Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 346

Why should these bleating sheep decide who runs the Labour Party?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Who should pick the leaders of our political parties? Those parties, or a bunch of journalists? The answer seems simple to me. I don't like the Labour Party, but it represents an important strand in British opinion. If its members choose Edward Miliband to lead them, according to their own rules, then that is their affair.

The same goes for the Tory Party. In the days when Conservative leaders were still picked by the party rather than by the media, Iain Duncan Smith was fairly elected.

The media later played a major part in the campaign to destroy and overthrow Mr Duncan Smith in a democracy-free putsch. Michael Howard, and later David Cameron, were anointed by jour­nalists and chosen by them.

In fact it was the absurd and well-organised adulation of Mr Cameron by the tiny clique of political writers and broadcasters that thrust this obscure Young Liberal into Downing Street.

Now the same clique are enraged by the refusal of the Labour Party to do what they told it to, and had in many cases wrongly predicted that it would do. Most of last week's coverage of the Labour conference was an extended scream, from the jour­nalists' playpen, of 'Waaaah! We wanted David and you picked Ed! How dare you! We'll get you for this!' And they will, you just wait and see.

A dull, flaccid speech by David Miliband was lauded as if it were some mighty oration by David Lloyd George or Abraham Lincoln. A dull, flaccid speech by Edward Miliband was sneered at as if he were barely coherent. This was much like the treatment, some years back, of David Cameron and David Davis by the same people. Everyone said the same thing.All opinions, in our supposedly varied and competitive Press, were the same. Ever wonder how this happens?

And so it will continue. David Miliband's petulant walkout from politics is treated as a heroic Shakespearean tragedy. Everything Edward Miliband does from now on will be a blunder or a gaffe.

Every tiny quarrel will be magnified into a split the size of the Grand Canyon. Unflattering photographs of him (not difficult to find) will be chosen in preference to kinder ones.

It's a scandal. And this is only half of it. The other half is that this media clique, most of whose members make the average sheep look like a forceful individualist, are all agreed that the key qualification for being in office is that you must agree with them, Sixties liberals almost to a woman.

Yet they are utterly unaccountable. Parliament is transparent and the Labour Party electoral college a model of democracy by comparison.

It is time somebody told these people that they have too much power and not enough responsibility.

New Labour is dead? Oh, ha ha. New Labour is alive and living in
No 10 Downing Street, and all the happier because so many Tory dupes
haven't noticed that Blairism continues, pink in tooth and claw, to
ravage what's left of this country.

Emma is right...  verbal bindweed's throttling English

Emma Thompson is right to worry about the verbal bindweed that is choking the English language. The power of speech is the main thing which distinguishes us from the animals – a point brilliantly made by C.  S. Lewis in his Narnia books.

It is closely linked to the power of thought – the thing which actually makes us people instead of highly sophisticated robots. If you cannot speak clearly and with expression, then your thoughts will also be muddy and half-formed. And if you allow fashion to dictate the way you talk, taking your style from the TV and the internet, you surrender your mind to conformism.

Hardly anyone actually reads George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, though lots of people think they have.

If they did, they would find that at the core of the Big Brother society is Newspeak, a language designed to make most things unsayable, and so unthinkable. Who would have thought our society would have volunteered to vandalise one of the most expressive and beautiful languages that ever existed?

Stopping at the Hilton, en route to a police state

How does a free country become a police state? With your help. I arrived in Manchester last Sunday and checked into the Hilton. There, having given my credit-card details, I was asked for 'photo-ID'.

I visit lots of dictatorships, where I expect this sort of thing and put up with it because it's their country. But here at home I enjoy the absence of such snooping. So I politely but firmly declined. 'But it's our company policy,' intoned the check-in person, as if this trumped thought or reason.

Actually it isn't Hilton company policy. I'd faced no such demand from their Liverpool hotel the week before, or at the many American Hiltons I've stayed in. But in any case I replied: 'Well, it's my policy that I don't accede to such requests.' I pointed out that they had no lawful right to do this. And after a minute or two a deputy manager was produced who said I could check in anyway.

Great. But I know several other people meekly submitted to this police-state demand. Which is why, five years from now, we'll all be doing it everywhere and another bit of liberty will have gone for good, because it was too much trouble to save it.

So this is Liberal Britain: execution by masked gunmen

The masked avengers of the Metropolitan Police's firearms squads scare the pants off me. It's not just the street-fighting gear they sport, clothes designed to give the wearer a feeling of irresponsibility. It's not just the IRA-style facewear.

It's not just the huge numbers of them – enough to invade Sierra Leone once the Army's been disbanded by George Osborne. It's not even the anonymity most of them are granted, like something out of the Middle Ages.

It's the fact that nobody notices. Liberal fanatics abolished hanging in this country nearly 50 years ago. Yet when we had the gallows, our police were unarmed. And if the state wanted to kill someone, it could only do so after a jury trial, an appeal and the chance of clemency. This was called 'obscene' and 'barbaric'.

Now we have a heavily-armed police force whose members, masked like Henry VIII's headsmen, deal out death as helicopters thunder overhead – no jury, no judge, no appeal. And those who said capital punishment was wicked refuse to see the connection. Oh, and please note the crazed, shotgun-wielding barrister Mark Saunders was taking 'anti-depressants' – another connection everyone refuses to see.


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The latest propaganda for the non-existent complaint 'ADHD' was torn to shreds on Radio 4's Today programme by Oliver James, despite highly unhelpful interruptions by the presenter Justin Webb, who gave the pro-ADHD spokeswoman a free run. 'Evidence' of a genetic link is nothing of the sort.

Even if it were, the fanatics who want to drug normal children and excuse our society's selfish, horrible treatment of them, have to solve this problem. How can you have a 'genetic link' to a complaint for which there is no objective diagnosis? What is it linked to?

A Brief History of Crimea

My old friend Edward Lucas of 'The Economist' has responded to my article about Sevastopol with a vehement (his word) rebuttal on his blog. A search engine should find it under 'Economist, Eastern Approaches, Peter Hitchens', or you can click here.

I have submitted the following reply there, and am displaying it here too.

My thanks to Edward Lucas for a serious response to my article about Ukraine. I have a high opinion of Edward, whose courage and indispensable help in Prague in 1989 I will always remember. I have been fascinated, ever since, by the different courses taken by many of the reporters who experienced the extraordinary and exhilarating period which ended the Soviet Empire. I have watched with great regret the miserable slide of Russia into autocracy and corrupt squalor. I have also wondered if this could have been avoided. And I have been troubled by the way in which the newly-free nations of Central and Eastern Europe have all too often become subjects of a new supranational project, their brief independence blotted out in a new world which has little time for national sovereignty.

I don't think I have a soft spot for big countries. But I did live in Moscow for more than two years, and learned there to separate Russia, its people and culture, from Russia, state and power.

I am well aware of the wretched story of the Krim Tatars. But I did not (and do not) think it had much bearing on the point I sought to make.

Edward goes on to doubt my contention that many Ukrainian inhabitants would prefer to be Russian. He says:

'It would be nice to see some polling data to support that. (None exists).'

I too would like to see such data. If it doesn't exist, then that is presumably because it has not been in the interests of anyone rich and powerful to obtain it. Polling - as Edward surely knows - is a device for influencing opinion, not a device for measuring it. From my own experience, I am confident that 'many' (I shouldn't have been that vague if percentages were available) Ukrainian inhabitants would rather be Russian, particularly in the Crimea and in the Eastern part of the country.

He also says that my contention that Mikhail Gorbachev 'had kindly dismantled the communist machine' is 'insulting to the millions of people who through their own bravery and vision helped overthrow the evil empire.'

Debaters should beware of people who claim to be 'insulted', by an idea that disturbs their own certainties. This sort of language is the enemy of cool reason. Is Edward saying that Mr Gorbachev's actions were not significant, and quite possibly decisive? Had he (or another leader) chosen the path of isolation, repression and massacre, what would have happened to those millions? Would the famous 'Velvet Revolution' we witnessed in Prague have taken place without his blessing, or the collapse of the East German regime? The Tiananmen option was available, and was very nearly used in Leipzig. I think we can credit Gorbachev with many things, while acknowledging his indecision and flaws as well.

Then he is cross about my remark that: 'We sponsored annoying mini-states next door to Russia.'

He chooses to interpret this thus: 'Mr Hitchens appears to be arguing that they should have stayed inside Russia, volens nolens, and that the West should not have lifted a finger to help them.'

That's how it may appear to him. I cannot help that. But it isn't actually what I say, or what I think. As one who was present during the January days and nights in Vilnius in 1991, when the KGB murdered a number of Lithuanians and I found myself looking directly up the barrel of a Soviet tank, I don't take this view. I was interested in Baltic independence in the days when most people in the West had never heard of these places, and I am haunted to this day by the description of the deportations in Czeslaw Milosz's 'The Captive Mind', as well as by the nasty modern KGB violence I saw in Vilnius (and Riga). But it seems clear to me that the long-term independence of these tiny states is endangered, not protected, by bringing them into NATO. Russia's interest in them is, was and always will be strategic. If Russia believes they are likely to be bases for a hostile alliance, then it will seek to undermine their independence.

I have no idea what NATO's real purpose is since it completed its mission in 1991, except perhaps as the provisional wing of globalist interventionism. There are few places further from the north Atlantic than Afghanistan. But I can see without much difficulty why Russia regards this organisation as implicitly hostile to it. Nor do I think the Baltic countries necessarily benefit from abandoning their new-found independence to the EU, which steals the sovereignty of all the nations it absorbs. It seems to me that these countries would be better off outside both these bodies, and outside the Russian empire as well. It is this possibility that Edward and his fellow 'New Cold War' advocates repeatedly deny.

As for the 'annoying' bit, I was thinking much more of Georgia, which has been encouraged into foolish sparring with Russia by various Western politicians and thinkers. How can this policy be sustained? Who benefits from it? What purpose does it serve, save to strengthen the arguments of Great Russian Chauvinists in the Kremlin? Long after the USA (and the EU) have lost interest in the Caucasus, Russia will still be there. Claims that this policy forms part of some sort of campaign for liberty and democracy in former Soviet states are deflated by the Anglosphere's continuing support for the extraordinarily nasty regime in Azerbaijan, and by its similar closeness to some of the more squalid dictatorships in Central Asia.

Edward simultaneously quotes and dismisses another writer who suggests that I am part of some Russian PR effort. Well, if Edward thinks this is tripe (as he does, and as it is) he would have done better not to quote it at all. But it gives a hint of the sort of overheated reaction which the New Cold Warriors have to any suggestion that their actions and attitudes might have helped to create the Putin autocracy - which I happen to think they did, by bullying and belittling Russia, and flooding it with spivs and snake-oil purveyors after 1991. The very word 'democracy' is gravely discredited in Russia, thanks to the experiences of normal people in that period.

As for my 'alternative', I don't really offer one, except caution, modesty and the avoidance of hubris. Alas, the damage is largely done. I merely point out that the conventional wisdom is mistaken, that the open-mouthed sycophantic coverage of such events as the 'Orange Revolution' has done us no favours, and that the future in this part of the world is far from settled and we should perhaps prepare for further turmoil rather than imagine that we have opened a Golden Road of peace and prosperity for ever. Is it sensible or right, ever, to force a language on people who don't want to speak it? Is Ukraine, as at present constituted, a viable polity? Are the Anglosphere nations right to treat Russia as a perpetual threat and pariah long after its global ambitions have collapsed and its military power has rusted away? Its regime is miserable. But then so is that of China, with which we seek good relations.

I think these policies are wrong, and the slogans which sustain them are barriers to thought. And it is thought that I hope to promote. It's my job, and Edward's. Why else did he and I make those chilly, alarming, thrilling journeys into the dark east in 1989, from which we've never really returned?

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Is Ed really Red? And other questions

I'll once again point out to the people who claim that I have no knowledge of policing, crime prevention etc that I have written a book on the subject, involving plenty of factual research into the operation of the English criminal justice system and the police.  Those who claim I know nothing of the matter are therefore simply mistaken. Whatever they may wish to say against me, this is something they cannot say, unless they have read the book and wish to challenge the validity of my...

As Ukrainians force Russians to turn their back on their language and change their names, I ask, is this the world's most absurd city?

Imagine some future Brussels edict has finally broken up Britain and handed Devon and Cornwall over to rule by Wales.

Imagine the Royal Navy, much shrunk and renamed the English Navy, being told it has to share Plymouth with a new Welsh fleet; that is, if it is allowed to stay there at all.

Picture the scene as cinemas in Plymouth and Exeter are forced to dub all their films into Welsh, while schools teach anti-English history and children are pressed to learn Welsh.

Street signs are in Welsh...

One enlightened policeman isn't going to scare the bad people

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Things will not get ­better. Just because Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constab­ulary has suddenly realised that police officers should once again walk the beat, do not expect that anyone will pay any attention.

Maybe you'll see a token patrol of two tiny, rotund PCSOs, chatting to each other as they tactfully ignore the anti-social behaviour raging all round them.

The yelling louts and the ­problem families will still rule the...

Liverpool's Two Cathedrals

Some time ago on this site I wrote about the astonishing building that is Durham Cathedral, an architectural monument - in my view - at least as valuable and striking as the Taj Mahal or the Moscow Kremlin, and in many ways greater than either in power and significance. Today I want to ponder another English building which is not given enough attention, and on its less lovely neighbour.

One of the many pleasures of visiting Liverpool for the Liberal Democrat conference was the chance to see...

A letter from Merseyside, and a few notes

First of all (I am attending the 'Liberal Democrat' conference, as it is quaintly called) let me restate my simple position on the use of law to control alcohol. Unlike cannabis, which is not legal and is not part of our culture, alcohol has been legal in this country for many centuries, many people use it in moderation, and it is perfectly possible to consume it without stupefying yourself. The only purpose of cannabis is self-stupefaction. And, by the way, the fatuous suggestion that it...

How to be Bourgeois, and other matters

I am pleased to see the enthusiasts for Stephen Fry attempting to hit back here on his behalf. I have long enjoyed the wonderful description of Mr Fry given by the Dictionary of National Celebrity 'a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like', not least because it helps to explain much of the enthusiasm among received-opinion leftists for this person's rather unprofound and trite opinions.

Radical opinion has now become so dull and free of thought or knowledge that Mr Fry...

Will all we have turn to dust and ashes, just like my Soviet roubles?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Britain cannot go on as it is. Either our dominant elite will recognise that their ideas are wrong, and must be changed. Or a series of avalanches will sweep away our comfortable lives.

I think I know which is more likely. Catastrophes do happen, and people survive them after a fashion, though their lives are never really the same afterwards.

The post-1968 ruling class are so convinced of their own rightness that I can no longer believe that...

Question - who said 'not all sex involving children is unwanted and abusive'. Answer - The Pope's biggest British critic

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Here comes the Pope, though he would have much more fun if he stayed in Rome for root canal dentistry.

His mysterious visit, to the country in Europe where he is most likely to be insulted, is the target of every liberal elitist in Britain.

A whole assembly of crackpot sexual revolutionaries and wild ultra-Leftists will be ranged against him.

Such people normally do not have much popular support.

Against the previous Pope, their campaign would...