresented what I had said in a radio debate with him. Because the thing I object to most of all in an opponent is misrepresentation. It poisons the wells of debate. So I scolded him sharply at the time and afterwards, and then contacted him to let him know that I planned (as I had told him I would) to post my words and his account of them on this blog, here, where all could see the huge difference between the two. And I intend - because I believe it to be morally imperative - to pursue this to the point of resolution.

So here comes Mr Wright again, saying: 'Mr Parris skewered you rather neatly in your recent spat and I cannot for the life of me see what he has to apologise for.'

Well, that's such an interesting point of view that I for one yearn to know how on earth Mr 'Wright' arrived at it, as I don't feel at all skewered, much more angered by a respected public figure's casual attitude to accuracy, particularly disturbing in a journalist. What precisely were the words of Mr Parris which 'skewered' me? In what way did they do so? But I bet he cannot do so and, if he is who I think he is, he won't respond anyway, to this or anything else. In the meantime I wish I could commission my favourite surrealist painter, the late Rene Magritte, to paint a blank canvas entitled 'This is a Skewer'. This could represent the non-existent skewer with which Mr Parris didn't actually kebab me. It could hang alongside his (Magritte's, not Matthew Parris's) famous picture of a pipe, entitled 'This is not a Pipe'.

That'll have to do for now. When we have this problem sorted out, and the site back on an even keel, I can get on with discussing the amazing Labour withdrawal from the policy of 42-day and 90-day detention.

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

Professor Nutt, the cannabis propagandist in a scientist's white coat

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The authorities in this country have given up trying to enforce the law against possession of cannabis.

I know this because I have spent the week researching a statement recently made by the famed Professor David Nutt, hero of the cannabis lobby. And it is deeply misleading, which is especially shocking in one who holds the title 'Professor'.

Professor Nutt said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme that last year '160,000 people were given criminal sanctions for possessing cannabis'.

Well, it is true that the Home Office recorded 162,610 cases of cannabis possession in England and Wales in 2009. But what ­happened next? Savage punishment?

Not exactly. The majority of these cases – 86,953 – were dealt with by a feeble procedure known as a 'Cannabis Warning'. This has no legal status, does not lead to a criminal record and is not even recorded nationally. Yet it is recommended by the Association of Chief Police Officers as the first option, unless 'aggravating factors' are present.

Another 19,137 cannabis cases were dealt with through Cautions, which expire after a ­maximum of three months and normally needn't be declared to employers.

Slightly tougher, but not exactly life-changing, were the 11,492 Penalty Notices for Disorder, which are recorded indefinitely but do not involve a court appearance, a fine or imprisonment.

Only 22,748 cannabis cases, slightly more than one in eight, actually ended in court. Nobody in Whitehall is able to tell me what sort of penalties were imposed or what distinguishes these cases from the others. I suspect that most of these involved persistent offenders, or possession with intent to supply, or were charged in conjunction with other crimes.

There is no record of what happened to the remaining several thousand cases. I imagine they slipped through the many cracks in our crumbling, decrepit criminal justice system.
But the message of these figures is perfectly clear.

For good or ill (and I believe it is for ill, since several such people will end up spending their lives in locked mental wards), a young person who smokes cannabis in private is most unlikely to attract the attention of the law. And if he does, he will not be seriously punished. Is a Cannabis Warning a 'criminal sanction' in any true sense? Or even a Caution?

Yet because David Nutt is a professor, he can say this sort of thing unchallenged on the BBC, and can also assert that 'criminalising young people for smoking cannabis is actually more dangerous to them and their life than decriminalising it'.

This is language abuse. A person who knowingly breaks the law of the land is not 'criminalised'. He criminalises himself. It is also propaganda masquerading as science, and it stinks.

A day for dignity, not jaunty fedoras

I don't know why David Cameron thinks he needs a personal photographer, when most of the British media seem to want to be his personal valets and shoe-cleaners.

It's amazing what the Camerons get away with.

If Cherie Blair had worn the jaunty fedora hat that Samantha Cameron sported on Remembrance Sunday, the whole world would have been about her ears, denouncing its frivolity and saying, in my view rightly, that it wasn't fitting for such a solemn occasion.

If Anthony Blair, or Gordon Brown, had used a grubby lavatory swearword in an after-dinner speech in front of dozens of prominent journalists and politicians, as Mr Cameron did on Wednesday night, he would rightly have been excoriated on front pages for lowering the standards of publicbehaviour.

And that's forgetting all about the Prime Minister's super-greedy past as a claimer of politicians' housing benefit, an irony that needs to be remembered at the moment.


Truth about the 'Darker Later' myths

In my effort to torpedo plans to place us permanently on Berlin Time, I have this week made the acquaintance of the 'Lighter Later' campaign, which is lobbying for this needless and unpleasant change in our way of life.

Actually, they could equally well be called 'Darker Later', since that will certainly be the effect on our mornings in winter. Here are a few things about them you might like to know.

They are an offshoot of the fanatical man-made global warming outfit 10:10. That organisation, a favourite of the anti-British, pro-EU Guardian newspaper, were responsible for the disgusting No Pressure propaganda film, in which people who doubted the message of warmist zealots were blown into bloody shreds in a series of supposedly comic scenes.

They sought to organise an invasion of our website last week (I have the evidence), so giving a false impression of public feeling on this matter. They claim that making it darker later in winter will reduce road accidents. Initially, I accepted their claim that this had in fact happened during the 1968-71 experiment in darker mornings.

I sought other explanations for this. But then I checked the actual road-death figures for the period.

Here they are:

1968: 6,810.

1969: 7,365.

1970: 7,499.

1971: 7,699.

1972: 7,763.

Yes, total road deaths in Great Britain went up during this period.

I don't know why they went up. But they certainly didn't go down. This one fact is worth a ton of projections and speculations, which is what 'Darker Later' come up with when challenged on this issue. I have also asked them to name me one free and democratic country, outside the reach of German diplomatic and economic pressure, that has voluntarily set its clocks to a meridian 600 miles away. There has been no answer.

This was rejected with relief by public and Parliament when we did it 40 years ago. A similar attempt to mess with American clocks in 1974 and 1975 was abandoned because the dark mornings were so unpopular.

My contention that this idea has its roots in the EU has been challenged. To this I reply that one of the many attempts to skew our time eastwards was the 'Central European Time Bill' of 1994, keenly supported by the arch-Europhile Roy Jenkins in the House of Lords.

I might also mention that the EU is known to work constantly and covertly for its own ends, as shown in our story about Hughie Green last week, and in the sinister Seventies breakfast lobbies at the Connaught Hotel, exposed ten years ago in an unforgettable BBC Radio 4 programme, A Letter To The Times.

This revealed a co-ordinated attempt to influence public opinion by stealth during the campaign to get us into the EU, and quoted one Brussels lobbyist as saying that such things are still going on. I don't doubt it.


************************
That supposedly nice and reasonable former Tory MP Matthew Parris has still not apologised for crudely misrepresenting me at a public meeting. In that case, can he still be regarded as either nice or reasonable?

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

An Appeal from the Chair

I am grateful for the many messages of encouragement following my posting last week, in which I expressed my frustration at the pitifully low level of some of the comments posted here.

I note that many of these supportive messages came from people who do not necessarily agree with my positions. This is most important to me. I greatly value the contributions here of people who are willing to enter into serious arguments, based upon facts and reason. And inevitably many of these will be from readers who do not share my opinions.

I am distressed only by those who write here to abuse me, or to make unresponsive comments which do not actually engage with what I have said (or which lazily repeat arguments many times exploded here). The task of compiling an index, which would help deal with the second problem, is one I have neglected because I have recently been travelling a great deal, and preparing for several debates and speeches. The need to document and transcribe my recent adventures on Radio 4 also took up a great deal of time. But I hope to use the next few months to set up a good working index which will allow anyone to look up what has been said here over the past few years, on most major subjects.

But this does not solve the abuse problem. I'm told to screen comments. I am against this, as a net which would catch the sort of people I have in mind might well also catch others who did not deserve to be caught. Also, I don't object to being abused myself, and pride myself on allowing the maximum possible freedom of speech. What I object to is that I alone have to shoulder the task of dealing with it.

And this is my point.

Think of this site as a public debate, in which I am both chairman and principal speaker. If hecklers or organised interrupters try to disrupt such a debate, or if certain persons make persistent nuisances of themselves, the mood of such a meeting will generally be hostile to them. The audience has come for serious debate, not for foolishness of this sort. And the chairman can rely on that mood to support his efforts to control them.

So to those who kindly urged me to continue, I have a very serious request. Do not ignore postings which you think break the rules of serious debate. Show that the mood of the site is against this sort of thing. Do not wait for me to seek to rally support against them. I should only need to intervene on such things very rarely. Many of them are quite possibly hoping to get my attention by being unpleasant. If you will condemn them, I won't need to. So they will fail in their objective, and perhaps be chastened as well.

Comment unfavourably upon them, as soon as you see them - not necessarily by disagreeing with their sentiments, and certainly not by being rude in return, but by pointing out that they have descended into abuse, or that they ignore the argument clearly made and the facts clearly stated (these are the main faults of such postings). Let them know that this sort of thing is not acceptable here. A one line comment, as long as it names the contributor involved, is quite enough - if sufficient people do it. It takes a moment. I beg you to do this from now on. Otherwise, all those messages of encouragement aren't really worth very much in practice.

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

Professor Nutt, the cannabis propagandist in a scientist's white coat

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The authorities in this country have given up trying to enforce the law against possession of cannabis.

I know this because I have spent the week researching a statement recently made by the famed Professor David Nutt, hero of the cannabis lobby. And it is deeply misleading, which is especially shocking in one who holds the title 'Professor'.

Professor Nutt said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme that last year '160,000 people were given criminal sanctions for possessing cannabis'.

Well, it is true that the Home Office recorded 162,610 cases of cannabis possession in England and Wales in 2009. But what ­happened next? Savage punishment?

Not exactly. The majority of these cases – 86,953 – were dealt with by a feeble procedure known as a 'Cannabis Warning'. This has no legal status, does not lead to a criminal record and is not even recorded nationally. Yet it is recommended by the Association of Chief Police Officers as the first option, unless 'aggravating factors' are present.

Another 19,137 cannabis cases were dealt with through Cautions, which expire after a ­maximum of three months and normally needn't be declared to employers.

Slightly tougher, but not exactly life-changing, were the 11,492 Penalty Notices for Disorder, which are recorded indefinitely but do not involve a court appearance, a fine or imprisonment.

Only 22,748 cannabis cases, slightly more than one in eight, actually ended in court. Nobody in Whitehall is able to tell me what sort of penalties were imposed or what distinguishes these cases from the others. I suspect that most of these involved persistent offenders, or possession with intent to supply, or were charged in conjunction with other crimes.

There is no record of what happened to the remaining several thousand cases. I imagine they slipped through the many cracks in our crumbling, decrepit criminal justice system.
But the message of these figures is perfectly clear.

For good or ill (and I believe it is for ill, since several such people will end up spending their lives in locked mental wards), a young person who smokes cannabis in private is most unlikely to attract the attention of the law. And if he does, he will not be seriously punished. Is a Cannabis Warning a 'criminal sanction' in any true sense? Or even a Caution?

Yet because David Nutt is a professor, he can say this sort of thing unchallenged on the BBC, and can also assert that 'criminalising young people for smoking cannabis is actually more dangerous to them and their life than decriminalising it'.

This is language abuse. A person who knowingly breaks the law of the land is not 'criminalised'. He criminalises himself. It is also propaganda masquerading as science, and it stinks.

A day for dignity, not jaunty fedoras

I don't know why David Cameron thinks he needs a personal photographer, when most of the British media seem to want to be his personal valets and shoe-cleaners.

It's amazing what the Camerons get away with.

If Cherie Blair had worn the jaunty fedora hat that Samantha Cameron sported on Remembrance Sunday, the whole world would have been about her ears, denouncing its frivolity and saying, in my view rightly, that it wasn't fitting for such a solemn occasion.

If Anthony Blair, or Gordon Brown, had used a grubby lavatory swearword in an after-dinner speech in front of dozens of prominent journalists and politicians, as Mr Cameron did on Wednesday night, he would rightly have been excoriated on front pages for lowering the standards of publicbehaviour.

And that's forgetting all about the Prime Minister's super-greedy past as a claimer of politicians' housing benefit, an irony that needs to be remembered at the moment.


Truth about the 'Darker Later' myths

In my effort to torpedo plans to place us permanently on Berlin Time, I have this week made the acquaintance of the 'Lighter Later' campaign, which is lobbying for this needless and unpleasant change in our way of life.

Actually, they could equally well be called 'Darker Later', since that will certainly be the effect on our mornings in winter. Here are a few things about them you might like to know.

They are an offshoot of the fanatical man-made global warming outfit 10:10. That organisation, a favourite of the anti-British, pro-EU Guardian newspaper, were responsible for the disgusting No Pressure propaganda film, in which people who doubted the message of warmist zealots were blown into bloody shreds in a series of supposedly comic scenes.

They sought to organise an invasion of our website last week (I have the evidence), so giving a false impression of public feeling on this matter. They claim that making it darker later in winter will reduce road accidents. Initially, I accepted their claim that this had in fact happened during the 1968-71 experiment in darker mornings.

I sought other explanations for this. But then I checked the actual road-death figures for the period.

Here they are:

1968: 6,810.

1969: 7,365.

1970: 7,499.

1971: 7,699.

1972: 7,763.

Yes, total road deaths in Great Britain went up during this period.

I don't know why they went up. But they certainly didn't go down. This one fact is worth a ton of projections and speculations, which is what 'Darker Later' come up with when challenged on this issue. I have also asked them to name me one free and democratic country, outside the reach of German diplomatic and economic pressure, that has voluntarily set its clocks to a meridian 600 miles away. There has been no answer.

This was rejected with relief by public and Parliament when we did it 40 years ago. A similar attempt to mess with American clocks in 1974 and 1975 was abandoned because the dark mornings were so unpopular.

My contention that this idea has its roots in the EU has been challenged. To this I reply that one of the many attempts to skew our time eastwards was the 'Central European Time Bill' of 1994, keenly supported by the arch-Europhile Roy Jenkins in the House of Lords.

I might also mention that the EU is known to work constantly and covertly for its own ends, as shown in our story about Hughie Green last week, and in the sinister Seventies breakfast lobbies at the Connaught Hotel, exposed ten years ago in an unforgettable BBC Radio 4 programme, A Letter To The Times.

This revealed a co-ordinated attempt to influence public opinion by stealth during the campaign to get us into the EU, and quoted one Brussels lobbyist as saying that such things are still going on. I don't doubt it.


************************
That supposedly nice and reasonable former Tory MP Matthew Parris has still not apologised for crudely misrepresenting me at a public meeting. In that case, can he still be regarded as either nice or reasonable?