Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 343

Do I ever think of Giving Up in Despair? And Other Questions

A number of people have posted here in recent weeks wondering why I put up with the low level of some comments, their utter missing of the point, their personal spite, their claims (from a state of ignorance) that I have never examined topics which I have examined, or that I have said things that I haven't said.

Do I ever, as I contemplate this dismal swamp of incomprehension and malice, think of packing in the whole blog? Well, yes I do, about five times a day. But the response to my BBC posting has brought me pretty close actually to doing so. After years of debating the question of BBC bias, I finally obtain a documented and recorded instance of this indisputably happening. I provide links, transcripts and careful analysis. And what do I get? Thought? Reason? Acknowledgement by those who have hitherto denied BBC bias that I may be on to something? Considered criticism of my point? Articulate defence of the BBC?

Or might there be intelligent comment on my research into what actually happens in this country when a person is caught in possession of Cannabis, under the alleged 'War on Drugs'?

Well, not entirely.

A number of people posted as if I had written this contribution in search of sympathy or to complain about my lot. I said no such thing, and I desire no such thing. I have had redress (as I state) which is what I thought I was owed in natural justice. I am of course interested in the rules which govern who is invited on to the BBC about what and when. I tend to think that, compared with a left-wing equivalent (my friend Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian has an almost exactly parallel career trajectory, and frequently presents Radio 4 programmes, and good for him) or even a female 'right-wing' equivalent (my Associated Newspapers colleague and (sometimes) ally Melanie Phillips is on the regular panel of the 'Moral Maze' and good for her) I get measurably fewer broadcasting chances than I might reasonably expect. I won't here trouble readers with episodes known in detail only to me and certain BBC executives, which in my view offer solid proof of a bias against me that is not personal, but political. But I will state that they happened.

But when I wrote: 'I don't actually mind having to conduct these fights, because I am used to them', that is precisely what I meant. Likewise, when I wrote: 'I don't at all object to Mr Webb's adversarial treatment of me. He should do it to everyone', that too is exactly what I meant. How is this read (except in a mind blurred and fogged by malice and wilful misunderstanding) as self-pity or a plea for sympathy? It is the *wider significance* of these events that is important, not my individual feelings.

Nor do I agree with some posters that it is futile to analyse this and complain about it where the inequity is measurable and undoubted - as was so in this case. Perfection's not available. But improvements are sometimes possible - and the BBC, under a long bombardment of criticism that it slants to the Left, is slowly beginning to acknowledge that this is true. Eventually, this may have a practical effect, especially if the argument is pursued (as I have sought to do here) with carefully-assembled evidence and reasoned argument. I am told that Mark Thompson, the present DG, is deeply unpopular among BBC establishment people for his recent admission that the Corporation was biased to the left in the 1980s. They realise that this cat can never now be stuffed back in the bag.

Some contributors here don't seem to know (though the information is readily available on the web) that I did some years ago present a programme on the then Talk Radio, during which I sought to demonstrate in practice my theory that adversarial presenters were the best route to impartiality. I should like to do so again, but if readers here believe that all I need to do is to approach the present management of 'TalkSport' with such a suggestion, for it to be granted, they reveal a deep lack of understanding of how such things take place.

The arrangement (in this programme) worked pretty well with Derek Draper because he was *morally and culturally* on the left, the true divide. On good days it was a very effective programme. But it was not a success with other partners, Paul Routledge and Austin Mitchell, because in fact they shared some of my conservative positions on non-party issues. It is all very well saying that my suggestion of adversarial presenters on the BBC is foredoomed. Maybe it is, but it remains a workable and sensible idea, and if the BBC fails to implement it, then it demonstrates the nature of its problem. What alternative do these critics suggest? A British Fox?

To those who wrote as if I was in some way objecting to people being rude about me, and as if the matter was about my hurt pride. a few notes.

Anyone is free to be rude about me on this blog, a freedom many take advantage of. Their contributions are almost invariably posted, where coherent. In fact, the moderators used to come to me to ask about such things, as they are well-brought-up people with good manners who personally felt that such rudeness shouldn't be tolerated. But I insisted that it should be. Lies, as some contributors have found, will not be tolerated. That is a separate issue. But plenty of ad hominem stuff is.

And, as I frequently have cause to say, I have in my life been insulted by experts. When I stood out against the Left among the industrial reporters in the late seventies and early 1980s, I was personally vilified in many unpleasant and lasting ways. When I angered the Left in the 1992 election, and when I did it again over Cherie Blair's attempt to stand for Parliament, various journalists of the Left came after me in uncomplimentary and personalised ways. My books have been reviewed in vituperative and abusive ways (one of these so bad that the author later apologised for it) often by people who have not troubled to read them. And so on.

I don't pretend to enjoy this. But I accept it as a necessary and inevitable part of what I do. As Enoch Powell remarked, a politician complaining about the press is like a sailor complaining about the sea. A columnist complaining that people are rude about him is in the same fix. I doubt if many of those who accuse me of having a 'thin skin' could endure a week of what I have put up with for years. Few who make this sort of accusation have any idea of what they are talking about. What I object to is not the rudeness, but the dim incomprehension.

Should I smile more? There are extant photographs of me smiling. Anyone who has seen them will understand why I try not to do it anywhere near a camera.

Bored beyond measure by accusations of 'humourlessness', I once sat down to measure the laughter I won from audiences on 'Question Time' and 'Any Questions' (see particularly one broadcast from East Dorset in the late summer of 2009). I found it usually outdistanced that given to the other panellists. Sad, I know, but it seemed strange to me that the reputation could coexist with the facts until I understood that some reputations are so powerful that proof of their inaccuracy will simply be ignored.

I am officially humourless. Thus a person who laughs at one of my jokes is quite capable of saying, five minutes later, that I am humourless. This is yet another illustration of the problem that when people's opinions are challenged by reality, they don't change their minds. They shut down their perceptions.

Maynard Keynes famously said: 'When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do, sir?'

He knew that the answer, in most cases, was that person involved would ignore, deny or suppress the facts.

The purpose of the long analysis, the quotations, the transcripts, the links to broadcasts and to learned research on (for instance) the dangers of cannabis to mental health, was to explore the issue of BBC bias, whose existence is in my view proven absolutely by this episode, in a way never achieved before. It was also to make readers think. In this, alas, I have plainly failed with a number of contributors here. But is the failing in me? Or in them?

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

Berlin Time and Time Again

Part of this posting is copied from a comment I left on the original 'Berlin Time' thread. This is because I think it demonstrates the absence of thought among many of the enthusiasts for setting this country's clocks as if it were 600 miles further east than it actually is.

Someone hiding behind the name 'Richard B' asks: 'Why Berlin time and not Paris or Madrid hmmmm I wonder?'
Well, Mr 'B', basically because it *is* Berlin time, and not Madrid or Paris Time. Hmmmmmmm? Did he wonder much?

Get out your atlas and observe that the map is marked with lines of longitude, spreading eastwards and westwards form the zero meridian at Greenwich. They arrive at the opposite of Greenwich in the far east of Siberia, which is 180 degrees east and west (the International Date Line, which does not exactly follow the 180 degree meridian, is to be found here).

The numbering of these lines is arbitrary. But the absolutes which they measure are based upon the rotation of the earth, and are not arbitrary but real. It really is lighter earlier in Berlin than it is here, in the morning.

In theory the zero meridian could go through anywhere. But Greenwich was chosen at the International Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884.

What is not arbitrary is that 15 degrees of longitude represents the distance between two points, where the sun is at its zenith an hour apart. Thus. The sun is at its zenith an hour earlier on the 15 degree east Meridian (close to Berlin) than it is at Greenwich.

And lo, the 15 degree east meridian runs about 60 miles east of Berlin. (Trebnje in Slovenia is exactly upon it, but Berlin is the major city in Europe closest to it, and also the political origin of Central European Time, dating back to the Kaiser but spread, by conquest or pressure, ever since.)

Whereas Paris is only about two degrees east of Greenwich (and ought really to be on GMT), and Madrid is about three degrees *west* of Greenwich, and would certainly be better suited to London than Berlin time - though being further south is not so badly affected by it.

I call it Berlin time because it is Berlin time.

Accusations of 'xenophobia' should only be made, I think, by people who know what they're talking about and have evidence to back their charges. I love Germany, and admire much about it, and often go on holiday there. I just don't see why I should live on German time when I am in England, hundreds of miles to the West.

Germans, likewise, see no virtue in living on Minsk time (the equivalent, for them, of doing what is proposed for us). Why should they? It is out of tune with their lives, as Berlin time would be with ours.

The imposition of someone else's time on a country is a classic Who Whom? question. It is done for the convenience of the one which imposes, and to emphasise the subject state of the one on which it is imposed, hence France's abject continued acceptance of a time zone first imposed on it by conquest, now by calls for 'European Unity'.

Think these symbolic measures are not of importance to the EU? Why then the EU flag on all British embassies, the EU stars on EU-supported projects, the EU blue tag on numberplates, etc?

The EU, a device for imposing German domination over Europe by peaceful means, often advances its agenda under cover, as was evidenced by the Jack de Manio affair and the Hughie Greene story in this week's MoS.

These both provide evidence that the EU cause has promoted itself by backstairs lobbying, without its own involvement being evident. This has happened in the past, and could well be happening now. I might add that one of the principal supporters of Lord Mountgarret's 1994 'Central European Time Bill', which failed in the Lords, was Lord (Roy) Jenkins, the arch-Europhile. In the debate (Hansard, 11th January 1994, House of Lords) both he and Lord Mountgarret denied any EU element in their cause, before anyone accused them of having such a cause. I wonder why it is that there have been so many such Bills, under so many different names, in the past 20 years. The current attempt is the seventh.

I might add that Lord Jenkins was the inventor of the famous 1968-71 experiment, during which we were on Berlin Time all winter (but not in the Summer), and during which road deaths in Great Britain actually rose (GB figures, source National Statistics).

1968: 6,810
1969: 7,365
1970: 7,499
1971: 7,699
1972: 7,763

And this in spite of speed limits and breathalysers, which as I said were introduced at the same time (not exactly the same time, but close enough for them to be having a measurable effect).

Since lower road casualties are such a keystone of the 'Darker Later' campaign (as it could equally well be called), this is quite interesting.

There is much else to add on this argument. I only urge those who have not already expressed their disquiet at this unpleasant scheme to write, e-mail or text.

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

The BBC's idea of Impartiality, versus mine. Some musings

As promised, I reproduce below my own transcript of the 'Feedback' programme (now I think taken off the website, as they only last a week) in which I was criticised with no contemporaneous chance of defending myself. I have, as noted before, been given a satisfactory chance to set the record straight. But I should stress this would not have happened had not I and several other people protested pretty forcefully, and had I not insisted rather strongly that early offers of redress were insufficient.

So, while the BBC and the programme deserve some credit for putting the matter right in the end, they certainly don't deserve *all* the credit. And the issue remains of what this episode can fairly be taken to mean.

As I have said before, it needs to be taken together with the original exchange on the 'Today 'programme. This, by the way, was (as far as I can recall) my first appearance on that programme for about two years, perhaps longer. The last appearance I can remember was a discussion with my brother about his book 'God is not Great', during his promotional tour here in 2007.

The subsequent famine of invitations, which seemed to coincide with the Corporation's growing friendliness towards David Cameron, had itself been a noticeable change. For some years I had been invited on to the Today programme perhaps three or four times a year. I remember particularly an occasion where I debated with Lindsey German, of the Socialist Workers' Party, over whether the Left had triumphed or been beaten in modern Britain. I also spoke, more than once I think, about conservative reasons for opposing identity cards.

On this latest occasion, I was at a disadvantage from the start. I had been asked on because of my past criticisms and because of my known opposition to the views of Professor David Nutt. Yet the news bulletins of that day, and indeed the lengthy news reports, had portrayed Professor Nutt's Lancet Report as a serious and powerful scientific document. Before I could even begin to engage on the subject, I had to challenge this assumption, which is why I had spent several hours the previous evening going through the report again and again to see if its weaknesses could easily be explained in crisp terms.

I might add that I'm currently discussing with a publisher a book to be entitled 'The War We Never Fought - Britain's non-existent "war on drugs".''

Readers of the 'Abolition of Liberty' will be familiar with the case I make, and the views I set out, in the chapter entitled 'Evil Drug Dealers', written several years ago. And others will know how persistent I have been in warning that the dangers of cannabis are gravely understated. This warning has been increasingly borne out by growing piles of reputable research into mental illness among the young - certainly to the point where serious doubts must arise. I direct anyone interested in this to the work of Robin Murray, Professor of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in London.

For a powerful anecdotal article on the subject, readers might wish to turn to Patrick Cockburn's heartbreaking account of the problems of his son Henry.

Anyone knowing or caring about this might at least be excused for wishing to get the point across as hard and fast as possible. They might even be excused for having a certain amount of 'passion' as they did so. Frankly, anyone not angered by official complacency and inaction over this grave danger to the young has something wrong with him. As for maintaining that someone is 'criminalised' when he is prosecuted and convicted for breaking an existing law, this is just language abuse. If what the person means is 'this should not be a criminal offence', he should say so. But anyone who knowingly chooses to break the criminal law is not 'criminalised'. He criminalises himself.

But Justin Webb, in his introduction, stated, as if this were a fact, that the report was 'a very serious scientifically-argued attack on current drugs legislation.'

I think this is, at the very least, arguable.

So I still think that this was a clear expression of partiality, which would tinge everything that happened subsequently.

I would hope by now that everyone interested has listened to the original thing.

Many have made comments, some of which I might endorse, and some of which are perhaps a little overstated, about the general conduct of the interview and how it did not favour me. Certainly it followed a sequence which assumed more or less that Professor Nutt was the establishment voice of reason, and I an outsider to be questioned more sceptically. Yet when we started into areas of hard fact, or indeed into discussion of the report itself, I was clearly equipped with facts (my attempt to mention the mental health dangers of cannabis had to be more or less wrestled on to the air over interruptions, as did my point that the criminal justice system is not interested in prosecuting possession of illegal drugs, only in supply).

I don't actually mind having to conduct these fights, because I am used to them. And on this occasion - and this is what I suspect got the goat of my critics, I was able (and this only because of my long experience of BBC interviews and their structure, in which I am never voluntarily given the vital last word) to state clearly that the report wasn't as scientific as it claimed to be, and to slam in the last word - an accusation of irresponsibility against the Professor for seeking to blur the distinction between legal and illegal drugs.

By the way, Professor Nutt in this conversation appears to say that 160,000 people were given criminal sanctions for cannabis possession last year (2009). I have been trying to track down this figure. The division of the Home Office into two parts does not help (nor does the increasing reliance of the government on the British Crime Survey, which is more like an opinion poll than classical crime statistics).

And what follows is a work in progress, to which I would welcome factual contributions and knowledgeable explanations. The Home Office recorded 162,610 cannabis possession offences in England and Wales in 2009. The 'Ministry of Justice' (how I shudder to acknowledge that this country has such a thing, usually a characteristic of a country without any Justice) has so far found (and this list is not definitive or complete) that in the same year police issued 11,491 penalty notices for cannabis possession, and a further 19,137 cautions for the same offence.

Meanwhile 22,748 cannabis offences came before the courts, of which 21,766 resulted in convictions. I am as yet unable to say what sentences were imposed, or what happened to the others. Maybe they were multiple offences committed by the same person. What I also cannot say (but strongly suspect) is that these cases came to court because the defendant involved was a persistent offender, the quantities of drug were exceptional, or he was charged with other offences at the same time, or all of these.

The idea that a young person, with no other criminal record, smoking cannabis in a private place is remotely likely to be imprisoned (or otherwise seriously sanctioned) or 'criminalised' for this offence seems to me to be laughable.

A fascinating insight into the recognised police procedure on this offence is given in this ACPO document.

I am trying to discover what legal status the 'Cannabis Warning' referred to in this document might have, whether it is equivalent to a caution, whether it forms part of a criminal record, or what.

Thus, it seems to me that the Today interview itself put me at a disadvantage, by assuming to be true (or failing to challenge) the assumptions of Professor Nutt, while treating my positions and contentions with a proper scepticism. I don't at all object to Mr Webb's adversarial treatment of me. He should do it to everyone, though I think he (and everyone else whose position is founded on licence money) should steer clear of stating contentious arguments as if they were fact. I just think the adversarial approach should have been applied equally to Professor Nutt.

But it is this inequality of treatment which leads directly to the 'Feedback' episode. Just as prison guards in bad countries can make it look as if their prisoners are struggling, so that they have the pretext to slug them and yank their chains, and thus the prisoners look like incorrigible troublemakers even as they seek to go meekly to their fate, a presenter who is adversarial only in certain directions can make some of his interviewees look like pesky interrupters whereas the others, not subjected to this treatment, all sound calm and serene.

This is bound to happen in an absurd BBC, where presenters are officially bound to pretend that they leave their opinions at the studio door - which is impossible - and where most BBC people share the same socially, morally and culturally liberal background, so aren't even aware that their views *are* views

This is why I have long argued for programmes such as 'Today' to have pairs of adversarial presenters, whose views are known and acknowledged, and who fall on either side of the liberal/conservative divide, so ensuring that everyone gets properly grilled by someone who has no sympathy with him.

So, assuming for a moment that Feedback's principal job is to launch 6-minute show trials (in their absence) of occasional contributors to Radio 4, then it was the handling of the issue on 'Today' which allowed 'Feedback' to do this to me. If Professor Nutt and I had been equally roughed up, then he too would have been constrained to interrupt, to interject and to use the techniques of the underdog.

Of course, what I describe above is absolutely not the job of 'Feedback'. Its targets are supposed to be established BBC presenters and executives, not outsiders who are briefly on air in programmes edited and presented by others. But of course Feedback covered this angle by suggesting that 'Today' had been at fault in having me on, and seeking a contribution from 'Today' - while somehow failing to notice that the whole item consisted of a group of people queuing up to say how dreadful I am, and of course the suggestion that I should be taken off the programme's address book.

But why was this double assumption (Hitchens is self-evidently awful, therefore 'Today' were automatically wrong to have him on, case closed), apparently viewed as axiomatic by 'Feedback' at the time - and never questioned by anyone in the BBC hierarchy? It would be very interesting to know. Does anyone in authority actually listen to such things before they are transmitted (or while they are being transmitted)?

So despite their eventual decision to give me the chance to respond, the next question is: 'How did the idea of subjecting me to such a show trial manage to get past the presenter, the producer and whoever commissions Feedback, and whoever checks recorded programmes before they are aired (not once but twice)? What sort of culture can exist in the BBC, where nobody spotted in time that it was wrong? For there is no doubt that it was wrong, or why was I allowed to respond as I did?

Transcript of 'Feedback' item broadcast BBC Radio 4, on 5th and 7th November 2010

About 2 minutes 58 seconds into the programme (the item lasts a few seconds short of six minutes, one fifth of the running time).

Roger Bolton:

'An editor in want of a lively discussion to inject some energy and passion into an otherwise rather dry programme is almost certain to have a list of guests who will always turn up and turn on. However, sometimes there is a danger that of part of the audience being turned off, which is what happened at 8.45 am last Monday on Radio Four.

'The Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens can always be relied upon for moral indignation and rarely hesitates to play the man as well as the ball. Some think he delivers more heat than light - but he certainly wakes up the audience

'His opponent on this occasion was Professor David Nutt, who had been invited on to the Today programme to talk about his latest study comparing the harmful effects of alcohol and hard drugs. The Professor concludes that while other drugs like heroin are more harmful to the individual, alcohol does most damage to society as a whole and that we should review the way we categorise all drugs.

'Mr Hitchens was suspicious of the Professor's motives. Is what follows an enlightening debate which succeeds in clarifying the issues for the listener?'

[There then follows a brief and in my view misleading extract from the Today programme, in which I am both faded down (I was in Oxford) and interrupted by the presenter. Both 'Feedback' and the 'Today' episode can be heard on Radio 4's listen again facility]

Then Mr Bolton continued: 'The Today programme's treatment of the issue and Mr Hitchens's contribution were just not good enough, says Guy Johnson.'

"I was livid and he wouldn't even let the guy say anything. He was just trying to shout him down which is kind of schoolyard rubbish"

New voice : "I'm not always in agreement with Dr Nutt, what I would have liked to see was a more cogent and coherent argument as to why the study was flawed"

New voice: "I am a head teacher. I run an 11-18 secondary school in Southampton. The report was essentially hijacked by Mr Hitchens's conclusions. From what I could see, Hitchens did not have any specific specialist knowledge of the topic. He's a foreign affairs and politics specialist if he's anything."

Roger Bolton: 'Thanks to Jacob Schell (unsure of spelling) who has worked with substance misusers for many years, and to Julian Thould (unsure of spelling).

'Dr Adrian Williams also contacted us. He is a research scientist at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire.

'He popped into the Feedback studio on his way back from a conference at Westminster to tell me what he thought of the interview.'

Roger Bolton continues: 'Dr Williams, Peter Hitchens described Dr Nutt's paper as "pseudo-scientific". You've read the report in the Lancet. Was that a fair comment?'

Dr Williams: 'No, I think it was totally unfair. I think Peter Hitchens clearly fails to understand the scientific method. He admitted as much, that he didn't even know what peer reviewing was. And I don't think he actually read it adequately. He obviously didn't understand the basic method of multi-criteria analysis that was described in a lot of detail and I think his criticism was totally unfair.'

Roger Bolton: 'Who would have been the right person to create a more balanced debate? Because there's a lot of division in the country about what we should do about drugs?'

Dr Williams: 'Absolutely. But I think you need someone with a good understanding of drugs and also the method that was applied in this particular study which was this multi-criteria analysis where you try to balance different sorts of impacts such as the individual's health, criminality, other wider damage to society and things like that. Which is not something that everybody understands fully. But it would be important to understand that in order to have an adequate debate on the subject.'

Roger Bolton: 'But somebody like Peter Hitchens does share the views of quite a significant part of the population and he's obviously very vigorous and interesting. People certainly will remember that discussion.'

Dr Williams: 'I think it will be remembered for the wrong reasons. He does seem to rant on and on - and I don't think he gave Professor Nutt an adequate opportunity to explain what had gone in the study. And I think by denigrating the quality of science without justification he was putting forward his own views completely at the expense of a study that was attempting to take an objective, balanced view.'

Roger Bolton: 'Do you think this is typical of some current affairs programmes like Today, that perhaps they're looking for heat rather than light?'

Dr Williams: 'I think there is probably a tendency to get people on who will talk in an animated way about a subject and perhaps give a good radio presence. But they don't necessarily actually inform the listenership in the way that a responsible programme should. What worries me about it is that there are probably a good number of people who have not got a strong background in science who may be sceptical and believe that someone who talks so vocally and vigorously and denigrates it in the way he did and actually believes he has a good scientific reason for putting across that point of view - when I am sure the reality is that he doesn't.'

Roger Bolton: 'So your advice to the editor of the Today programme - if he is listening (though I think he's in China at the moment) - is what?'

Dr Williams: 'I would consider an article like that - to consider the people in the BBC who actually work on science programmes. There are some admirable ones on the R4 network to do with science, Quentin Cooper, Geoff Watts, the medical ones, several I would contact. Those are the people first of all and discuss with them who would be a good person to discuss a paper of this sort.'

Roger Bolton: 'And remove Peter Hitchens from your phone book, I gather.'

Dr Williams: 'I think I would agree with that absolutely.'

A lot of stuff follows here about failed efforts to get an editor from the Today programme to appear (the editor and his deputy were both abroad at the time) ending with the words from Mr Bolton: 'We will not let them forget', as if they were guilty fugitives.

A statement from the Today programme is then read:

'We wanted to tease out with Professor Nutt the political dimension of the drugs debate. Peter Hitchens has long taken an interest in this area and it's not uncommon for the programme to turn to newspaper columnists when casting discussions. We felt both sides got the chance to make their main points and as far as we know neither felt hard done by. The discussion was reasonably robust but we felt there was light as well as heat generated, and the e-mails to the programme seemed to confirm that.'

Transcript ends.


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

Don't let them force you to live your life on Berlin Time

Sooner than you think, we could all be living our lives on Berlin Time, an hour ahead of GMT in winter and two hours ahead of GMT in summer.

Such time is fine for that great and historic city, you might say. But Berlin is 580 miles and 15 degrees of longitude east of Greenwich, which means that the sun rises and sets there an hour earlier than it does in England.

The German capital, quite reasonably, does not fix its clocks to the time in Kiev or Minsk. Nor does it seem to suffer greatly by refusing to do so. So why should it be thought sensible for us to live as if we were far further east than we are?

And especially why should the people of the North of England and Scotland do so, when it will mean black darkness till around ten o'clock in the morning in the winter months?

According to Rebecca Harris, a chirpy, enthusiastic young Tory MP, this is a price worth paying for the many sparkling advantages of living our lives in step with Berliners. She believes that later, lighter afternoons in winter – and even later ones in summer – will make the roads safer, make old people less lonely, reduce crime, save energy and boost business.

She has all kinds of studies that appear to prove this, and is supported by a mass of pressure groups that agree with her.

My own impression is that many of these claims are pretty much guesswork. Shifting the clocks about changes less than you might think. The amount of actual daylight remains the same. It is just available at different times of day.

There was an experiment between 1968 and 1971, when we stayed on Summer Time all the year round – and lower road casualties for this period are often cited as an argument for the change. But the same years saw the introduction of roadside breath tests and the 70mph speed limit, so it is hard to claim that lighter evenings and darker mornings are solely responsible – or even to be sure that they are responsible at all.

Evenings are more dangerous than mornings on the roads, especially in these days of cheap alcohol and all-day opening, and of sparse police patrols, because drivers have had more time to drink too much. Light and dark make little difference to that.

But Mrs Harris's well-supported Bill is well on its way anyway, unlike several similar efforts on the subject over the past dozen years. These all ended in defeat, as did the 1968-71 experiment.

But this one is different. An active and busy lobby seems to have got behind this measure, as any careful student of the media will have spotted. How did all those breezy, uncritical articles come to be written? How did the Prime Minister find the time to imply his own support?

It goes before Parliament on Friday, December 3, and if passed it will trigger the first steps towards this momentous change, possibly separating us for ever from the Greenwich Mean Time which we invented.

We have done this before – but only in the desperate days of wartime, when it was necessary to keep munitions workers at their benches, and farm labourers out in the fields, as long as possible.

But do we really need it now? In fact, might it not be a positive disadvantage to many, and not just those living in the North or Scotland? It is all very well for businessmen who wish to telephone colleagues in Frankfurt, Paris or Rome, though a one-hour difference is really not that hard to manage. But shoving us an hour eastwards would narrow the window in which we can speak to the US, especially to the increasingly crucial West Coast, which would be nine or even ten hours behind us.

In any case, clocks and times are not arbitrary. They measure the objective passage of time, which is governed by the rotation of the Earth. We do not have the power to change this.

Anyone who does much flying knows the unsettling effect even of a small shift in time on the human frame. This is because our clocks are out of synchronisation with our surroundings. What is being proposed is that this should now be our fate for ever. When our clocks say it is noon, or midnight, they will always be lying. For the summer months, they will be lying twice as hard.

Why Berlin time, anyway? This is the question nobody likes to discuss. Why are Sweden, Germany, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Sicily, and everyone else on the Berlin time line, not required to experience the alleged benefits being offered by Rebecca Harris and her friends? It is hard to understand why – if it is so good for us – it is not good for them.

But it is easy to see that since 1893, when Kaiser Wilhelm II's arrogant and expansionist new German Empire adopted Mitteleuropaische Zeit (Central European Time to you), German power has been forcing its ideas of time on the rest of the Continent. First in 1914, and with redoubled force after 1940, the conquered nations of the Continent were instructed rather sharply to shift their clocks forward to suit the needs of German soldiers and German railways and German business.

A map of the present Central European Time Zone looks disturbingly like a map of a certain best-forgotten empire of 70 years ago. Would it really be silly to suspect that the neatness and standardisation fanatics of Brussels and Frankfurt, who have abolished almost every border in Europe, devised the European arrest warrant and the Euro passport and the European number plate and the European flag – and imposed a single currency on almost every state – would not also like a single time zone?

But wouldn't it also be fatal to their desire if people in Britain recognised that this was what was going on? Are the smiley, optimistic 'daylight-saving' lobby perhaps useful idiots in someone else's campaign? Rebecca Harris emphatically says that this is not so. But then, if it were, would she know?

Anyone in Britain who wants to live by Berlin time is welcome to do so, just as they are welcome to breakfast on bratwurst. There are good arguments, too, for schools and offices in some parts of the country to open earlier and close earlier in the dark months from November to February.

But that is quite different from our whole country being permanently shifted on to foreign time.

It is not too late to stop Mrs Harris's curious Bill if enough MPs – more responsive to the public than they once were since their recent embarrassments – can be persuaded by public protest to vote against it.

If we are foolish enough to hurry down this path, it is by no means certain that we shall ever be allowed back if we decide we do not like it. Once we have fallen in, who would be surprised by a quiet Brussels Directive making the change permanent, whatever Parliament does? Now is the time to save our own time.

Register your support by mailing your name and address to BritishTime@mailonsunday.co.uk or by printing off the form here and returning it to British Time Campaign, Mail on Sunday, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS.

Poor old IDS...a decent man who's been conned by the Fake Conservatives

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

For many years, most British Governments have followed a policy best called Fake Conservatism. This involves loudly pretending to do what the public wants. But while the country is distracted by these stunts and spectaculars, the Cabinet gets on with its real task of turning Britain into a multi-culti socialist Euro-Province.

That is why the most painful example of this policy is the vainglorious and often damaging use by Anthony Blair of our once-superb Armed Forces, in places where Britain has no national interest.

Meanwhile, he compelled those same Armed Forces to surrender to the criminal gang called the IRA, the only recent war in which our soldiers were used for proper national ends. He also crippled them with cuts.

Then there was Blunkettism. This began with a pretence that we were going to 'sack bad teachers', 'raise school standards' and so on, though of course continuing to ban selection by ability, the only thing that would do any good.

All that in fact happened was a great deal of testing, whose results were promptly rigged to suggest success. The outcome was that illiteracy, classroom disorder and low standards continued exactly as before, if not worse.

But before this was obvious, David Blunkett had moved on to the area of crime. Here too he was highly successful in improving the statistics, without improving the conditions.

Then there was terrorism, a perfect area for distraction. The Government could pretend to protect us against Osama Bin Laden, or some other sinister, hooded, bearded person crouched in a cave in Yemen, while failing to protect our homes against burglars – and so look decisive and 'tough'.

We reached the stage long ago when most thinking people could spot that this stuff was false coinage. Any sensible adult, hearing the word 'crackdown', instantly suspects that he is being gulled. But most of the media, being happy to act as the spokesmen and spokeswomen of power, duly report this bilge as if it were true.

Well, now we have the same thing happening with welfare. Mr Blair's New Labour Government is ably headed by his understudy David Cameron – while Mr Blair is on leave of absence addressing conventions of lavatory-paper makers. And among its many mini-Blunketts is poor old Iain Duncan Smith, a decent man fallen among liberals. IDS has indeed thought a lot about welfare.

But his colleagues forbade him to think about the real problem. This is that, since the catastrophic Labour Government of 1964-1970, the welfare state has deliberately encouraged parasitism, as well as flooding the country with professional social workers.

Nor can he actually do anything about the suicidal subsidy to single-mother families, which has helped destroy fatherhood and wreck our society.

So the IDS scheme will not work, and is certainly not the 'historic' document the servile BBC makes it out to be. But for a while it will stave off demands for a real reform. And when we wake up to the truth, we will be another dozen irrecoverable steps down the dark and crumbling stairway that leads to national extinction.

Sorry about that. I did warn you what would happen if you voted Tory.

Finally, a 'family' that Hollywood approves of

So that you don't have to, I have been to see the cosy lesbian film The Kids Are All Right, currently top of the cinema charts among our fashionable elite. I can't really recommend it, mainly because of the needless amount of four-letter language and the equally needless bedroom scenes, during which I checked my (silent) mobile phone for text messages and missed calls.

But it does contain some interesting things. It portrays a stable, two-parent family sympathetically, and assumes it is a good thing and deserves to survive. Hollywood doesn't do this for heterosexual marriage, preferring to defame the respectable suburbs in such rubbish as American Beauty and Revolutionary Road. It hints humorously at the possibility that even a lesbian couple aren't all that wild about one of their children turning out to be homosexual. It notices the cool, grown-up contempt many of today's young feel for their babyish, spoiled, Sixties-generation parents. And it is remarkably just and condemnatory about the cruel selfishness of men who don't take fatherhood seriously.

The superficially charming sperm-donor character, who reappears in his offspring's lives, is eventually dismissed by one of them with the quietly devastating words: 'I wish you'd been better.'

I think today's young are entitled to say that about my entire generation.

Did the Milibands really wear it with pride?

Edward Miliband and his Unwife are pictured with their new baby in posed shots. Father and mother are both, weirdly, wearing Remembrance Poppies on their indoor clothes (in her case, possibly her nightie).

Some questions arise. Why isn't the baby wearing one? And are we supposed to believe that these people – one the atheist scion of one of Britain's most glacially Marxist families, the other a pointedly unmarried London trendy – are wearing poppies because of their conservative pro-military patriotism? Or because the British Left have decided that this is a good way to try to fool people that they are really normal?

Personally I prefer the honest position taken by Channel 4 News's Jon Snow, who says he will wear his poppy in church but not on TV.

In these days when parliamentary whips hand out poppies to MPs, and the BBC hands them out to guests, they are no longer a sign that you have given to the British Legion. So not wearing one (and this year I started to do so only on Thursday)
is not a sign that you haven't given.

Don't swallow the riot baloney

Speaking as a former student rioter, who has repented of his ways, I would advise the Government to pay absolutely no attention to such people – let alone to accept the baloney that such events, mostly involving sons of the suburbs, are a sign of real discontent. Riots in free countries are not deep expressions of woe or oppression. They are a bit of fun for those taking part.

Every time I read about the so-called Poll-Tax Riots, reverently described as some sort of turning point, I grind my teeth. There may have been problems with the Poll Tax (though after 20 years of the deeply unfair Council Tax, maybe it deserves another look). And it may have played badly in the focus groups. But if anyone in Government was – or is now – influenced by the irruption of a load of violent, destructive yahoos into Central London, they should be ashamed of themselves.

******************
How the Chinese dictatorship must chortle at the idea that Britain is in a position to lecture Peking about its persecution of dissenters. Having chased us out of Hong Kong by merely frowning, China knows that our pretence of being a major world player is just that. If Mr Cameron is really concerned with liberty, there is much work to be done at home. In any case, giving a man moral advice while asking him for business is never a good idea.

More Impartiality and More Debate on the BBC

Those who read the previous posting may want to know about the remarkable sequel. The BBC Radio 4 programme 'Feedback', on Friday 5th November, broadcast a pre-recorded item which was severely critical of my intervention in the 'Today' programme four days before. You may listen here. The item begins at about two minutes 50 seconds into the programme and continues for about six minutes.

I objected strenuously to the fact that no attempt had been made to contact me about this, or to give me an opportunity to answer my critics (listeners will hear that such an opportunity was offered to Stephen Fry, who was criticised in the same programme - though he chose not to take it).

As a result of my complaints, and those of some others, the 12th November edition of the programme, to which you can listen here, offered me the opportunity to respond. The item is trailed at the very beginning, and commences a few minutes into the transmission.

I will say no more about this at present, but hope it may stimulate a rather more interesting debate about the nature of BBC bias, if it exists, than has been had here before. On Monday I intend to post a transcript of the key section of the 5th November programme.

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

Impartiality and Debate on the BBC

Some days ago, on Monday November 1, I was invited on to the BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme to discuss a report published by (among others) Professor David Nutt. Professor Nutt has been discussed here before and is known for his radical approach to the current laws on drugs. His report rather eye-catchingly suggested that alcohol is the most damaging drug available in Britain.

I would have posted the link to this broadcast long ago, but it has been broken since the programme was transmitted and was only fixed today, after I made e-mail and telephone pleas for this to be done. It has now been fixed (my thanks to Andy Walker at Radio 4, who took great trouble to see that this was done) so it can be found here.

From the chair, could I stress that I am not interested in rehearsing the arguments on this subject which have been held here more times than I care to remember. They are a dialogue of the deaf because the pro-drug advocates are making a moral case - for a society willing to pay the large penalties of unrestricted hedonism, widespread intoxication and undeserved pleasure, because that is what it likes.

But they will not admit this, and instead make their case under the cover of legalistic arguments, attempts to blur existing moral boundaries with obfuscation, and debatable versions of history (and indeed of present events). They also tend to pretend that they have no interest in the outcome of the debate, which I find incredible given their passion for their side of it.

What I wish to debate here (and I will respond only to postings on this subject) is the way in which the BBC handled the matter.

I have no idea what Professor Nutt seeks or wants. But I am in no doubt that reports such as his serve the purposes of the lobby I describe above. And it is my view that the BBC and much of the media accord them far greater status than they deserve.

Alas, the news bulletins of that day are not available on the web, so far as I know. If they were, it would be possible to show that the BBC gave the report great prominence and treated it as a serious contribution to science. They also made no substantial mention of Professor Nutt's controversial past, and accepted at face value the standing of the self-styled 'Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs'. Independent of whom or what?

Well, which of the hard experimental, predictive sciences is it based on? Certainly not Physics, Chemistry or Biology, or any of their subdivisions. It looks more like Sociology, that abstract and subjective discipline, to me. And even I have an 'A' level in that. It somehow manages to combine stomach ulcers, needles littering the streets, deforestation, road traffic accidents, absenteeism, domestic violence, blood-borne viruses, the decline in social cohesion, child neglect and many other disparate factors in its judgement. It claims to have devised a formula under which all these things are given their correct weighting in determining the danger of a particular drug.

How? Well, I quote from the section headed 'Scoring of the drugs on the criteria', which describes part of the process thus:

'Consistency checking is an important part of proper scoring, since it helps to minimise bias in the scores and encourages realism in the scoring. Even more important is the discussion of the group, since scores are often changed from those originally suggested as participants share their different experiences and revise their views.'

Is this objective experimental science? Are all of the categories studied even susceptible to objective measurement in the first place, let alone meaningfully combined with others (even if they are more readily measurable) which are wholly different?

I could not see, when I read the material, how this could possibly be given the weight accorded to a paper which recounted scientific experiments and their results conducted under laboratory conditions. In which case, why does it qualify for such uncritical reverence?

In his introduction to the item, Justin Webb said: 'We are being told today that alcohol is a more dangerous drug than heroin or crack cocaine, not of course to an individual user but to society generally. The message comes from Professor David Nutt, the former chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs who with colleagues on the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs has produced a very serious scientifically-argued attack on current drugs legislation or at least the way we view it.'

Note that description. 'Very serious, scientifically-argued.'

Please listen to the whole item. Note that when I say there is no 'war on drugs' Mr Webb interjects: 'Of course there is.'

And note that Professor Nutt also avers at the end: 'They (the Government) need to accept the fact that the Misuse of Drugs Act is way past its sell by date. We need to completely review the way in which we deal with all drugs, not just illegal drugs because that's an arbitrary and non-scientific division. We need to review the whole way in which society regulates, controls, reduces the harms of drugs.'

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

Work and Welfare, War and Remembrance

I'm distracted at the moment by various efforts to defend myself against misrepresentation, unfair attack and attempts at censorship. So I'll just offer a few brief comments on major topics of the moment.

I am unconvinced by plans to compel welfare recipients to go out and do such jobs as clearing up the mess in parks. This seems to me to fail on several counts. I'd be interested to see convicted vandals put to such work, specifically to scrubbing away the wall-paintings grandly known as 'graffiti', though I don't think it could be achieved without prison discipline. My knowledge of 'community service' projects suggests that it is very hard to get offenders to do a good diligent job, and that supervision of such things is often half-hearted, as the supervisors often don't believe very strongly in what they are doing, and have no real sanction if they do.

The other is that surely local authorities should be tackling such tasks themselves. Park-keepers, street-sweepers and other such people are vital to making a place look loved, a key part of maintaining order and civilisation. It is absurd that they should have been allowed to sack such staff in recent years, while keeping so many overpaid bureaucrats and politically correct timeservers on the public payroll. If these jobs are now to be done only by long-term claimants (or offenders) it will be very hard to get anyone to feel pride in doing them for a living wage, as should be the case.

In fact one of the main difficulties at the heart of Iain Duncan Smith's schemes is its reliance on a belief that somehow jobs will become available in this country in the private sector, and that the welfare state can be used to cure itself, without any fundamental attack on its central pillar. That central pillar is the welfare state's attempt to replace the married family, and especially the male breadwinner, with state subsidies. This has been combined with a general effort to feminise the workforce, and to compel young mothers to go out to work, whether single or married, as if this was definitely a good thing.

Together with that, as previously discussed, has come the effort to cover up national economic decline, and the inability to pay tolerable wages at the bottom end of the scale, which results from it, by encouraging mass immigration and allowing many such immigrants to do the low-wage jobs while living in squalid overcrowded circumstances which are largely uninvestigated. Meanwhile, people born here who could in theory do these jobs while still living at home are so badly educated, and so discouraged from work by the welfare culture, that there is little point in them working.

And in the meantime many households - especially those with one female parent alone - are essentially dependent on state handouts simply to survive. Making them work, and dump their children in dubious baby farms and day-orphanages, means that from at least having one parent at home, their poor innocent children now have none.

Unless these fundamental wrongs are put right, by serious restraints on mass immigration, a true reform of schools, and a serious attempt to end the persecution of the married family by the state and the courts, and the deliberate subsidising of rival forms of household, IDS's scheme will, in my view, amount to little. It is treating some of the symptoms without in any way trying to cure the basic disease. But there is a great wave of justifiable discontent among those in work against the huge taxes they have to pay, often to support neighbours who are plainly and visibly parasites. So apparently 'tough' measures of these may well be popular, even if they do not work. This is what conservatism is reduced to by the TV culture and mass democracy.

I find myself surprisingly sympathetic to Jon Snow, the Channel Four News presenter who is resisting clamour to make him wear a Remembrance Poppy on the TV. Mr Snow says rightly that we fought for the freedom to have any views we like, and not to be told to wear things. And the absurd early poppy-wearing by TV presenters and politicians this year has put me off wearing one myself - though I'll probably don one on Thursday, the actual Remembrance Day, and again on Sunday, when it is more thoroughly commemorated.

This is despite the fact that Mr Snow once called me a 'Hitlerite' at Keflavik Airport, because I didn't share his views on the failure of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik (I was delighted it had flopped, not being convinced at the time that Mr Gorbachev's intentions were genuine, and also fearing that President Reagan was perhaps a little naive).

Gosh, how long ago all that seems, that ridiculous gathering where the Soviet Zils were too big for the USSR's tiny embassy garage in Reykjavik, and I swam across a volcanically heated swimming pool to test claims that Raisa Gorbachev spoke English (she didn't), and the Icelandic police, keeping us away from the summit site with jolly good humour in a furious gale, shouting: 'You see, this place shouldn't be called Iceland - it should be called 'Windland'. They were right. The hotels were so crowded that I stayed instead as a paying guest with a delightful Icelandic family, who told incessant jokes about their rather wonderful small country.

But I digress. Readers of my book 'The Rage Against God', will find in there a description of the Remembrance Days of my childhood which had a power and poignancy they lack today. This was partly because at that time most adults had direct experience of war, and the grief was still raw and unhealed. And partly because we, and our cities, looked more sombre and dark, and the red of the poppies was more evocative and startling against the sooty buildings and universally dark clothes. I still find the moment when the great guns are fired off and the silence begins almost unbearable. But I don't think it an excuse for political humbug.

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

The dictator with a Royal warrant: Why HAS Prince Andrew been to Kazakhstan six times in seven years?

Lost amid the lonesome waste spaces of the Asian steppe, the next North Korea is slowly appearing amid the winter blizzards and the blast-furnace summer heatwaves of one of the most inhospitable climates in the world.

This time the unhinged regime comes without the trappings of Marxism and is blessed – or cursed – with the wealth that comes from oil and gas.

The country also enjoys a strange sort of British Royal warrant – Prince Andrew is a frequent and honoured visitor, though the reasons for his many journeys to this remote destination remain unknown.

And he also sold his former marital home to a Kazakh businessman for an unexpectedly high price.

You may think you know about Kazakhstan because of the silly film satire Borat. In fact, this sordid and worrying country's rulers would much prefer you to believe that Sacha Baron Cohen's ignorant and frivolous travesty, which involved no visits to the place itself, was the truth. For the reality is far worse.

The best place to start on a journey to the real Kazakhstan is its astonishing new capital, Astana, a work of megalomania that brings to mind Nicolae Ceausescu's gigantic folly in Bucharest and the silent, deserted streets and squares of Pyongyang.

It also reminded me of the spooky Burmese forbidden city of  Naypidaw, built, like Astana, in the midst of nowhere so the rulers can be as far as possible from the ruled. People Power will never be able to find its way here. It would starve to death on the way.

The word 'Astana' means 'Capital City'. This, as Kazakhs wryly point out, is rather like calling your dog 'Dog' or your wife 'Wife'.

Most people think that the name is just temporary, and the country's all-powerful autocrat, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is slowly summoning up the courage to name the place after himself.
What we know about President Nazarbayev comes from two sharply conflicting sources.

One is the not exactly critical biography of his progress from nomad hutment to steepled palace, via the Communist Party, written by Britain's penitent survivor of the sleaze era, Jonathan Aitken.

In this work, the leader emerges as a benevolent father of his nation, popular, sensitive to criticism, with a solid record of achievement, etc, etc.

The other version comes from a joyfully malicious and utterly self-serving volume by Nazarbayev's former son-in-law Rakhat Aliyev, driven from the boss's inner circle after a quarrel and now in hiding from the fist of his wrath.

It is in this work that you will read that President Nazarbayev is alleged to have three living wives. The first is his 'official' wife, Sara Alpysovna, who still maintains the position but is said to live in Almaty – hundreds of miles from her husband and his busy life.

The second is a former air hostess aboard the presidential jet. The third is said to be a former Miss Kazakhstan.

Many educated people in Kazakhstan know the names of these women, but nothing about them is ever published in the fearful and persecuted Press, which is allowed limited freedom provided it never criticises the President himself.

Libel is a criminal offence – not, as in civilised countries, a civil matter. One critical newspaper, Respublika, has suffered particularly hard. In 2002 its offices mysteriously burned down.

The culprits hung a headless dead dog from the ruins and left a note saying: 'You won't get another warning.'

Now the paper's presses have been confiscated and it appears in a crudely stapled, computer-printed version on newsstands.

The President carefully creates the illusion that his country is a law-governed democracy, while making sure that in reality it is not. Protest demonstrations are allowed, but only in remote parks, hard to reach by any method.

But Europe's powers happily join in the fiction that Kazakhstan is a Western-style democracy, as they do not wish to offend or destabilise a man who controls a large part of the world's oil and gas.

As usual, corruption and repression go hand in fist. The country languishes at No 105 in Transparency International's league table of corruption, alongside Argentina, Algeria, Moldova and Senegal. And it stands at No 162 on the Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders.

International monitors say the police routinely torture suspects. A Human Rights activist to whom I spoke in his remote premises in the far suburbs of Alamaty – but who shall remain nameless for his own safety – told alarming tales of how he and others had been falsely charged with criminal offences and imprisoned, so their persecution could not be officially recorded as political.

He said with a shrug: 'In this country no one is actually persecuted for his political views. They always find another way to get you.'

One campaigner, Evgeni Zhovtis, director of the Kazakhstan International Bureau For Human Rights And The Rule Of Law, was jailed last September for four years after a traffic accident in which a pedestrian died, but which seems not to have been the driver's fault.

The dead man's own mother pleaded for leniency, but the driver still received a specially heavy sentence.

Criticising the President in person is now specifically illegal, under Article 318 of the Kazakh criminal code. Even before this law came into force, writing a story for a magazine about the President's private wealth earned my informant a menacing visit from the KNB, more or less the successor of the old Soviet KGB, but without the charm.

Soon after that he was violently attacked in the unlit hallway of the block of flats where he lives by large, gruff men who warned him to shut up.

Genuine opposition is difficult. Parties need to collect huge numbers of signatures to register, and the authorities routinely disallow many of the signatures.

According to Aliyev, the opposition parties that are permitted to operate are fakes, maintained purely for public relations. Real opponents meet unpleasant fates.

In November 2005 a critic of the President, Zamanbek Nurkadilov, was discovered dead with a gun by his side. An official inquiry said he had killed himself.

But the dead man's lawyer wondered if anyone could have committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the chest before putting a third bullet into his head.

Not long afterwards another prominent opponent of the regime, Altynbek Sarsenbayev, was found dead in the mountains near Almaty, with his driver and bodyguard, in highly suspicious circumstances.

Aliyev's book casts serious doubt on the official trial of those accused of the crime, and makes sensational allegations about who ordered the death.

Nazarbayev likes to win general elections with around 91 per cent of the vote, and is usually careful to do so, even if this involves paying little attention to actual ballot papers, or so his former son-in-law Aliyev alleges.

He triumphed in 1991, had his term extended until 2000 in 1995, was re-elected in 1999 and again in 2005. Opposition candidates usually understand in advance that they are there for show.

Nazarbayev – unlike anyone else in Kazakhstan – can stand for election to the supreme post as often as he likes. Others are limited to two terms.

This lawless dispensation is non-transferable – except perhaps to a future son and heir.
For now there may be a dynasty on the way. Aliyev alleges that the mysterious third Presidential wife, married to the increasingly Muslim President in an Islamic ceremony valid under Sharia law, bore Nazarbayev a son in Turkey in April 2005.

Having read Aliyev's book, crammed with scurrilous elite gossip too racy to repeat here, and blood-freezing allegations about the conduct of state affairs, I am not surprised that Nazarbayev wants to get hold of the author, or that the author moves house frequently.

His former father-in-law has already made strenuous efforts to get him back to Kazakhstan.
In this account the 'Godfather-in-law' is portrayed as the super-rich, mildly comical but also sinister chief of a corrupt and thuggish autocracy which sometimes kills its critics.

He is also accused of trying to set up a Kim il Sung-style dynasty, moving from wife to wife to wife to achieve a male heir, like an Asian Henry VIII.

Nazarbayev is one of the only two people left in the former USSR who also held power in the days of Communist rule. The other is his neighbour in Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, infamous for his nasty habit of tipping boiling water over dissenters.

How on earth has Kazakhstan, such a strange and creepy country, been appointed to the chair of the Organisation For Security And Co-operation In Europe? And how has it found its way into the heart of Prince Andrew? Perhaps his role as Britain's Special Representative for International Trade is involved, though it would be nice to know exactly how.

The Prince is a close friend of a prominent and glamorous member of the Astana elite, Goga Ashkenazi. He is also said to have gone goose-hunting with the President himself, and to have made surprisingly frequent visits to Kazakhstan.

He has even been seen in a not-specially luxurious Almaty expatriates' bar, Soho, where staff remember him arriving with a large group of mainly British people, and asking the lively resident band to play Prince's 1984 hit Purple Rain.

The Duke's old home, Sunninghill Park, was recently bought for £15 million – £3 million more than anyone expected – by a Kazakh businessman, who has since left it empty. Whatever is going on here?

One Kazakh journalist said to me that 'there are many ways of saying thank you in Kazakhstan. But this method – paying a higher price for what you buy than it is worth – is a common method of rewarding a friend'. If Kazakhstan can do such favours for our Royal Family, where else is its influence felt?

We need to know because Kazakhstan is the ninth biggest country in the world by area, larger than the whole of Western Europe. It is one of the beneficiaries of the enormous Caspian Sea bubble of oil and gas, as important as the oilfields of Arabia and being eyed all the time by China, India, Russia and the USA.

With a population of 16 million and more or less indefensible borders, it is a likely battlefield in any future war for energy.

I first came here 20 years ago in Soviet days, when Kazakhstan was Moscow's cupboard of guilty secrets, its launching ground for space flights and its nuclear playground. In the fading days of the Evil Empire, I visited the secret city of Kurchatov (not on any map), where a Geiger counter was installed in the main street to check radiation levels.

I walked gingerly among the shattered sheets of black glass, where the earth had melted under the heat of Nikita Khrushchev's H-bomb tests. I visited survivors of Stalin's concentration camps, unable to leave their imprisonment in Karaganda because their homes and families had vanished while they were enslaved.

And I watched the lift-off of a Russian space rocket, crude and simple (you could see the paintbrush marks on it) and more or less identical to the one which had sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961.

And I flew over the dried-up Aral Sea, the world's single greatest environmental disaster, caused by idealistic communists. The sea is still mostly desert. The space launches continue, paid for by Moscow, but Kazakhstan has long been able to assert its independence from the Kremlin, thanks to the flow of oil wealth.

This status also owes much to Nazarbayev himself, who learned the dark arts of power at the end of the Eighties when he clawed his way into the local Communist Party leadership. During his time as a senior communist, there were riots in the then capital of Kazakhstan, Almaty.

Many suspect that Nazarbayev moved the capital hundreds of miles north, to the desert, to make sure he would be safe from any such thing.

I reached Astana on the night express, which runs from Almaty, taking 13 hours as it rambles across tawny grassland, desolate by day and without lights at night. I arrived on a raw autumn morning at a new and ultra-modern station.

And there it was, rising out of the flatlands in a bend in the Irtysh river, its skyscrapers sparkling in the pale sun. And what strange structures they are.

Two, clad in shiny gold, are known locally as The Beer Cans. Another, referred to as The Cigarette Lighter because of its odd shape, recently caught fire.

In the midst of an enormous avenue stands the Bayterek Tower, which is meant to symbolise a complex Kazakh myth involving a tree, a dragon and an egg. Inside the egg, visitors can place their palms in a bronze handprint of President Nazarbayev (the national anthem used to play every time this happened, but it became too annoying and it has now been silenced).

From here there are fine views of this curious hybrid of Pyongyang, East Berlin and Dubai. In one direction is the White Palace, with its blue roof, dome and spire, symbol and seat of Nazarbayev's power and startlingly like Ceausescu's florid Eighties monstrosity in Bucharest.

Do all tyrants like this heavy, icing-like architecture?

At the other end of the prospect is a curious shopping mall, designed by Britain's Norman Foster, built to resemble a nomad's tent, but containing a branch of Debenhams on the ground floor and an all-weather beach, at the top. As I trudge back towards the palace, I realise there is still more to see.

Beyond its arrogant bulk, and across the river, sits a blue and grey pyramid, also the work of Lord Foster. It crouches on a small hill beyond a scruffy park. This contrast between grandeur and grit is typical of Astana. Look closely at much of the site and there are cracks, missing tiles, broken glass, graffiti and evidence that Astana does not have enough public lavatories.

As I approach the Pyramid (officially a Palace Of Peace And Reconciliation) armed men wearing berets pop out of a hole in the hillside and look at me. They seem nervous.
'We are here to watch for the Wahhabis [members of Osama Bin Laden's Muslim sect]', explains one, demonstrating that Central Asian dictatorships, just as much as
Western democracies, know how to fan the fear of Islamist terror.

After reassuring him that I do not belong to this or any other fanatical sect, I carry on past the pyramid.

Here I encounter a curious monument. At its base is a statue of President Nazarbayev.
Above a towering, fluted column is a gilded bird that looks remarkably like a parrot spreading its wings to squawk.

In a nearby conference hall, a vast and garish mural depicts the President smiling among his loyal, happy people, in the unmistakable style of North Korea's Kim il Sung.

But beyond all these boastful structures a number of shacks huddle against the scything Asian wind. After much banging on doors and braving nasty watch dogs, I find that these dismal places are still inhabited by people little short of desperate.

One of them – again I will not name him – dwells there in smelly squalor with a tiny, pale child, an aged parent and a sadly disabled brother.

Offering me bread and tea with the heartbreaking hospitality of the desperately poor, he says he expects to be moved out sooner or later to make way for the next stage of this Dubai of the Steppes. But he will not be compensated.

Any doubts of the leader's grotesque self-worship fled away when I toured the museum – once his palace – he has erected to himself in the older part of the city.

Visitors are compelled to wrap their feet in blue plastic bags and walk slowly past ludicrous exhibits.

Here we can see faded pictures of his humble childhood, the living leader's old school reports (top grades in all subjects), a painting of him with his father amid the sheep pastures, his gigantic desk, his ranks of telephones, the robes given to him by the universities that have awarded him honorary degrees, the President's own books in many languages, a copy of Jonathan Aitken's biography (but not one of Aliyev's), various gross nick-nacks presented by foreign delegations, a tennis ball signed by Boris Becker and a dagger (of all things) sent by Alexander Lukashenko, dictator of Belarus.

It is a great strain to tour this warehouse of embarrassing rubbish without giggling, but I am sure that any mirth would land me in serious trouble.

For it truly is not funny that such a large part of the Earth's surface should have escaped from Soviet tyranny only to fall into the hands of this vain and cliched dictatorship.

But so it is, and so it is likely to remain, propped up and condoned by the very people in the West who claim to be the friends of liberty.

Once again, I am forced to reflect on how immensely lucky we are in Britain to have real freedom and a real rule of law, and to be able to know what our rulers get up to in private, and to laugh at them.

These are great and rare luxuries, and all the oil billions of Kazakhstan cannot buy them. 

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

Two 'conservatives' humble the heirs of Nelson ... oh, how the French must be smirking

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Willam Hague was dead right when he warned against the EU's attempt to create its own armed forces, increasing harmonisation of economic policy and a Europe-wide justice system. He thundered: 'Together these things amount to a blueprint for a single European state.'

And he was equally right to chide the Prime Minister for his feebleness, saying he was 'going with the flow' of recent alarming developments in the EU.

'Like the little boy who cried wolf too many times, nobody now believes the Prime Minister when he says he will fight to protect Britain's interests in Europe.'

You didn't notice? Alas, Mr Hague said all these things when he was still at least pretending to be a conservative. His words, entirely applicable this week, were spoken on December 4, 1998, when the PM was David Cameron's hero and exemplar, Anthony Blair. Mr Blair had just been mauled over Britain's colossal contributions to the EU, as happens
to all British Premiers.

Then, as if to emphasise our national weakness, he had sought to appease our European rulers still more by surrendering control over our own armed forces. This shameful event, the St Malo Agreement, is still far too little known because it was obscured at the time by the Budget row. But I remember my shudder of apprehension and disgust. A beautiful warship, the now-scrapped HMS Birmingham, was moored in the French port of St Malo, so that British naval power could be formally ended beneath the shadow of the White Ensign.

How the French must have smirked to see the heirs of ­Nelson reduced to providing a stage set for the symbolic cancellation of all those great naval victories that secured British independence from the Con­tinent, especially Trafalgar – for which they have never forgiven us and never will.

This agreement is the main trunk of the deal under which we have now absurdly agreed to 'share' warships – and troops and nuclear matters – with France, though its roots actually lie in an earlier document signed under John Major's leadership by Michael Portillo, in Bordeaux in November 1996.

The Cameron-Sarkozy bargain has been treated as a joke because it is so obviously silly to imagine that Britain and France could ever agree on how to use such things if their interests differ. But those who laugh at it miss its point. From now on, neither country has any independent defence policy. Both have handed it to the EU.

The French don't care about this because they long ago recognised their defeat by Germany in 1940 as permanent, and resolved to live with it in return for prosperity and the outward appearance of grandeur. That, enshrined in the Elysee Treaty of 1963, is the unspoken pact at the heart of the EU.

Just as the original Franco-German currency deal was the beginning of the euro, the union of Europe's two remaining serious military and naval powers is intended as the beginning of Federal European armed forces. These will be controlled by the new post-Lisbon 'legal personality', the European Superstate they keep telling us doesn't exist.

Well, it does exist, and Mr Cameron and Mr Hague are its obedient servants.


A sad end to friendly rivalry on India's front line

What a pity that the mad but hugely enjoyable Indo-Pakistan border ceremony is to
come to an end. Having witnessed it from the Pakistani side, I can see it would be hard on the knees, but the really good thing about it was that it actually promoted friendliness.

I was told the 'opposing' teams of soldiers – having goose-stepped almost into each other's faces and glowered at each other till their moustaches touched – often gathered afterwards for a convivial curry. And the cheering, flag-brandishing crowds were a good deal less menacing than British football fans confronting rivals at a local derby.

It may even have been a safety valve. And no conflict in the world is more in need of one.


'I give in' – the words written on Cameron's heart

The largely powerless Strasbourg Human Rights court has functioned for years as an excuse for British governments that badly wanted to do stupid, liberal things – but feared punishment at the polls.

They could claim that they were 'forced' to do these things by the raggle-taggle judges in their palace on the banks of the curiously named River Ill.
Oddly enough, it was David Cameron himself who punctured this delusion, by promising in an unwise moment to pass a 'British Bill of Rights' (we already have one, but this Oxford-educated ignoramus doesn't seem to know this).

So his whinnying claim that he 'had no choice' but to yield to the demands of a drug-hazed axe-killer and give votes to serving prisoners is particularly contemp­tible. He had a choice. He just preferred not to exercise it. If Britain pulled out of the Strasbourg court, and resolved to ­regulate its own liberties, nobody would lift a finger to stop us.

This man has 'I give in' written on his heart (see how long his tough line on immigration lasted). I advise all news­papers to keep the headline 'Cameron backs down on . . .' set permanently in large type. We are going to need it a lot.


**************************
The interesting thing about Professor David Nutt and his silly pseudo-scientific report about drugs last week is that this pitiful stuff was treated with seriousness by the BBC and several major newspapers. Why? Our media and our politics are deeply corrupted by drug abuse now and in the past. They still won't admit they were wrong.



**************************
Why was it even necessary to tell us about a bomb in a freight plane that didn't go off? Is everything we are being told about it true? And I still haven't seen a convincing, satisfactory explanation of precisely how these devices could have been detonated. Remember that neither the shoe bomb nor the underpants bomb ever went off.



**************************
The widespread acceptance of pornography, bad language and general sexual licence make child sex abuse easier and more likely. Surely that is one of the most striking lessons from the inquiry into the horrible goings-on at Little Ted's Nursery in Plymouth. The monstrous Vanessa George created an atmosphere in which staff felt it 'prudish' to challenge her behaviour. In a world where people are ashamed to be prudes, and unashamed of pornographic dirt, this is what you get. Smut matters.


**************************
Some public figures attract a sort of love from their admirers. One such is Matthew Parris, the radio presenter and columnist who appears so sweetly reasonable. Is he as he appears? On Wednesday, Mr Parris, in the course of a rather acid attack on me in front of a London audience, gave what I shall politely describe as a severely inaccurate account of something I had said on Radio 4. (Details are below.) I have asked him to correct it but he shows no sign of doing so. If he is as reasonable as he likes to sound, he will put this right.