Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 345

Happy St Crispian's Day, and a few retorts and comments

If I hadn't been travelling last week I would have marked Trafalgar Day, which fell on 21st October, on this site. As it was, I toasted the immortal memory of Horatio, Viscount Nelson, victor of Trafalgar, Copenhagen and the Nile, in fizzy beer in a foreign bar, with a select group of companions. But having missed Trafalgar, let's recall instead another great English anniversary, now fading into obscurity and myth, that of Agincourt - as portrayed by Shakespeare in 'Henry V' - and particularly King Harry's great speech before battle - Laurence Olivier's 1944 rendering of this can be found on YouTube.

'This day is called the feast of Crispian: He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say "To-morrow is Saint Crispian". Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars. And say "These wounds I had on Crispin's day..."

'...This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, from this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.'

Let's prove King Harry right, by remembering it today.

As we forget these things, we forget who we are and cease to be what we used to be. In my view, this makes us worse, not better, than we were before.

Now, to your comments. There is alas a vast backlog, some not even here but in other places on the web which I have found during late night sessions in wonky internet cafes, far, far away.

Alleged Cruelty to, and Intolerance of, Unwed Mothers

Going back two weeks, I recall the sad misunderstanding by some ultra-feminists - who think themselves so righteous that they do not need to consider their positions at all - of my suggestion that we should give nine months' notice of a cessation of benefits for unmarried mothers. Somehow or other, this far from anti-female position is classified as being such, and so dismissed without thought.

Few seemed to get the significance of the nine months. So I will explain it. It's my view that the current state subsidies for unwed motherhood - especially the housing - are an incentive for unmarried pregnancy. Given the current state of British manhood, and the fairly wretched standard of living available to the unskilled worker trying to support a family, it is perfectly reasonable for a young woman to get herself with child and, in effect, become a bride of the state.

The state won't come home drunk and beat her up. The state won't abandon her when her pregnancy first starts to show. The state won't two-time her and dump her. The state will come up with regular, if fairly basic, payments and will provide a roof over her head more or less indefinitely.

So, far from condemning these young women, I am saying that their actions are rational under the laws and conditions created by the state. The female instinct for motherhood is powerful, strong and good. It is the state which has, by destroying the marriage pact and substituting the current arrangements, created a way of life which is, by all statistical measures, likely to be worse for the children who are born into and raised in one-parent households.

If the benefits were withdrawn, and if society once again began to disapprove of women embarking on motherhood without a husband, I believe most (obviously not all) of these young women would not take this course. Those who did would have to take responsibility for themselves, or get their families to do so, or get married. And the long struggle to re-establish marriage, that great cornerstone of liberty and civilisation, could begin.

This raises plenty of other questions. For a start, would I approve if they continued to be promiscuous, and aborted the resulting children? No. I am against abortion, regarding it as the murder of an innocent person, and cannot myself think of any circumstances where adoption would not be better. I am open to argument about cases where the mother's life is threatened by the pregnancy, but I believe such instances are in fact extremely rare in the days of modern medicine (we also get into complex moral questions about intention here, which simply do not arise in the case of the great majority of abortions. In general, the issue is raised to throw dust in the eyes of the gullible).

Apart from my general moral objection, I am also against readily-available abortion because of its propaganda effect. I think its widespread acceptance as backstop contraception (as pioneered in the USSR, where abortions came to outnumber live births), along with the general encouragement of reliance on contraceptives, actually encourages promiscuity. Certainly its availability in recent years has not led to its becoming 'safe, legal and rare', the goal its proponents claim to seek. Rather, it is possibly safe (I think there are doubts about its long-term effects), legal and increasingly common, and in many cases is resorted to many times by the same person.

What about rape victims? Contrary to various lies and misrepresentations spread about me by people who prefer smear to truth, I believe that rapists should be severely punished (though only after fair and unprejudiced jury trials with an effective presumption of innocence). But I do not see why a child conceived in such an act should be condemned to death for an act in which he or she had no possible part.

Yes, I genuinely, truly believe that sexual intercourse should take place only within lifelong marriage. But no, I don't imagine for a moment that a society which enforces this moral view through disapproval of other relationships, and by refusing to subsidise those who breach this code, will be entirely chaste. Of course it won't. Chastity in one's past life is not a requirement for marriage, though a lot of anti-religious people seem to think it is. What is required is fidelity after marriage ('forsaking all other', as the 1662 book requires).

But people will, if they choose another course, have to live with the consequences of their actions and certainly won't get the active encouragement by the state, using other people's money extorted by that state under threat of jail, as they can now. Will such a society be cruel? In some ways, undoubtedly, though generally the cruelty will not in my view be the fault of the laws or the morality, but it will be the fault of those who acted selfishly and in defiance of the moral rule that children should be raised within stable marriages, and that fidelity, constancy and mutual support are superior to promiscuity, serial relationships and the casual abandonment of children.

But it would be nothing like as cruel as what we have now, where the desires and pleasures of adults always trump the needs of children - that great voiceless multitude of victims who suffer from the divorce and promiscuity culture more than anyone, and who revenge themselves on our callous society when they reach adulthood, and are in many cases unable to perform the duties of a civilised human being.

A blogger called 'JDA', in an interesting and largely generous comment on my chapter on this issue in 'The Abolition of Britain', still manages to accuse me of 'intolerance' towards unwed mothers, because I conclude that the stigma against this style of life is necessary. I disagree. My chapter is thoroughly sympathetic to the charities which used to seek better treatment for unmarried mothers and especially for their innocent children. It says that it is quite unfair that illegitimacy should be seen as a fault in the child who is illegitimate. What control did he or she have in this? But there has to be some responsibility somewhere, and surely it lies with the parents of the illegitimate child. And I mean both parents. Parishes used to pursue the fathers of such children quite hotly until we urbanised in the 19th century. DNA now enables us to do the same, if we wish. I believe the great majority of pregnancies are the result of conscious, rational decision. I think it wrong to decide deliberately to raise a child without a father. All studies and statistics show that - in general - children in such households will have poorer life chances than those raised in stable marriages. Heroic individual efforts may overcome this, just as married couples may through negligence or other wickedness destroy the futures of their children. But the dice are heavily loaded against a good outcome in a fatherless home (especially for boys) and it seems plain wrong to me to risk this deliberately.

I am not sure how it adds up to 'intolerance' to be ready to state this publicly. I am not proposing criminal penalties, or the sort of persecution now often visited (for instance) on the disabled by cruel mobs. I am just saying that society must distinguish, if it is to survive, and that is bound to mean that those who choose to raise children outside wedlock suffer some disadvantages in law and status. The fact that I am prepared to say this does not help my case, and I know it. But I think anyone involved in social policy must be ready to accept all the consequences of what he proposes. It is precisely because the Left refuse to do this that they are so blind to the damage that they do. Intolerance is, as far as I know, an unwillingness to tolerate things you do not like. I recognise that in a society based upon lifelong marriage there will be people who will not or cannot conform. I think they should be tolerated and where necessary protected from those who would do them harm. But I do not think they should be encouraged or subsidised, or that children should be taught that these distinctions do not matter. They do.

Defenders of easy divorce often fail to think about what they are saying. Here's an example. Christopher Charles posted: 'Peter Hitchens's desire to keep everyone married forever is just odd.

'I was married for 24 years. Towards the end of that time we grew apart, separated and divorced. I don't look back at that as a failure. [Fact is, in an earlier age, one of shorter life expectancy, chances are one of us would have died by then and the marriage would indeed have been 'life long'.] For the most part it was a success.

'We separated without too much rancour. Within a shortish time we forgave one another and now have cordial relations. Rule number one was never to use the kids [who were both under the age of ten when we separated] as pawns and we haven't. They've grown up healthy, emotionally intelligent and well adjusted. Quite what purpose would have been served by forcing their mother and me to stay together completely baffles me. Perhaps Mr Hitchens could explain?'

Well, here's an attempt. As another contributor has pointed out, Mr Charles is not necessarily typical in having 'never used the kids as pawns'. In fact he is highly untypical. And, though I know nothing of his circumstances and wouldn't dream of commenting upon them, I'd make a couple of cautionary comments. It would presumably be in his interests to believe that his children have grown up 'healthy, emotionally-intelligent and well-adjusted' despite their parents' split. But would everyone else involved agree? Is Mr Charles capable of objectivity on the matter? Or Mrs Charles? And how would the outcome have differed had there been no divorce?

As for 'forcing him and his wife to stay together', lifelong marriage cannot actually do that, and does not. What it does is alter the rules under which people live, promoting unselfishness and strengthening the family and private life at the expense of the state and of greedy commerce.

Even in the days before divorce existed, the Church permitted separation, and so should the state. Anyone can leave if they want to. What was not permitted was remarriage. You made your marriage work, as promised, or you didn't. But there was no remarriage of divorced persons with a living spouse (this is still the official doctrine of the C of E, though it is widely breached). In a society where marriage, and marriage alone, has legal and moral privileges, this matters quite a lot. In our current sexual anarchy, it doesn't really matter at all. Which is why men increasingly avoid marriage as a potential booby-trap in which they can lose everything in return for nothing much, and why women (knowing that men will not commit themselves to lifelong relationships any more) increasingly fear old age, and seek through such things as Botox and cosmetic surgery to hide or postpone it, as their value on the market falls.

If marriage is once and for life, people think harder before getting married. They think harder before getting pregnant. They don't reach for a divorce lawyer as soon as they encounter a bumpy patch, or when they get tired of each other. And women have a huge power over men, which they lose in a promiscuous society. Where sex outside marriage is frowned on and hard to find, men can only get what they want by giving something substantial in return. A serious feminist, concerned with the well-being of women rather than with a revolutionary campaign against the Christian ethic, would see this.

By the way, life expectancy hasn't altered all that much, as any study of old gravestones will tell you. Many people have lived into their 80s for centuries, and stayed married while doing so. Two of my grandparents lived to be nearly 100 years old. I suspect that the current young generation - especially the young women who smoke and drink far more than their grandmothers would ever have thought of doing - will die younger than my lot. The huge reduction in infant mortality thanks to better housing conditions, clean water and medical advances has, however, greatly increased the average lifespan. I am amazed that this silly suggestion, that our forebears didn't live very long, is repeated so often.

I don't expect most of my critics to pay any attention to any of this, except to mine it for quotes which they can misunderstand and misrepresent in ways that suit them. But I felt it necessary to state it anyway.

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

A chainsaw massacre... where the cost cutters end up spending £92bn MORE

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

What cuts? My favourite two facts about British public spending are these. Housing benefit, probably the single most fraud­ulent and wasteful state handout ever invented, costs more each year than the Army and the Royal Navy combined.

And while Labour spent £600 billion (roughly £10,000 for every human being in this country) in their last year in office, the supposedly vicious cutter George Osborne plans to spend £692.7 billion (£11,500 per head) in 2014-15, after his alleged chainsaw massacre. Britain remains bankrupt in most important ways.

We spend more than we earn. We pay huge numbers of people to do silly jobs, or to do nothing at all while pretending to be ill. Our public services, about which we are all supposed to be so sentimental, are often dreadful. And where this is so, it is usually not because of a shortage of money.

A good, well trained and dedicated doctor cannot be bought with cash, any more than a conscientious nurse or a clean hospital ward can be obtained by spending more. A smart new hospital building can be hosting MRSA within months of opening. Its nurses – now armed with costly and useless so-called degrees, but often lacking the dutiful discipline of their forebears – can still leave the old to die of dehydration or to fester in their own filth.

Comprehensive education is designed to be inferior to selective schooling, but is supposed to make us more equal, the fundamental purpose of our more- or-less communist state machine. Which is why politicians impose it on other people and use every wile and trick to avoid it for their own children.

Local government is an out-of-control disgrace, employing thousands of people on salaries they could never command in the real world, doing (or not doing) things that nobody wants, but shrieking predict­ably that the 'cuts' will force them to shut libraries and leave parks neglec­ted while the condom outreach workers multiply, the twinning trips continue and swollen 'Chief Executives' pay themselves the sort of salaries most of us cannot even dream of. But above all, like drug dealers ensuring a continuous clientele, we get people used to the idea that the State will provide – starting with the much-abused Educational Maintenance Allowance.

Given that our frightful state schools cannot train most of their pupils in the basic skills of work, this creates a huge pool of people who are permanently unemployed and unemployable – quite needlessly. For there is work – as the hard-working migrants from Eastern Europe who do so much of it daily prove. It is just not paid at the fantasy wages we seem to think we are entitled to. This cannot continue for ever. My own guess is that it will be swept away some time soon by a wave of terrible inflation, which will destroy the provident and the prudent as well as the parasites, and which finally will reduce this country to the Third World status it seems so anxious to attain.

The idea that the present Government is somehow facing the truth and acting boldly is ridiculous flattery, and we should stop encouraging it.

 

Sneering lout who did even more damage than Blair

The memoirs of Keith Richards are as self-serving as those of Anthony Blair. And in the end, it may well be Mr Richards who is more important. Mr Blair, like so many people of my generation, really wanted to be Mick Jagger and probably saw being Prime Minister as a poor second best – at least until he found out how rich modern politics can make a man.

And when the history of our times comes to be written by cold, dispassionate minds, they may well recognise that the utter destruction of a way of life by the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll cult was far more significant than anything Mr Blair did.

After all, he was only the junior partner in his biggest single deed, the half-witted war on Iraq with its seas of blood, its mountains of skulls and its irreparable damage to the power and influence of the West. But the Rolling Stones, or some of them anyway, were the spearhead of a colossal global cultural revolution, the results of which continue to echo down the years.

I have long believed that one of the most important moments in our history was the exoneration of Mr Richards from drugs charges in 1967. It may not have killed as many people as the Iraq War. But it helped to ruin many lives, and still does so. And Mr Richards was vaguely aware of it.

He told the judge in the case, David Block: 'We are not old men. We are not concerned with petty morals.' What did the judge make of this? Old he might have been, but he was not petty and he knew more about morals than Mr Richards ever will. He had survived the sinking by the Japanese of the aircraft carrier Hermes in the Indian Ocean in 1942 and (like my father) was present at the Battle of North Cape in 1943, perhaps the last great fleet action of the Royal Navy. But in the contest between the two worlds represented by the sneering lout in the dock and the distinguished man on the bench, the entire British establishment has long taken the side of the lout.

Mr Richards's drug conviction, like that of 'Sir Michael' Jagger, was overturned on appeal by the Lord Chief Justice in person. My liberal conservative colleague, Lord Rees-Mogg – then editor of The Times – rallied to the defence of Mr Jagger, allegedly a 'butterfly' broken on the wheel. Some butterfly. Some wheel.

Mr Richards is an old man now, a debauched, capering streak of living gristle who ought to be exhibited as a warning to the young of what drugs can do to you even if you're lucky enough not to choke on your own vomit.

Yet, far from being embarrassed, he goes on about it as if it was all a good thing. If he can even remember 1967, does he ever, in the long dark nights, wonder if he chose the right life or did any damage? I do hope so.

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

 

A word of praise for Lady Hale, whom I had not until now seen as a friend of marriage. Alone in the Supreme Court, she opposed the nasty un-English idea of pre-nuptial agreements, which insert built-in failure into every marriage, the way manufacturers put built-in obsolescence into cars. This change will make things worse.

'It is wrong,' she also correctly stated, 'to equate married with unmarried parenthood.'

Together with Harold Wilson's poorly designed divorce reforms of 1969, judicial scorn for the idea of lifelong marriage has transformed our society for the worse – causing great misery to millions of abandoned and heartbroken, wounded children.

It is good that somebody is at last criticising this. It would be better if a major political party recognised that a grave mistake was made in 1969, and began to put it right.

 

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

Yet more reason for a full, deep inquiry into so-called 'anti-depressants'. How many suicides have been prescribed these ill-researched and unpredictable pills, also possibly linked with rampage killings?

Both Yvonne Brown and her son Ben, who threw themselves to dreadful deaths from the Humber Bridge within weeks of each other, had been prescribed with 'anti-depressants'.

Is university really such a good thing? I spent three years learning to be a Trot

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

What are universities for anyway? I went to one and spent the whole time being a Trotsky­ist troublemaker at the taxpayers' expense, completely neglecting my course. I have learned a thousand times more during my 30-year remed­ial course in the University of Fleet Street, still under way.

I am still ashamed of the way I lived off the taxes of millions of people who would have loved three years free from the demands of work, to think and to learn, but never had the chance.

We seem to accept without question that it is a good thing that the young should go through this dubious experience. Worse, employers seem to have fallen completely for the idea that a university degree is essential – when it is often a handicap.

For many people, college is a corrupting, demoralising experience. They imagine they are independent when they are in fact parasites, living off their parents or off others and these days often doomed to return home with a sense of grievance and no job. They also become used to being in debt – a state that previous generations rightly regarded with horror and fear.

And they pass through the nasty, sordid rite of passage known as 'Freshers' Week', in which they are encouraged to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol and to lose what's left of their sexual inhibitions after the creepy sex educators have got at them at school. If they have learned self-disciplined habits of work and life, they are under pressure to forget all about them, suddenly left alone in a world almost completely stripped of authority.

And if they are being taught an arts subject, they will find that their courses are crammed with anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-traditional material. Proper literature is despised and 'deconstructed'. Our enviable national history is likewise questioned, though nothing good is put in its place.

Even if they are study­ing something serious, their whole lives will be dominated by assumptions of political correctness, down to notices in the bars warning against 'homophobia' and other thought crimes.

I think this debauching of the minds and bodies of the young is more or less deliberate. The horrible liberal Woodrow Wilson, who eventually became President of the United States, was originally an academic who once blurted out the truth as seen by many such people. He said in a rare moment of candour: 'Our aim is to turn out young men as unlike their fathers as possible.'

Well, look at the modern world as governed by graduates who despise their fathers' views, and what do you see? Idealist wars that slaughter millions, the vast corruption of the welfare state, the war on the married family – and in this country the almost total disappearance of proper manufacturing industry.

Rather than putting an entire generation in debt, the time has come to close most of our universities and shrink the rest so they do what they are supposed to do – educating an elite in the best that has ever been written, thought and said, and undertaking real hard scientific research.

Or do these places exist only to hide the terrible youth unemploy­ment that is a result of having a country run by graduates?


Embarrassing dancing can't get a message across, Ann

Will we ever be able to forget those pictures of Ann Widdecombe trying to dance? Heaven knows, some people can't and shouldn't dance. I am one of them.

The last time I tried was when I was required to do so with the beautiful female staff of the North Korean consulate in Shenyang, China. It was part of the price of getting a visa to go to Kim Jong Il's paradise, and worth paying for me (though not for the poor ladies).

But Miss Widdecombe – a fundamentally thoughtful person and the author of intelligent novels – was also paying a price. It is one which anyone must consider who is trying to get serious ideas across to a population that isn't very interested in them. If you even want to be heard in the modern world, let alone listened to, then you must seek to become some sort of celebrity. This is the new aristocracy and the new priesthood, and if you don't belong to it you are nobody.

There have been dark nights when I have wondered if I should try to get myself on to one of these programmes, swallowing grubs or enduring the company of morons on live TV, or making some sort of exhibition of myself, in the hope that people might in that case read my books and listen to what I have to say.

I decided not to try because I concluded that even if I did these things, it would be the terrible dancing, or the dinner of weevils, or the absurd costume that would be remembered. People still wouldn't pay any attention.

How lucky David Cameron is, to have been appointed a celebrity by his media friends, and so not required to galumph round a stage in funny clothes to get his miserable message across.


China's jackboot marches on

The Chinese police state doesn't really care that Liu Xiaobo has won the Nobel prize. The Peking junta are irritated, but it won't have spoiled their day. And ten, 20, 30 years from now China will still be a tyranny, censored by what a group of Chinese writers recently called 'The Invisible Black Hand', a system by which an anonymous telephone call can stop a book or an article being published anywhere.

By contrast, Nobel awards to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa all helped to bring down the Kremlin's evil empire, causing genuine grief and ­dismay to its leaders.

We are all going to have to learn to share the planet with a new superpower which, having been cut off from the Christian enlightenment, is not ashamed to crush its critics – a boot stamping on a human face for ever.

Why, we'll ask, did we give our nation away...

If an occupying power did to us what the European Union does – carted off huge piles of national wealth, robbed us of our right to make our own foreign policy or laws, abolished our passports, compelled us to import its goods at preferential rates, cut us off from the English-speaking world while forcing us to allow in ­millions of continental workers (inclu­ding doctors who cannot speak English), dem­anded the right to arrest our people and carry them off to unfair trials on the Continent, ordered our MPs and courts about, closed rural post offices, fined market traders for selling vege­tables in pounds and ounces – we'd be in revolt.

But because our own political leaders allow this to happen, anyone who opposes the EU membership that lies behind all this is dismissed as an extremist or meaninglessly sneered at as a 'Little Englander'. One day, people will wonder why.

******************************
Why do we have an Equality and Human Rights Commission? Who asked for it? Who needs it? Who would miss it if it were abducted by aliens?

Lattes, beach barbecues (and dodging missiles) in the world's biggest prison camp

It is lunchtime in the world's biggest prison camp, and I am enjoying a rather good caffe latte in an elegant beachfront cafe. Later I will visit the sparkling new Gaza Mall, and then eat an excellent beef stroganoff in an elegant restaurant.

Perhaps it is callous of me to be so self-indulgent, but I think I at least deserve the coffee. I would be having a stiff drink instead, if only the ultra-Islamic regime hadn't banned alcohol with a harsh and heavy hand.

Just an hour ago I was examining a 90ft-deep smuggling tunnel, leading out of the Gaza Strip and into Egypt. This excavation, within sight of Egyptian border troops who are supposed to stop such things, is – unbelievably – officially licensed by the local authority as a 'trading project' (registration fee £1,600).

It was until recently used for the import of cattle, chocolate and motorcycles (though not, its owner insists, for munitions or people) and at its peak earned more than £30,000 a day in fees.

But business has collapsed because the Israelis have relaxed many of their restrictions on imports, and most such tunnels are going out of business. While I was there I heard the whine of Israeli drones and the thunder of jet bombers far overhead.

Then, worryingly soon after I left, the area was pulverised with high explosive. I don't know if the Israeli air force waited for me to leave, or just walloped the tunnels anyway.
The Jewish state's grasp of basic public relations is notoriously bad. But the Israeli authorities certainly know I am here. I am one of only four people who crossed into the world's most misrepresented location this morning.

Don't, please, accuse of me of complacency or denying the truth. I do not pretend to know everything about Gaza. I don't think it is a paradise, or remotely normal. But I do know for certain what I saw and heard.

There are dispiriting slums that should have been cleared decades ago, people living on the edge of subsistence. There is danger. And most of the people cannot get out.

But it is a lot more complicated, and a lot more interesting, than that. In fact, the true state of the Gaza Strip, and of the West Bank of the Jordan, is so full of paradoxes and surprises that most news coverage of the Middle East finds it easier to concentrate on the obvious, and leave out the awkward bits.

Which is why, in my view, politicians and public alike have been herded down a dead end that serves only propagandists and cynics, and leaves the people of this beautiful, important part of the world suffering needlessly.

For instance, our Prime Minister, David Cameron, recently fawned on his Islamist hosts in Turkey by stating Gaza was a 'prison camp'. This phrase is the official line of the well-funded Arab and Muslim lobby, who want to make sure Israel is seen by the world as a villainous oppressor.

Well, Israeli soldiers can and do act with crude brutality. Israeli settlers can and do steal Arab water and drive Arabs off their land. Israeli politicians are often coarse and insensitive.
The treatment of Israel's Arab citizens is one of the great missed opportunities of history, needlessly mean and short-sighted. The seizure of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 were blunders, made worse by later folly.

But if you think Israel is the only problem, or that Israelis are the only oppressors hereabouts, think again. Realise, for a start, that Israel no longer rules Gaza. Its settlements are ruins.

No Israelis can be found inside its borders. And, before you say 'but Israel controls the Gaza border', look at a map. The strip's southern frontier – almost as hard to cross as the Israeli boundary – is with Egypt. And Cairo is as anxious as Israel to seal in the Muslim militants of Hamas.

Gaza was bombed on the day I arrived in retaliation for a series of rocket strikes on Israel, made by Arab militants. Those militants knew this would happen, but they launched their rockets anyway. Many Gazans hate them for this.

One, whom I shall call Ibrahim, told me how he had begged these maniacs to leave his neighbourhood during Israel's devastating military attack nearly two years ago. His wife was close to giving birth.

He knew the Israelis would quickly seek out the launcher, and that these men would bring death down on his home. But the militants sneered at his pleading, so he shoved his wife into his car and fled.

Moments after he passed the first major crossroads, a huge Israeli bomb burst on the spot where his car had been. The diabolical power of modern munitions is still visible, in the ruins of what was once a government building.

It looks as if a giant has chewed and smashed it, and then come back and stamped on it. If you can imagine trying to protect a pregnant woman from such forces, then you can begin to understand how complex it is living here, where those who claim to defend you bring death to your door.

For the Islamist rocket-firers are also the government here, supported by Iran and others who care more for an abstract cause than they do for real people. They claim that their permanent war with Israel is for the benefit of the Palestinian Arabs. But is it?

Human beings will always strive for some sort of normal life. They do this even when bombs are falling and demagogues raging. Even when, as in Gaza, there is no way out and morality patrols sweep through restaurants in search of illicit beer and women smoking in public or otherwise affronting the 14th Century values of Hamas.

So I won't give the name of the rather pleasant establishment where young women, Islamic butterflies mocking the fanatics' strict dress code with bright make-up and colourful silken hijabs, chattered as they inhaled apple-scented smoke from their water-pipes.

Their menfolk, nearby, watched football on huge, flat-screen televisions. Nor will I say where I saw the Gazan young gathering for beach barbecues beneath palm-leaf umbrellas.
Of course this way of life isn't typical. But it exists, and it shows the 'prison camp' designation is a brain-dead over-simplification. If it is wrong for the rich to live next door to the desperate – and we often assume this when wecriticise Israel – then what about Gaza's wealthy, and its Hamas rulers?

They tolerate this gap, so they are presumably as blameworthy as the Israelis whose comfortable homes overlook chasms of poverty. Then there is the use of the word 'siege'.
Can anyone think of a siege in human history, from Syracuse to Leningrad, where the shops of the besieged city have been full of Snickers bars and Chinese motorbikes, and where European Union and other foreign aid projects pour streams of cash (often yours) into the pockets of thousands? Once again, the word conceals more than it reveals.

In Gaza's trapped, unequal society, a wealthy and influential few live in magnificent villas with sea views and their own generators to escape the endless power cuts.

Gaza also possesses a reasonably well-off middle class, who spend their cash in a shopping mall – sited in Treasure Street in Gaza City, round the corner from another street that is almost entirely given over to shops displaying washing machines and refrigerators.

Siege? Not exactly. What about Gaza's 'refugee camps'. The expression is misleading. Most of those who live in them are not refugees, but the children and grandchildren of those who fled Israel in the war of 1948.

All the other refugees from that era – in India and Pakistan, the Germans driven from Poland and the Czech lands, not to mention the Jews expelled from the Arab world – were long ago resettled.

Unbelievably, these people are still stuck in insanitary townships, hostages in a vast struggle kept going by politicians who claim to care about them. These places are not much different from the poorer urban districts of Cairo, about which nobody, in the Arab world or the West, has much to say.

It is not idle to say that these 'camps' should have been pulled down years ago, and their inhabitants rehoused. It can be done. The United Arab Emirates, to their lasting credit, have paid for a smart new housing estate with a view of the Mediterranean.

It shows what could happen if the Arab world cared as much as it says it does about Gaza. Everyone in Gaza could live in such places, at a cost that would be no more than small change in the oil-rich Arab world's pocket.

But the propagandists, who insist that one day the refugees will return to their lost homes, regard such improvements as acceptance that Israel is permanent – and so they prefer the squalor, for other people.

Those who rightly condemn the misery of the camps should ask themselves whose fault it really is. As so often in the Arab world, the rubbish-infested squalor of the streets conceals clean, private quarters, not luxurious and sometimes basic, but out of these places emerge each day huge numbers of scrubbed, neatly-uniformed children, on their way to schools so crammed that they have two shifts.

I wish I was sure these young people were being taught the principles of human brotherhood and co-existence. But I doubt it. On a wall in a street in central Gaza, a mural – clearly displayed with official approval – shows an obscene caricature of an Israeli soldier with a dead child slung from his bayonet.

Next to it is written in Arabic 'Child Hunter'. Other propaganda, in English, is nearby. My guide is embarrassed by this racialist foulness. I wonder how so many other Western visitors have somehow failed to mention it in their accounts.

I was still wondering about this as I travelled to the short distance to the West Bank, where Israel still partly rules. I was the recipient of hospitality in many Arab homes – a level of generosity that should make Western people ashamed of their cold, neighbour-hating cities.
And once again I saw the outline of a society, slowly forming amid the wreckage, in which a decent person might live, work, raise children and attempt to live a good life. But I also saw and heard distressing things.

One – which I feel all of us should be aware of – is the plight of Christian Arabs under the rule of the Palestinian Authority. More than once I heard them say: 'Life was better for us under Israeli rule.'

One young man, lamenting the refusal of the Muslim-dominated courts to help him in a property dispute with squatters, burst out: 'We are so alone! All of us Christians feel so lonely in this country.'

This conversation took place about a mile from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where tourists are given the impression that the Christian religion is respected. Not really.
I was told, in whispers, of the unprintable desecration of this shrine by Palestinian gunmen when they seized the church in 2002 – 'world opinion' was exclusively directed against Israel. I will not name the people who told me these things.

I have also decided not to name another leading Christian Arab who told me of how his efforts to maintain Christian culture in the West Bank had met with official thuggery and intimidation.

My guide and host reckons there are 30,000 Christians in the three neighbouring municipalities of Bethlehem, Beit-Sahour and Beit- Jala. Soon there will be far fewer.
He has found out that 2,000 emigrated between 2001 and 2004, a process which has not stopped. What is most infuriating about this is that many Christians in Britain are fed propaganda blaming this on the Israelis.

Arabs can oppress each other, without any help from outside. Because the Palestinian cause is a favourite among Western Leftists, they prefer not to notice that it is largely an aggressive Islamic cause.

And in this part of the world, political correctness does not exist. Picture yourself on a comfortable sofa in an apartment in a West Bank town. Nearby runs the infamous, absurd, barrier dividing the Arab world from Israel.

Think about this wall. I acknowledge that it is hateful and oppressive – dividing men from their land, and (in one case) cutting across the playground of a high school. But I have concluded that it is a civilised response to the suicide bombing that led to its being built.
My host, a thoughtful family man who has spent years in Israeli prisons but is now sick of war, has been talking politics and history. His wife, though present, remains unseen.

Suddenly he begins to speak about the Jews. He utters thoughts that would not have been out of place in Hitler's Germany. This is what he has been brought up to believe and what his children's schools will pass on to them.

The heart sinks at this evidence of individual sense mixed up with evil and stupidity. It makes talk of a 'New Middle East' seem like twaddle. So, are we to despair? I am not so sure.

Not far from this spot there is an unmarked turning at a roundabout on the route back into Jerusalem. It's an unnumbered road running south from Route 437. About a hundred yards along, it is barred by concrete blocks. It is a ghost road.

If it ever opens, it will be part of a network of secure roads and tunnels that would link Nablus and Ramallah in the northern West Bank to Bethlehem and Hebron in the south.

It would enable people to do the normal things they want to do – visit relatives, go to work, go shopping. It would not make Arab Palestine a state. It has nothing to do with the issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank – a problem made worse by Barack Obama's call for a moratorium, a demand even the Palestinian leadership had never made.

But it might help create a society in which a happy life was possible for many people. I suspect it is nearly finished. It is not the only sign that the human yearning for normality is strong. In Ramallah, unofficial capital of Arab Palestine, it is a pleasure to visit the busy streets around Manara Square at twilight, with the cafes and the shops invitingly bright.

A few years ago, the bullet-torn corpses of 'collaborators' were displayed here. Now the displays are of smart clothes – but not as smart as those in Ramallah's opulent shopping mall, stocked with designer goods, and with camel rides for the children outside.

Even in notorious Hebron in the south, famous for its massacres and its aggressive Israeli enclave, the mall culture is in evidence three miles from this seat of tension. And on the road from Hebron to Jerusalem stands a cut-price supermarket so cheap that Israeli settlers and Palestinians mingle happily at the cash tills.

I might add that an Arab intellectual, sitting in a Gaza cafe, recalled for me the happy days when Gazan women used to wear short skirts (now they all wear shrouds and veils) and you could get a beer by the beach.

But perhaps best of all was the comment of the Arab Israeli who mourned for 'the good old days before we had peace'. It may well be that no solution to the problem of Israel is possible, and that it will all end, perhaps decades from now, in a nuclear fireball.

But if outside politicians, more interested in their reputations than in the lives of Arabs and Israelis, would only stop their search for a final settlement, might it be that people – left to their own devices – might find a way of living together, a way that was imperfect, but which no longer involved human beings being dissolved into hunks of flying flesh by high explosive?

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

One benefit reform that would make us happier ... and richer

There's only one lasting, simple welfare reform package this country needs. It goes like this. First, an announcement that nine months from today, all benefits of any kind for new unmarried mothers should cease.

Note the word 'new'. Existing victims of one of the stupidest policies in human history should continue to get their handouts and subsidised homes until their children are grown. It is not their fault, or their children's, that they were misled by weak and wicked politicians into this way of life.

They should not be condemned or harassed. But this state-sponsored assault on marriage should stop. Just to emphasise the point, we should once again distinguish between those who end up as lone parents through no choice of their own and those who choose this state.

The ­ Widow's Pension – scandalously abolished – should be reinstated. Deserted wives should likewise be offered proper ­support.

Next, the disastrous divorce reforms of the Sixties, which have blasted the lives of millions of deserted children, should be replaced by new rules that make it rather harder to break up a marriage than to end a car-leasing agreement.

And Parliament should overturn the disastrous judge-made laws which have, over the past 50 years, left divorced husbands with almost no rights at all. Within ten years we should be a happier, more orderly and peaceful society, and a much richer one too.

Depriving children of fathers, which seems to have been the policy of the so-called 'centre-left' and 'centre-right' for 40 years, has had a grim and painful effect on almost every aspect of our lives – and has affected almost every topic I touch on in this column.

The costs of trying to patch up the damage are immense, in grief and money. It is as if the whole country has been banging its head hard against a concrete wall for decades. It would be wonderful to stop, as well as being rational and kind. But of course it will not happen.

For all three parties have been taken over by Sixties liberals, who will never do this. Which is why no message of hope came out of the Tory Conference last week, and why the Prime Minister was reduced to attacks on a dead-and-­buried Labour Government, and to flogging his gassy, thought-free 'Big Society', under which we're all supposed to come home from work and the long commute, and then rush out to hold up the sky.

What was really wrong with the Tory Party's amateur dramatics was not the incompetence, though there was plenty of that; nor the dismissive callousness towards mothers who take the responsible decision to bring up their own children; nor the impracticable promises to 'clamp down' on a welfare system that is specifically designed to create more clients every day and will grow inexor­ably if this does not stop.

It was that it has turned its back forever on the married family (while tossing footling token gestures in its direction). And it has sold its soul – and the conservative people in this country – in return for the approval of the BBC and for the empty, pompous joys of office without power.

No wonder there were so few conservatives there, and no wonder Tory Party membership is shrivelling so quickly that the figures are a secret. 

Why Rita the Dagenham feminist got it so wrong

There's a moment in the very bad film Made In Dagenham when the central character, Rita, turns on her husband.

Rita, played engagingly by Sally Hawkins, has been neglecting her home and children for weeks while leading a 1968 strike for equal pay at the once-mighty Dagenham Ford factory. Her husband has at last grown sick of this.

As she hurries off to yet another meeting, he points out to her that he's been a good spouse – not drinking or gambling away his wages, not raising his hand to her or the children.

She turns to him, rather snottily, and makes a Germaine Greer-type speech saying that she expects all these things by right, not as a privilege. This rings as false as most of the scenes (and the excessive swearing) in the film. But it's also morally wrong.

Men don't naturally behave in the responsible, considerate way that most working-class husbands still did in 1968. There was a deal, called marriage, which persuaded them do so.

But when that deal collapsed, not least when sex outside marriage became freely available, men began behaving like cavemen again, and women suffered from their own 'liberation'. I suspect there's more drunkenness and more violence against women in this country now than at any time since before the First World War.

As for the struggle for equal pay, it looks to me as if the end result is that most men have got equal pay with women, if they can get jobs at all. The normal household needs two pay packets to survive, instead of one.

Go to Dagenham now and, where 25,000 men once supported families on a living wage, there's a modest engine plant and a wind farm. Most of the jobs long ago disappeared. That's progress for you.

Dreary old Brum was a better place

Escaping from the Birmingham conference centre for a stroll around England's second city, I saw two things that told me a lot about modern Britain, and which you certainly wouldn't have found in the ­ Midlands until quite recently.

One was a fine Edwardian Children's Hospital, its name still proudly carved above the door, converted into a garish casino.

The other was a smart new plastic surgery clinic, for women desperately trying to stay in the market for jobs and companionship. I think I preferred the dreary old Brum before these changes.

Did you know that the BBC had cameras which could cope with only one interviewee at a time? No, nor did I, and of course it isn't true.

But it was the excuse given to me by a Corporation person last week after I was abruptly dumped from a TV discussion of the Child Benefit blunder.

Oddly enough, the item I was dropped from did feature two people – both of them defending Mr Cameron.

How stupid do these people think we are?

The only proper conservative speech at the Tory Conference came from teacher Katharine Birbalsingh, who was sent home from her ­ London school on Thursday for speaking the truth.

I suspect that these words were the ones that caused the trouble: 'I don't think ordinary parents have any idea about what goes on in their schools. But it is totally and utterly chaotic.

Teachers spend most of their time telling children to sit down or stop disrupting the class rather than teaching.'

She added that there was 'a conspiracy of silence' in staff rooms because teachers were too afraid of being branded as ­ failures if they admitted how bad the true ­picture was. Which I think is proved by what happened to her.

A Parting Shot

I have carefully studied Mr Everett's attempt to respond to this post, and I am afraid he seems to have missed the point so completely that I wonder if he has joined our old friend Tim Lemon, viewing the world through a dented telescope from one of the Moons of Jupiter. In fact, I find his stance so frustrating that I will rescind my promise not to post anything else for a fortnight, just to say the following.

One or two points. He says: 'I've yet to see Peter Hitchens ever, ever accept someone else has an alternative valid point to his own (even when it's factually true, such as the time I informed him of Paul 'Bono' Hewson's devout Christianity, which he wasn't aware of, but then continued to churlishly doubt).'

I don't recall doubting the Great and Sainted Dog Biscuit's adherence to a church. Nor do I. I believe he is a member of the Church of Ireland. No more do I doubt Anthony Blair's membership of the RC church. But I shouldn't be at all surprised if, in both cases, those involved didn't turn out to espouse the sort of modern welfare Christianity, which mainly worships state intervention and foreign aid, and is a bit woolly about some of the sterner doctrines of the faith.

And my whole life (see my books 'The Broken Compass' - or its revised paperback edition 'The Cameron Delusion' and 'The Rage Against God') has been a process - which I have described in unusual detail - of accepting that others have valid points of view, and changing my mind as a result. I would say (though I am, of course biased here) that this whole blog is constant evidence of my willingness to engage, with facts and logic, with any serious and civilised opponent who is ready to argue with me. The fact that I usually come off better in such engagements may stem from the fact that I have been through most of these positions myself, and so know their flaws better than those who now hold them. Who knows?

Mr Everett - who wishes to apply my strictures against the political journalists' clique to myself - seems not to see the importance of the difference between openly expressed commitment to a cause or belief (on which I have spent so much time above) and covert propagation of an unstated but urgent agenda. In fact it's this simple point to which he seems wholly closed. Once again, if only he'd read 'The Cameron Delusion', he'd save me a great deal of effort. And I'm tempted to tell him not to return to this argument until he has done so. However, I fear he won't read it and that, even if he does, he will (see below) emerge with his view unaltered.

Nor does he seem able to tell the difference between one person (operating openly with a declared aim) and a group of people, operating under a false flag of impartiality, whose aim is undeclared.

Nor does he grasp my essential point about the weird unanimity of a supposedly competitive and diverse group of media.

I certainly hope that what I say has some influence. And I would love to believe that my words may have helped deprive the Tories of a majority. But he doesn't listen much, does he? Half my case, for several years before the poll, was that the Tories would not and could not get such a majority at the 2010 general election (nor will they get one in future, unless and until they change the constituency boundaries, and even then it will be tough). This was not an opinion, or something I was urging, but a fact, available to any unbiased and informed reader of opinion polls (see my long ago posting 'How to Read an Opinion Poll' among others). One of the main activities of the media clique was to deny this fact, by wilfully misunderstanding polls which all pointed in the same direction. Wilful misunderstanding (again see below) is generally the result of a fixed opinion, not of deliberate dishonesty.

What I was arguing was this: that the large number of people who planned to vote Tory to 'get Labour out', despite their general disappointment with that party, were in fact misguided. They could not do this. The Tories could not win. In which case they had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by abstaining in large numbers, or at least voting for non-Tory candidates, and so sending the Tory Party to such a defeat that it would collapse and make it possible for real conservatives to seek to replace it with something better.

Thus, I can say with absolute conviction that a) my assessment was right and b) my advice was ignored. What I said *would* happen, happened. What I urged people to do, they did not do.

I was at fault in not thinking more seriously about the possibility of a Lib-Con pact, which I thought was excluded by the militantly anti-Liberal rhetoric of the Tory leadership - all the more militant because the differences between the two parties were so small.

It is my suspicion that Mr Cameron and his close advisers realised long before the election both that they could not win it alone and that such a pact might be possible, and I will not be surprised if, in memoirs yet to be written, we find that there were contacts between the two party leaderships well before the election.

But Mr Everett's claim that I somehow cost the Tories the election is, alas for me, not borne out by any facts.

I still cannot understand how a principled person can offer an alternative opinion to his own stated one, arrived and stated consistently over years. Either I have an opinion, or I don't. If I do, I can't simultaneously have another one. It's kind of him to concede that I don't *have to* offer two contradictory opinions on one page under my name. But he seems quite unable to see how ludicrous such an act would have been. Again, this hilarious inability to descry the blazingly obvious stems from the problem I shall deal with at the end.

Mr Everett more reasonably says that the Mail on Sunday should have offered an alternative opinion to mine. And so it did, both in its main opinion column, which urged a Conservative vote, and in many columns by Lord Rees-Mogg, who was repeatedly supportive of Mr Cameron and his project, and continues to be.

Conveniently for Mr Everett, he ignores my mention of the MoS opinion column. He does so, once more, because to acknowledge it would be to admit that his argument is bunkum. But he cannot do that (see the end).

Fairness does not consist of one person speaking opposite ideas simultaneously out of either side of his mouth. It consists of giving competing points of view proper space in which to be heard - something the MoS always does, notably by having a columnist of the Right, and a columnist of the Left, occupying prominent positions in the paper.

As to his scheme, he says: 'He cannot say that he did not think of this, as I requested it in the week before on this blog, as I suspected what he was about to do. (Not that "my" requests/opinion counts for anything, I just think that would have been fairer if they'd done it..)'

Nor do I say that I did not think of it. I just say that it would have been silly, and the problem was more than adequately dealt with by the opinion column and by Lord Rees-Mogg.

Continuing not to pay attention, Mr Everett says: 'On to another point - Peter Hitchens says that this (sheep-like) tiny clique "…are all agreed that the key qualification for being in office is that you must agree with them". Not at all like Mr Hitchens then, hey?'

Well no, actually, not at all. I am open in my partiality. They are not. I am alone. They are many. They have guaranteed access to the airwaves without being required to declare any partiality. I have episodic, occasional, brief access to the airways - in which I am always clearly identified as having a stated position.

Mr Everett: 'However, Mr Hitchens does not tell us who these "tiny clique" are – other than they are "political writers and broadcasters".'

I assume that, having been alerted, people can watch out for this sort of thing themselves. It is very easy to see.

Mr Everett: 'Presumably some of these people in this "tiny clique" are openly biased columnists such as himself – in which case they're the same as him.'

No, actually, by definition they cannot be. Open declarations of bias by, say, BBC correspondents and presenters, or by lobby journalists on national newspapers, would make this behaviour impossible (except in the bizarre cases of some openly biased columnists who then become 'impartial' presenters of BBC programmes, their former views apparently forgotten, discussed in my book. This is a process not available to me, as I know in detail, having responded to a BBC executive's public urgings to conservative journalists to apply for a presenter's slot, and got precisely nowhere). Again, this is blazingly obvious from all I say. If Mr Everett spent the time he uses up on these repetitive and unresponsive complaints, reading my book on the subject, he would by now understand the point which most readers of this site long ago grasped.

No, I am not going to respond to his urgings to start naming the people involved. As I say, readers, viewers and listeners, once alerted, can easily spot it for themselves. Mr Everett could do, if he so chose. I am confident they will observe the truth of what I say, which is evident to me, morning, noon and night. But I do not have the research and record-keeping facilities, or the time, to bandy names about. Any individual I accused of this would perforce have to deny it, and then I would have to spend most of my life watching many years of old videotapes and combing through recordings and cuttings substantiating my case. I've no doubt I could do so, if I devoted my whole waking life to it, and if I were granted the facilities. But I prefer to live as a human being, columnist, blogger, author, cyclist, reader of books etc, who occasionally eats, sleeps and even wanders round a cathedral. And, contrary to the beliefs of many, I don't have some vast 'staff' working for me. There are some things I am willing to do for Everett. This posting is one of them. But there are others I'm not.

Oh, and what's the explanation? The one that always applies in cases where people don't get it, even when it's in plain view. There is none so blind as he that *will* not see. The real question is why Mr Everett is so determined to cling to a political party whose leadership loathes and despises him, has always betrayed him and always will. I'd understand it better if Mr Everett were a keen supporter of the EU taking over Britain, of bad schools, lax law-enforcement, uncontrolled mass immigration and systematic undermining of the married family. But I don't think he is these things. The Tory Party, on the other hand, is.

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

Travel Notes

I plan to be travelling for much of the next two weeks. I do not expect to post (apart from my column from the Mail on Sunday) during that time.

Perhaps Mr Mulholland would like to make his usual assumption and make his usual comment on how I seem to have an awful lot of holiday, and how disgraceful it is. Then I could point out to him, as usual, that 'travelling' does not necessarily mean I am on holiday. Which gives me the chance to say that original comments are always more welcome than weary repetitions of dead discussions.

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

How to be biased

I have been thinking about Mr Everett's strange and baffling suggestion that I should have included in my pre-election column an item urging people to vote Tory, for the sake of fairness. I have been trying to think of the appropriate wording.

How about this: 'For the sake of balance, the author also urges those who disagree with everything he says, and who prefer not to believe the long catalogue of attested and provable facts that he lists in aid of his argument, to vote Tory.'

Or: 'Despite the facts and logic which clearly lead to the opposite conclusion, the author recognises that some of his readers will still wish to vote Tory, even though there is no possible sense in them doing so.'

I mean to say, what is this rubbish?

What does Mr Everett think columnists do? They set out their opinions, openly, under their own names. They assemble, sometimes disclose and give prominence to facts or stories which support their opinions. They do not write stories on the news pages of the paper - though in my case I used to be a reporter, and I do write foreign dispatches which are, like my columns, clearly identifiable as opinionated. They contain adjectives of approval and disapproval. They contain statements of opinion on major issues touched on by the article.

So for instance, readers of my report from Iran would quickly be able to see that I do not support an attack on Iran by the 'West'. Readers of my report from Turkey will quickly see that I oppose Turkish membership of the EU, and reject the common belief that the Erdogan government is harmless and friendly towards the 'West'. Readers of my writings from will see that I do not support the 'Orange Revolution' or the concept of the 'New Cold War'. Readers of my account of South Africa will see that I am not sympathetic to the ANC. Readers of my accounts of China will know that I regard that country as a police state, and that I disapprove (amongst other things) of its one-child policy. And so on.

Those who disagree with me on these points may still read what I write, but will be a) alerted to my partiality and b) entitled to ask if a writer with different opinions might have painted a different picture, and to compare the differing versions available, and then to wonder which would have been more truthful. Thus do we grope towards the truth, our goal.

They can see these things because I state them clearly in the article, using the methods above. In many cases, they will know from my past statements elsewhere (in my column, on broadcasting stations) where I stand on these issues. Those who agree or disagree with me will be aware that they are doing so, and will never be in any doubt that the facts selected, and even the illustrations used, will have been influenced by my clearly-stated partiality.

Above all they will know that there is something with which to agree, or disagree, something to accept, or something to reject.

I do not know of any more honest way to seek to persuade people of a contentious point of view.

But watch a TV news bulletin, or read a news story in many newspapers or magazines, and things may not be so clear. The writer will not helpfully include statements of open bias in his story. He will not use adjectives to show his approval or disapproval. But he might even so be biased, and seeking to persuade the reader of his opinion. And if so he will be far better-placed than I am to do so. For people are much more easily persuaded (as advertisers know) if they do not realise that they are being persuaded.

For instance he might present a controversy in a number of interesting ways.

He might open the story with the allegation made by the body, or country, or party of which he approves, which he and his editor have agreed to place prominently in the newspaper or the TV bulletin. In which case he might say that this body or country 'said' or 'announced' whatever it did. And then he might add that the body or country of which he disapproves 'denied' the report. Immediately, the denier is at a disadvantage, precisely because he is the denier. The presumption of guilt is universal in the media. The decision to run the allegation, and give it prominence, is itself motivated by bias. Israel suffers particularly from this form of reporting. But allegations of wrongdoing against the Palestinian Authority, or Hamas (or indeed any Arab government) are rarely reported. Thus the context in which Israel's undoubted wrong doing takes place is seldom stated.

Or he might use such words as 'claimed' to describe the statements made by one side, while using the word 'said' for the other side. Or a person may be said to have 'insisted' such and such, the unstated implication being that this insistence is an irritating refusal to accept the blazing truth.

But above all, unseen bias is achieved by selection of material, selection of pictures, choice of which story to run and which to dump or put on an obscure page. Now if, in an article attacking Mrs Theresa May I use a picture making her look silly, it will be clear what I am up to. But if a newspaper repeatedly uses in its news columns a picture of a politician grimacing, or with his head in his hands, or his hand over his mouth, or next to a sign marked 'exit' (and it is impossible, in public life, to avoid having your picture taken next to such a sign so such a picture will exist), the purpose is not stated or seen, and the cumulative effect of ridicule and contempt on minds which do not even realise they are being exposed to propaganda is not actually felt by its victim, the innocent reader.

Broadcasters, as I have often said, have an extra battery of techniques, from tone of voice, to camera angle, to lighting, to who gets the last word, to the way in which questions are formulated. In none of these does the viewer or listener see the unstated bias, unless his ear is tuned to listen or watch for it. And each act of bias is so small and subtle that, taken by itself, it seems entirely harmless and cannot be used to formulate an official complaint. But believe me, it goes on.

Oh, and how about this story? When I worked for another newspaper, in the early years of the Blair government, I continued to write a strongly anti-Blair column - despite the fact that the newspaper's editorial line was strongly pro-Blair. No difficulties arose. I was the paper's recognised and tolerated dissenter. Openly biased comment is actually not that sensitive. But on one occasion (as sometimes happens to columnists) I was sent a startling story by a reader. The story was that Cherie Blair had been hosting a trip on the Royal Train for the wives of foreign leaders.

The story checked out as true, and I wrote it. And there was a kind of collective panic among the paper's editorial executives - because they knew (as I did) that the headline 'Cherie takes over the Royal Train', or whatever it might have been, would be more damaging to the Blairs, among our largely monarchist readership, than any number of columns written by me. In the former days when my newspaper had been anti-Labour, I reckon the story would have led the front page, and been picked up by all the other papers and quite possibly the BBC.

But on this occasion they ran it, after much tooth-sucking, on such an obscure page that hardly anyone noticed it, and a rival paper ran it as a (much-followed) 'exclusive' on its front page several months later, in the sincere belief that the story was new, while I ground my teeth. There's another part of this story that I will not set out here because I cannot prove it, but hope one day to do when a certain spin-doctor's full diaries are published.

News, you see, is much more politically sensitive than comment.

But to grasp this, you have to understand that the two are different things, and I suspect the root of Mr Everett's difficulty is that he won't see this.

By the way, Mr Everett, in a laborious effort to avoid my counter-arguments, tries to make out that there is an inconsistency in my pointing out that the group of influential political journalists is tiny, while also describing them as a 'phalanx'. Not so. They are indeed tiny in number in comparison with (say) the members of the Tory or Labour Parties, voting in leadership elections. But they are a pretty formidable and effective unit and they outnumber me by many dozens to one.

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

Notes and Queries

A few responses to comments. On arming the police, the main point is that the death penalty (at least until the 1957 Homicide Act) protected the police, and all of us, from armed crime, by effectively deterring criminals from carrying firearms and knives. I think this effect is unquestionable, and my arguments for making the connection are to be found in full in the relevant chapters of my book 'A Brief History of Crime'. I simply haven't the space to set them out here, but would urge readers hostile to this conclusion not to dismiss it until they have read this material. I would personally prefer to be against the death penalty. I endorse it because facts and logic so insistently support its return.

Abolishing the death penalty led to an increase in armed crime and the stealthy arming of the police, transforming their relationship with the public. The numbers of shootings by the police, which I think will rise, are not themselves the issue. It is the fact that they take place at all, and that the officers responsible are almost invariably granted anonymity and exonerated, which is the point. I expect the numbers to rise, in any case. We never had very many executions either, at any time in the 20th century, but that didn't alter the principled objections of campaigners who felt the death penalty was wrong. Nor should it have done. Principles are principles, even if they are misguided.

On the distinction between my solitary call for people to withdraw votes from the Tory party (which I really wish had been as effective as one correspondent alleges), and the near-unanimous propaganda of the political media, which has in turn been used to destroy Margaret Thatcher, to install Anthony Blair, to destroy Iain Duncan Smith, to destroy Gordon Brown and to elevate David Cameron.

One, my column is an open expression of my personal opinion. It does not operate by nuance and selection of facts, by tone of voice, by ensuring that my side gets the last word in discussions whose direction is partially chaired by supposedly impartial presenter, nor by systematically choosing unflattering pictures of those I wish to undermine, while using flattering pictures of those I wish to build up. It makes no pretence at impartiality. And it is solitary. Nor by presenting subjective judgements of speeches as facts.

My complaint against the press and TV pack (I agree that the press alone could not achieve this, but the same structures apply to the BBC and some independent broadcasters) is that they are unanimous, and collective. And that their bias is not openly declared, but concealed, made highly effective through the subtle methods I outline above.

A note to Mr 'Un'. I apologise for speculating on his sex, but not for anything else I said (not that it matters much, since nobody knows who he is anyway). I have been the target of some spiteful personal attacks, in which the person involved sought to wound me by references very similar to the ones made by Mr 'Un'. I thought this person might have been trading under a false flag. Plainly I was wrong, but if I were Mr 'Un', I would not take it as a compliment that I had this suspicion. Attacking me in this way seems to me to be low in general, since the attacker knows I am debarred from any robust defence of myself that might not also involve in an unwanted quarrel with my brother. It is even lower when the attacker knows that my brother is very ill, as Mr 'Un' obviously does. Shame on him, and on others who use this grubby method to avoid proper argument.

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

Piffle Made in Dagenham

Oh dear, what a bad film 'Made in Dagenham' is. Like, 'Brassed Off' and too many other modern British films, it relies far too heavily on the f-word for laughs. And it projects onto the past the attitudes of the present, giving people views and characters they couldn't have had. For those who haven't read the reviews or seen it, this is a fictionalised dramatisation of the Dagenham women workers' strike for equal pay in 1968.

Now, I may be completely wrong about this, but I worked on farms and in a brewery in the late 1960s, in which there was quite a lot of bad language and a modicum of violence too, and I just do not think that women, even in a workplace, would have used this word as readily then as they are shown to do in this film. It still had an immense power to shock.

There is also one scene, in which Sally Hawkins, playing strike leader Rita O'Grady, uses this word after barging (through her own fault) into Rosamund Pike, playing the boss's wife Lisa, in a school corridor. Ms Hawkins, the overwhelming star of this film, is very well cast. She has the perfect face for the role, and a slight hint of Rita Tushingham in her features, which awakens memories of many social realist films of the time in the memories of people such as me.


I cannot begin to say how unlikely this scene is, from start to finish (the likelihood of two such women sending their sons to the same school, even in the lost era of grammar schools, is close to zero), but I am just sure that a woman of the type Ms Hawkins is playing would not have used language of that sort in these circumstances. There are many other unlikely agitprop moments, not least a ludicrous moment in which one of the strikers is suborned by the offer of a modelling career, and by the crude caricatures of at least three marriages. Plus a Ford executive in Detroit, portrayed as raging against a selection of revolutionary political groups most of which did not yet exist (at least under those names) in 1968, and which certainly had no role in Dagenham industrial disputes.

And that is just one of the ways in which the makers of this film show that they really don't understand the past. Clips of the real Dagenham women strikers, shown as the final credits roll, emphasise that these were doughty, greying ladies (a word they use of themselves) who had come up through the tough world and close society of London's East End, and who were interested (as English people used to be) in simple fairness and justice, not in starting a social revolution. There are also many expressions which seemed to me to be to be far more American than the speech of the time. And of course the nervous, self-conscious smoking which is now the film-maker's universal way of saying 'This is the past'. The thing about smoking in those days is that it was so normal and universal that people were barely aware they were doing it, any more than they were aware they were breathing or walking. Modern actors just can't simulate this.

I might add that in all my years as a Labour correspondent, I never heard trade union officials address each other as 'comrade', even the ones who were open Communists (most of those I knew would have laughed out loud if anyone had called them this). Then there's the weird laudatory portrayal of Barbara Castle, emphasised by the ludicrous attempted comical duo who are supposed to be her senior civil servants. They seem to have come out of some super-dire Norman Wisdom comedy of the 1950s).

And it's my understanding that Harold Wilson smoked cigars in private. The pipe was for TV.

But perhaps above all there's this question, in which the film doesn't touch. The Ford Dagenham plant, in the 1960s, employed about 25,000 workers, almost all of them men, sustaining them in a way of life immensely more modest than ours, but also less indebted, better-educated, more peaceful, better policed and more sober (again, the female drunkenness portrayed in the film seems out of place to me. Such things were severely frowned on). It was a society founded on real work making real exportable products, in which men fulfilled the role of breadwinner and were for the most part responsible husbands and fathers.

Now that entire factory is gone, as are almost all the other places that provided work for men. There are plenty of jobs for women (who are universally supposed to be better off as a result, though their children might argue) and fewer and fewer for men, especially working class men whose lives often drain away into unemployment and crime.

We make little that is tangible, and export less. Heaven knows how we shall continue to afford the standard of living we think is our right -a standard more appropriate to a major exporting country with a powerful economy.

Dagenham is the site of a wind farm.

I think it is legitimate to ask if this is actually an improvement. The entire film is based on the belief that it is unquestionably so.

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