Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 76
November 11, 2019
700 people came to see this talk about my book 'The Phoney Victory' in Edinburgh . Now you can share the experience
At last! The recording of my appearance last August at the Edinburgh Book Festival to discuss my widely-ignored book ���The Phoney Victory��� https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb8A4AGKGkg&feature=youtu.be
The interviewer is Ruth Wishart, to whom I offer my thanks . Likewise to the Edinburgh Book Festival, the only major book festival which showed any interest in this book .
I think the unfairness and idiocy of the boycott of silence to which the book has been subjected by festivals and reviewers was well-illustrated by the fact that 700 people attended this event, and I missed my train home because so many people wanted me to sign books afterwards.
I have addressed two other private events about this book and on both occasions received an enormous amount of interest. It is not because this book is a commercial flop that it is being ignored, but perhaps because it might be a success if it were given normal levels of publicity.
Why it is Bottomlessly Thick to Respond to Arguments Against Marijuana Legalisation by Saying 'What About Alcohol?'
My post today, with its clear evidence of marijuana's role in violence and misery, received many responses along the lines of 'what about alcohol?' as if this were either a logical or factual answer. Anyone who seriously advances this case should read the article below, first published here in February 2017 and now reprinted in all its brilliance:
It is amazing how many times I am confronted at debates, on the Internet and in discussions with apparently intelligent people, with the same stupid arguments for weakening the drug laws.
It���s plain that those who use them haven���t thought about them. I wonder where they pick them up. Is it at school, in PSHE classes? Or from Christmas crackers? Or have the billionaire drug lobby, Big Dope, found some other way of planting them in the minds of millions, though movies, comedians, celebrity endorsement and so on?
Anyway, I felt the time had come to provide a concise riposte to these thought-free claims, in the hope that those who are capable of thinking will be able to see through them. Many, of course, want to believe any old drivel that supports their personal desires. For them, I have no antidote.
Idiotic argument No 1:'MARIJUANA USE IS A VICTIMLESS CRIME'
Only if you do it on a desert island, quite alone, and nobody loves you. In all other cases, the user runs the risk of doing himself serious harm (see below on correlation between cannabis use and mental illness). And if he does, his family will be terribly grieved and quite possibly forced to look after him, and pay for his upkeep for the rest of this natural life. They are victims.
Alternatively, the user may end up in a mental hospital, expensively cared for at the charge of the taxpayer, who is also his victim. Even so, his family���s grief and distress will last for as long as they live.
'Correlation is not causation, so there !'
No, correlation is not *necessarily* causation. But it is not necessarily *not* causation either. It is the foundation of epidemiology -see the famous case in which Cholera was linked to foul water supplies
https://www.pastmedicalhistory.co.uk/john-snow-and-the-1854-cholera-outbreak/
- and the starting point of investigation. And it is often the best early indication we get of a connection (such as that between smoking and lung cancer) whose detailed operation may take many decades to find and describe. Should we have done nothing to discourage smoking despite the known correlation between smoking and Cancer?
Surely only Big Tobacco would take that view. Those who take the same complacent view about the marijuana link to mental illness are very similar to Big Tobacco, and in some cases have similar motives. It is shocking irresponsibility, especially since legalisation of marijuana, once achieved, will be as irreversible as legalisation of alcohol and legalisation of tobacco.
Many studies, from the Swedish Army survey to the Dunedin study, plus the work of Professor Sir Robin Murray mentioned elsewhere in this article, have shown that cannabis use is correlated with mental illness of various kinds. Mental illness, I should say here, is easy to define as the overthrow or weakening of the patient's reason. But I do not use various pseudo-scientific terms such as 'psychosis' or 'schizophrenia', since these seem to me to lack any objective measure, and cannot be compared to physical diseases which can be reliably diagnosed by objective methods.
Stupid stoners respond to this by saying that breathing and eating bread are also correlated with mental illness. But this is just wilful point-missing. These are not meaningful correlations. Yet it is surely unsurprising if a drug which acts powerfully on the brain is associated with mental disturbance; just as it is not surprising that repeatedly inhaling clouds of smoke from burning vegetable matter is associated with lung and bronchial problems.
The stupidest argument in the world: 'WOT ABAHT ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO, THEN, EH? I BET YOU LIKE A DRINK. HYPOCRITE!' And the next stupidest : 'Are you in favour of allowing smoking, then? Hypocrite!'
Well, what about alcohol and tobacco? Both are very dangerous to their users and do terrible harm. If you support their legal status, or consume either or both, surely you are inconsistent and a hypocrite?
Answer: Not at all. I drink a little wine and the occasional glass of beer. Very occasionally I might drink a small measure of spirits. There is no hypocrisy in this. I break now law. I do not get drunk. If I ceased to do it, it would have no impact on the drinking of others.
My opponents use an illegal drug and campaign for its legalisation to suit themselves. I do nothing of the kind.
If alcohol were illegal I would not buy or consume it, nor would I campaign for it to be legalised. If I did campaign for it to be legalised, I would certainly not break the law I was campaigning to change, as so many cannabis legalisers do.
As it happens, I regard heavy and habitual drinking as scourges and sources of misery, so I favour the tightest legal limitations on its sale which are achievable. I support the reintroduction of the strict alcohol licensing laws which existed until the Tory and Labour parties combined to destroy them between 1985 and 2000. Under those laws, pubs were closed for most of the day, and closed for even longer on Sundays, and a special licence was necessary to sell alcohol anywhere else.
I have no doubt that heavy drinking has hugely increased since these laws were abandoned. I have seen the terrible consequences of habitual heavy drinking, and can see the case for prohibiting alcohol entirely. However, I do not think this is practicable. Banning things which have been legal for many centuries and also in mass use (including TV advertising and open sale in high streets) is impracticable.
Such laws cannot be enforced, as millions will know that until recently the government and the police took the opposite view, and will regard the change as inconsistent and dubious.
What did 'Prohibition' really involve?
It would also be extremely difficult to prosecute. US alcohol ���prohibition��� is often wrongly regarded as a model for this It is not a good example. Millions of recent immigrants (wine drinkers from Italy and beer-drinkers from Germany and Bohemia) viewed the prohibition law (mainly the result of lobbying by feminists) as a political attack on their heritage and culture.
Very small resources were devoted to enforcing it. The USA has long, unpatrollable coastlines and borders. It shares its borders with countries which do not prohibit alcohol. It has vast unpoliced internal spaces where smuggled goods can be hidden and illegal brewing and distillation can take place. . Perhaps most significant of all, the USA's law did not punish possession (and therefore use) of alcoholic drinks.
This enfeebled it from the start, as if you do not interdict demand you are wasting your time interdicting supply. This is the basic flaw in our cannabis laws, where the supposedly severe penalties for possession are seldom if ever invoked . The police avoid arresting, the CPS avoids charging and the courts avoid punishing offenders. Where they do act at all, it is generally because it is a repeat offence and linked with another crime, or has been used as an easily proven charge (thanks to unquestionable forensics) against someone the authorities want to punish for something else which they cannot easily prove in court.
A better example of failed alcohol prohibition is modern-day Iran, where a country which formerly permitted drinking now seeks to suppress it. Any visitor to Iran is quickly aware that this law is not effectively enforced, and has utterly failed. And this failure takes place in a police state without any of the safeguards and restraints on authority in the USA.
What about smoking then?
Suppressing smoking has been slow, cautious and late. It had to be. It was legal for centuries, and a mass habit. If it were introduced now, and we knew what we know about cancer, we would make it illegal and keep it that way.
The slow crabwise approach of the authorities, long after it was clear that cigarettes were an intolerable health hazard that should never have been permitted in the first place, shows how difficult it is to act against organised , wealthy, politically-influential greed lobbies unless you have the law behind you already.
To begin with the huge commercial power of Big Tobacco more or less prevented any action at all. When action did take place it was by tiny slow degrees. It is amazing how long cigarette advertising continued after it was well-known that cigarettes killed their users. To this day, product placement of cigarettes in films and TV dramas continues to an astonishing extent.
And it is still legal to sell cigarettes in shops, a freedom allowed to no comparable substance (dangerous when used according to the manufacturers��� instructions). I support the current measures to discourage its use and ban it from public places (measures backed by civil legal sanctions).
These are reasonably effective - though far from wholly successful. This dangerous substance remains on open legal sale and is still legally promoted ( see above, through product placement and other subtle methods). It would have been far better had it never been legal or in mass use in the first place. The idea that , by legalising marijuana, we would make it possible to 'regulate' it is shown by the tobacco example to be false. Once legalised, so allowing open sale and advertising, use is so widespread that it is almost impossible to stamp out. And, however 'regulated' they may be, cigarettes remain potentially lethal to many of those who smoke them. Don't wait for the correlation between dope and mental illness to be confirmed as causation. Keep the laws against marijuana so that we aren't, 50 years hence, struggling to cram this evil genie back into its bottle.
A lesson for legalisers
This must surely be a lesson for legalisers. Imagine, were marijuana to be legal and in mass use, as the Billionaire Big Dope lobby ���
(yes, it exists, see the links below)
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/2/billionaire-george-soros-turns-cash-into-legalized/
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-proposition64-cash-snap-20161102-story.html
want it to be in the Western world, advertised (as permitted in the recent California Proposition 64) and in mass use, instead of (as it still is now) restricted to a comparatively small part of the population ��� comparatively small set beside the huge alcohol and cigarette markets.
The young think they are immortal
The existing law still restrains many people, especially the young, from using marijuana either at all or habitually. Were it to be properly enforced, it would be a powerful counterforce , set against the immense peer pressure in schools and colleges, for the young to take up marijuana. Young people think they are immortal and laugh at (often exaggerated) claims that drugs will kill them. Many presumably think that the mental illness increasingly correlated with marijuana use���.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/oct/29/cannabis-schizophrenia-classification
���.will not trouble them. But the realistic immediate prospect of a criminal record, of being banned forever from travelling to the USA, of limitless career damage (all consequences of criminal prosecution for possession, were it to be reintroduced) would do so, especially if they knew of people to whom this had happened.
This is the case in both Japan and South Korea, where laws are strongly enforced against drug possession, and use is also much lower. Before 1971, when British drug laws were more stringent and more enforced, drug use was also much lower in Britain. The idea that the Japanese and South Korean difference is ���cultural��� is fatuous. ���Culture��� on such matters is greatly influenced by law. Japan���s laws were introduced in response to widespread amphetamine use in the post-war period, a fact which rather undermines the claim that Japan���s ���culture��� is responsible for its lower drug use. Weak drug laws have hugely changed British culture��� since 1971.
See the November 2014 Home Office study on differing responses to the drug problem around the world
P.46:
'Japan: We visited Japan, which operates a strong enforcement-led approach to drug misuse, often regarded as a ���zero tolerance��� policy. Substances are more strictly controlled than in many other countries. Some products that are available over the counter as cold and flu remedies in the UK are banned. Possession of even small amounts of drugs is punishable by lengthy imprisonment.'
And p.51, which sneakily admits that tougher enforcement is accompanied by lower use (a conclusion perhaps unwelcome to the sponsors of this particular document)but then asserts, without a scrap of evidence, that this is really because of a different 'culture') It says (my emphases) : ' In Japan, where cultural conformity is traditionally valued, drug use is subject to a degree of stigma. In this context, it is difficult to tell whether low levels of drug use (see how slyly the document admits that there are low levels of drug use) are a consequence of legislation, or a product of the same cultural attitudes that have informed the zero-tolerance approach. This is more or less openly racist, to use a term the authors of this report would well understand. These supposedly 'cultural' attitudes also existed in the Britain of the mid-1960s, when we too enforced our drug laws. NB: The study does not mention South Korea, which has similar levels of enforcement and lower drug use. It overstates the level of enforcement in Sweden which can hardly be described as 'zero tolerance' or equated with Japanese practice.
Note the way the report records a) that the laws in Japan are tougher than elsewhere and b) that Japan does have lower drug use. But this does not fit with the message the report seems to have decided to send anyway. Had the investigators visited South Korea, another free democracy, I believe they would have found the same thing. Would they have dismissed that, too, as the result of 'culture'?
The world���s stupidest argument
All the above make it plain that the ���what about alcohol and tobacco��� plaint is in fact the World���s Stupidest Argument. (#WorldsStupidestArgument) Not only is there no hypocrisy. Not only am I and other campaigners for stringent drug laws quite ready to concede that these are highly dangerous drugs which should be as heavily restricted as possible. But the ���US prohibition failed��� slogan is in fact a warning to Western society that, once marijuana is legal, it will be effectively impossible ever to ban marijuana again, even if the warnings of many experts turn out to be true, and the correlation between its use and lifelong mental illness turns out to be meaningful and major.
'WHY ALLOW CRIMINALS TO CONTROL THE TRADE? MAKING IT LEGAL WOULD DRIVE THEM OUT'
This is demonstrably untrue. Alcohol and tobacco (see above) are legal. Yet in Britain, HM Revenue and Customs use huge resources trying to combat the criminal gangs which smuggle illicit cigarettes into the country, or who manufacture and distribute illicit alcohol. This is because they are very heavily taxed, just as legal marijuana would be very heavily taxed if it were on open sale. In fact it is already being taxed in Colorado, one of the US states which has legalised it. Illegal sellers still operate there, trading successfully, at well under the taxed price in legal outlets. Illegal sellers also prosper in Uruguay, another place where marijuana has been decriminalised, and where attempts have been made to limit strengths of marijuana on sale. In Colorado, fear of the illegal market is one of the reasons why high-strength THC products are on legal sale. The same is true in Canada, where criminal gangs, sellng at higher strengths and lower prices, still dominate the trade. Legal sellers fear the competition from the black market. We can safely assume this would all be be the case under general legalisation, as has now been shown in Canada.
All crime is caused by law
In any case, no thought has gone into this argument at all. All crime is caused by law. To have law means to have crime. If you have no law, you will have no crime. But think what this means in reality. If we banned nothing, we���d need no police, courts or prisons. But we���d also live in much worse, more dangerous and unpleasant world. We ban things because they are dangerous or have other evil effects.
Why are cynical businessmen so much better than criminal gangs?
Why exactly are cynical businessmen better than criminal gangs? Dope legalisers back Billionaire Big Dope, while condemning cynical cartels of the same kind - Big Pharma, Fast Food and soft drinks behemoths, the alcohol giants, Big Oil and the arms trade. Such businessmen, following the example of Big Tobacco, can wrap their dangerous products in pretty packets and sell them in shops and on the internet, they can in some cases get health services to prescribe their products to millions, and advertise them on TV and in cinemas. Or they can lobby states into fighting wars for them and helping them sell their dangerous products in unstable places. Why are they so much more desirable than criminals? Criminals cannot do these things, and can reach many fewer people than cynical businessmen.
Just because it���s regulated, doesn���t mean it���s safe.
Does the fact that cigarettes and alcohol are sold openly and ���regulated��� mean they are safe to use and will not harm you? Don't. Be. Silly.
Why then would 'regulation' of drugs, mean that legalised drugs were safe to use and would not harm you? By ���regulating��� them, society and the state would be offering a reassurance they were not entitled to give. They would be looking the other way while something inherently dangerous was put on open sale. I can see why a greed merchant might accept this argument. But most marijuana legalisers regard themselves as being opposed to corporate cynicism. Why, I ask again, are they outraged at the sale of sugary drinks and greasy burgers to innocent children, but happy to ally themselves with the mighty lobby of Big Dope?
Oh, and we're told that handing over a lucrative substance to legitimate business means the end of violence. In practice that isn't true, and couldn't be unless the much-touted promise by legalisers of big tax revenues from legal marijuana was abandoned, which it won't be. Western governments cannot make ends meet. they will not ignore any opportunity to raise taxes on pleasures. Could it also mean the state getting (violently?) involved in securing supplies, as it has done over oil. Is this inconceivable? History says no.
'LEGALISING DRUGS WOULD END THE MURDER AND CARTELS IN DRUG PRODUCING COUNTRIES'
I am not quite sure why. Perhaps it might instead lead to international wars, such as those which now take place over oil, for prime drug-producing territory. But the cause of the trouble in these countries comes from the rivers of money, dollars, euros and pounds, which are spent on drugs by spoiled, selfish westerners. Their role is exactly the same as that of those who spend their money on trafficked prostitutes. They finance and maintain a wicked, immoral trade by paying for it.
Meet The Real Mr Big - it���s You
These are the people who seek the dangerous, selfish pleasures of drugs. These are the real Mr Bigs of the drug trade. Without the cash they willingly hand over for their chemical joy, there would be no cartels, no smuggling, no mules, no gang wars.
This is why it is so astonishing that the people at the heart of the drug trade, the buyers and users, are the only ones in whom the law is utterly uninterested. If they were systematically arrested and prosecuted, the drug trade would rapidly dwindle, most of all in the places now enslaved by it.
'BUT YOU CAN���T PUT HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE IN PRISON'
No, you can���t. The point of prison is to deter. Once it is clear that a crime is being taken seriously, its incidence falls (see Japan and South Korea and pre-1971 Britain). A fairly small number of high-profile arrests and prosecutions, and the use by police of informers on a large scale so that nobody knew if they were in fact buying from a police nark, would rapidly persuade most people that drug abuse wasn���t worth the risk. And if everyone had heard of someone who *had* been jailed for drug possession, they���d change their behaviour. Drug abuse is a crime of affluence and choice. Anyone can stop committing it if he wants to. Nobody needs to do it.
Dictators and despots (and any government fond of repression and lying) love having stupefied subjects. They���re easier to fool, and to push around
Self-stupefaction is not some mighty freedom, like the freedoms of speech, thought and assembly. It is rather the opposite. Any tyrant would be glad to have a stupefied, compliant and credulous population, accepting what it was told and too passive and flaccid to resist. See Huxley���s ���Brave New World���, in which the masses are controlled by the pleasure-drug Soma. Mostly, they just take it and are apathetic and stupefied. But on one occasion a riot is quelled by the police spraying the protestors with Soma.
'But Marijuana is a useful medicine, isn���t it?'
Is it? There have been a few attempts to use its active ingredients in medicines, but they have not been especially successful. It is extremely hard to test it rigorously (in double-blind tests against inert placebos) because the guinea-pigs will instantly know if they have been given the real thing or the dummy.
Also euphoria and numbness are not the same as medical relief, or brandy would be a medicine. Then again, remember that correlation with mental illness. No drug is any safer than its side-effects. Thalidomide was quite effective against morning sickness among pregnant women. But its appalling side-effects made that benefit irrelevant. What ailment is so bad that you would risk lifelong mental illness in the search for cure or alleviation?
Finally, I have yet to meet a ���medical marijuana��� campaigner who was not working alongside the general campaign for recreational legalisation. No serious campaign for medical use would do this, as it instantly makes it much less likely that anyone will listen or accede. I don���t question the *possibility* that the ingredients of marijuana may one day be shown to have a valid medical use. But I would take it much more seriously of those who make this claim were not allied to general legalisation campaigns.
It is also worth noting that Keith Stroup, one of the USA���s most prominent and distinguished campaigners for marijuana legalisation, said in 1979 (in an interview with the American university newspaper ���The Emory Wheel��� of which I have seen the original) that he hoped to use medical marijuana as a red herring to get pot a good name. I suspect he now regrets his candour among friends, but I also suspect that it was true then and remains true now. And until I meet a ���medical marijuana��� campaigner who actively denounces, and distances himself from, the general legalisation campaign, I will continue to believe this.
Anyway, can anyone tell me why, even if marijuana does turn out to be an effective medicine, that would justify its legalisation as a recreational drug. There is precisely no logical connection between the two. Yet legalisers speak as if there is, and go unchallenged by dim or compliant media and politicians.
But you don't want to ban rock-climbing, mountain-climbing or motorbikes
No, though if motorbikes *were* banned I might well oppose a campaign to legalise them. I know from personal experience that 17-year-olds, for instance, shouldn't be allowed to ride them.
There are two things wrong with this argument. The first is that rock-climbing and motorbikes are and always have been legal, but marijuana is illegal , and legalisation (see above) is almost certainly irreversible if it comes about. Why spit on your luck? Just because some dangerous things are legal, it is not an argument for making another dangerous thing legal. Or if it is, I cannot see why.
The other is that dangerous self-stupefaction is not really comparable to dangerous activities such as these. Climbing or riding are both activities which can be learned and in which experience and dedication contribute to safety and achievement. The better you are at them, the safer you are. I also think they make those who do them better people than they otherwise would be, like all activities demanding courage, dedication, effort and self-discipline.
No such claim can be made for the smoking of marijuana.
'P ortugal and the Netherlands have shown that relaxing the law works!'
Have they? How? Holland's limited decriminalisation of marijuana is much less extensive, in reality, than Britain's de facto decriminalisation spread over 40 years and affecting the entire country, and the UK is generally seen as a place with many serious drug problems. Many in the Netherlands hate what has happened and strive to keep cannabis cafes away form their homes. Amsterdam, the centre of this reform, is not exactly crime free.
https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/du...
The claims made for Portugal are disputed both in Portugal and among researchers outside the country. See
Lifetime drug use in Portugal has actually risen. As far as I know, no work has been done on the incidence of mental illness there among drug users. HIV infection rates among drug abusers are not really a very good indicator of the total success of a policy. It's also worth pointing out that, like many supposedly 'enlightened' states which have greatly relaxed their drug laws, Portugal was not famous for tough enforcement before the change. For years before the 1991 reforms the law had been laxly enforced. The same, by the way, is true of Uruguay. Even now, it's tougher than in the UK. A person caught with drugs in Portugal can have his passport confiscated, be banned from pursuing his profession, and fined heavily.
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/really-want-portugals-drug-laws/
As for those countries which offer 'addicts' supplies of substitute drugs, and the claims made for crime reduction following this, people should notice that what has really happened is that the state has become a drug enabler, mugging taxpayers to pay for the drug habits of self-indulgent criminals. Whether you rejoice over this, or do not, will depend on your moral and political opinions. But it can hardly be presented as an ideal solution.
Supposed health benefits following the Portuguese drug law changes also coincided with other changes in Portugal's health services (correlation is not necessarily causation, as I so often point out). Even enthusiasts for the policy will, if pressed, admit this fact.
For a fuller examination of this claim, please see this longer analysis of the alleged Portuguese Drug Paradise :
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/08/the-portuguese-drug-paradise-examined.html
And finally....
A cruel war on drugs is ruining lives'
No it's not . See 'Myth 8' here
Also note that the London 'Times' reported on Monday 20th February 2017 that 'Police warnings and fixed penalty notices for cannabis possession have more than halved in four years, leading to claims that the drug is being effectively decriminalised . This follows many reports of UK police forces openly saying they will no longer pursue cases of drug possession.'
And see this:
*****For full details of these arguments, backed by research, please consult my 2012 book 'The War We Never Fought', published by Bloomsbury, which any library will get for you or (if you prefer) is available to purchase in all formats, including audio. ***
November 10, 2019
PETER HITCHENS: Read Grace's story, then tell me you still think marijuana isn't destroying our country
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday Column
You probably shuddered when you read about the terrible thing which happened to a young trainee doctor, Grace Spence Green. Her body was smashed when a man jumped off a 120ft-high shopping centre and landed on her. But did you wonder why it even happened? Marijuana was why it happened.
When will we ever learn just how much damage the unrestrained use of marijuana is doing to our society? When will we ever do anything about it, as wiser countries do?
I make no apologies for coming back to this subject, as I remain amazed by the growing support of ignorant politicians and media for the legalisation of this terrifying poison. If they get their way it will take us straight into a nightmare version 
of the third world, with all the misery but without all the sunshine.
You yourselves may have seen the symptoms, and you will have been appalled by them ��� but you may not have connected them with their actual cause, because so many media outlets do not report the vital details.
There are many striking things about the case of Ms Green. There is her courageous, selfless response. This young woman is now confined to a wheelchair, possibly for life. But she is quite without bitterness. She takes comfort because, though she was gravely hurt, she managed to save a life, by breaking the man's fall. She has returned to university to continue her medical studies.
This is very moving. But it also makes me very angry, because all this pain and loss could easily have been avoided by simple, cheap human actions.
The man who jumped, Amsumana Sillah Trawally, eventually admitted grievous bodily harm and was sent to prison, far too late to do him or us or Ms Green any good. The judge said he had, in effect, used his body as a weapon and must have known the risk he was taking. Which is true.
Trawally, 25, was out of his mind on marijuana at the time. He tested positive for the drug, afterwards. But you will say, surely marijuana does not cause people to leap off high places, and land on innocents below, or it would happen all the time.
And I would agree with you. The temporary high given by the drug probably would not normally have that effect. But many terrible acts of violence or insanity or both are committed by long-term marijuana users, who have become mentally ill.
The judge, like so many people in positions of authority in modern Britain, appears not to know of the link between marijuana and long-term mental illness. That judge ignored evidence that Trawally was mentally ill as well as intoxicated, seeing it as nothing more than an attempt to excuse the crime. He said: 'I am entirely satisfied that the offending was attributable to voluntary consumption of cannabis rather than any underlying mental disorder.'
In my view the judge was wrong. This issue is nothing to do with responsibility. Possessing marijuana is a crime, and those who inhale or eat it are totally responsible for the other crimes they commit as a result. I'm utterly uninterested in getting them off.
But if only the authorities would look into the past drug abuse of all violent criminals, I think we would find an undeniable link between marijuana use and violence.
If this were done, the Government and the police might grasp that 50 years of slack, weak, sloppy attitudes towards marijuana, and the popular wisdom that it is a soft drug, have been a disastrous mistake. 
Far from legalising marijuana, we should be ferociously enforcing the laws against its possession, and driving it out of use, as the sensible governments of Japan and South Korea still do.
But see what a stone wall I am up against here. Half a year ago, I tried to discover from Hampshire Police if they had checked on the past drug use of a very nasty killer.
The culprit was then 17 so his name has not been disclosed. He broke into the home of Barry Hounsome, an academic in Gosport, near Portsmouth, and cruelly killed him for no known reason, using, among other things, an electric drill. He was clearly out of his mind.
I asked if they had looked into his past drug abuse.
But rather than answer my simple question, Hampshire Police acted as if they were guarding the national nuclear codes.
After months of wrangling, and the laudable determination of the Information Commissioner, they last week coughed up a form authorising a drug test on the culprit after he was caught. That's it. That's what they did. No sign of any inquiry into his past. Two parts of nothing. They have had every opportunity to tell me if they ever did anything else. I think I can now fairly say that they did not. They weren't interested. They didn't think it mattered.
Well, thanks to that lack of interest in every police force in this country, more dreadful crimes have taken place, are taking place and will take place, such as the one which burst so terribly into the kind and generous life of Grace Spence Green. This will go on until we wake up. When will that be?
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November 7, 2019
Some Thoughts on the TV version of Sir Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials'
The critics gushed on Monday morning ( as the TV preview writers had gushed over the weekend) about ���His Dark Materials���. The BBC���s ultra-costly collaboration with HBO which began at 8.00 p.m. on Sunday night on BBC1, a slot to kill for, on the first real Sunday of the dark season.
This is the third attempt to make visual drama out of Sir Philip Pullman���s anti-Christian fiction. I���ve noted before that Sir Philip���s earlier, more ordinary children���s books, free as far as I can judge of anti-Christian propaganda, have never attracted the same almost obsessive admiration from the intellectual classes.
Please see the following links for some of my previous writings about this:
The first attempt was a great flapping turkey of a film, though, as now, people made an effort to be polite about it at the time. I now glow with pride that I was perhaps the only journalist in London who wanted to go to the preview, but was not invited to the preview. I decline to believe that this was happenstance, or that my invitation was lost in the post. Indeed, the makers would not even tell me where it was to be shown, presumably in case I sneaked in via the fire exit, aided by a confederate, as I have heard some people have done when they could not get into the front entrance of a cinema. I even contacted Sir Philip (as he then was not) to ask for his help against this obvious denial of liberty, but no help came. Maybe he was powerless in the matter.
Despite its ponderous, didactic tedium, the papers tried to be nice. One said ���though it lacks the impact or charm of The Chronicles of Narnia, the special effects are extraordinary and the film is sure to be a success with young audiences.���
Another said ��� Philip Pullman declared that the screen version of his classic story lived up to what he was trying to achieve when he put pen to paper.
���The bestselling writer told The Times that the epic screen adaptation of the first instalment of his fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials -a spellbinding story of shape-shifting creatures and otherworldly characters in parallel universes was stunning.���
The Sun declared 'A seamless mix of live action and computer-generated images brings to life a colourful cast of weird and wonderful characters. From the countless animal daemons and massive warrior-like bears to the inventive aircraft and intricate instruments, the special effects are as stunning as the snow-covered landscapes they inhabit. But despite the computer trickery the cast, which also includes Eva Green, Jim Carter, Christopher Lee and Tom Courtenay, hold their own.
Thirteen-year-old Dakota Blue makes an enchanting debut.
With a dark and complicated plot and a few scenes that will have you jumping out of your seat, The Golden Compass is definitely not for very young children. But for older ones and adults who enjoy fantasy, it's a must, a well-written, beautifully delivered adventure.'
The Guardian proclaimed 'it certainly looks wonderful, with epic dash and a terrific central performance from Nicole Kidman, who may come to dominate our children's nightmares the way Robert Helpmann's Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang once did ours. It has no other challengers as this year's big Christmas movie.'
Ah, well.
But others expressed doubts which turned out to be justified. It never really got off the ground, dramatically or commercially. Promised sequels were unmade.
There seemed to me to be a similar faint undercurrent in Monday morning���s otherwise complimentary reviews. Great CGI. Sexy stars. But a bit wordy.
Having read the books, I was and remain unsurprised. It is simply not an obvious candidate for filming. It wouldn���t be filmed or staged, in my view, if it were not for Sir Philip���s cult status as Arch-Atheist and all-purpose left-wing cultural figure, as underlined by his famous but later cancelled tweet about 'Boris' Johnson, ropes and lamp-posts.
The second attempt was a curious dramatization at the National Theatre in London, that temple of radical thought, which attracted the sort of reviews which go on about how wonderful the puppetry is, but have less to say about how gripping the drama was.
Some people have suggested that the film flopped because of religious boycotts in the USA. Maybe this is possible. For sure, the Executive Producer of the TV series. Jane Tranter has gone on record in the USA to say that this series is not an attack on religion.
���The religious controversy that was around the film was not relevant to the books themselves, she said, explaining: ���Philip Pullman talks about depression, the control of information and the falsification of information���.there is no direct contrast with any contemporary religious organisation.���
���Philip Pullman, in these books, is not attacking belief, not attacking faith, not attacking religion or the church per se,��� Tranter said. ���He���s attacking a particular form of control where there is a very deliberate attempt to withhold information, keep people in the dark, and not allow ideas and thinking to be free.���
She added: ���At any time it can be personified by an authoritarian church or organisation, and in our series it���s personified by the Magisterium, but it���s not the equivalent of any church in our world.���
Odd that she should say that when Sir Philip himself said quite explicitly ���I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.��� in an interview with Alona Wartofsky of the Washington Post published on February 19 2001 (Remember that the three books of the original trilogy were published between 1995 and 2000).
I���m very glad this article is now back on the Washington Post site and readily available, as it vanished for a while. I found many of Mr Pullman���s partisans were unhappy about its open campaigning nature and reluctant to believe he had used such severe, direct words. I suspect his publishers, and the makers of the film and the TV series, also wish he had not been quite so blunt. Well, he did say them. He was that blunt. Judging by my dealings with him, he meant exactly what he said.
And, going by the first episode of ���His Dark Materials��� , all I have yet seen, I think Ms Tranter may be fooling herself a bit.
There's a great flood, and a mysterious prophecy of a child with a great destiny. Prophecy? Destiny? How would they work, in a world without purpose or design?
The portentous opening sequence and titles, which I think must have cost a small fortune all by themselves, play with the idea that Pullman���s world is both like and unlike our own. I���ll come back to that. Then the introduction gets very pseudo-religious.
The human soul, it says, takes the form of a daemon. This is Sir Philip���s supposedly clever device, by which all characters are followed about by an animal (of the opposite sex to them) which in some way resembles their adult character. Actually it���s not that clever. It hasn���t been thought through. Do these creatures eat? Do they urinate and defecate? Do they sleep when we do, or do they pace and scramble around in our bedrooms as we snore and dream? In what way are they the animals they resemble? How do they get on with household pets? Or don���t they exist? Some of them growl and hiss, as well as talk in beautifully-modulated English. They appear to be physical. Lord Asriel���s leopard-daemon chases a servant form the room with snarls and menace, and he flees as if it poses a bodily danger.
Do they take up actual space or are they phantasms of light and shadow? Say your daemon was (as I suspect mine might be) a donkey, where on earth would I keep it? Would it bray, or kick my opponents if they annoyed me in debates?
We are then told, solemnly, that the ���relation between human and daemon is sacred���.
Oh, yes. Sacred to what? Sacred in what way? Can things be sacred without a God? If so, is this the God of our world, or another one?
It���s so sacred that the careful watcher of Sunday night���s drama will have noted that minor characters, especially servants, do not have visible daemons. I could see none among the laundry workers or the kitchen servants, nor among most of the canal-dwelling Gyptians, who are politically-correct Sir Philip���s beloved oppressed minority. If the uniformed officer aboard the Zeppelin had a daemon, I couldn���t make it out. Nor could I quite work out how Lyra Belacqua���s furry-animal daemon, Pantalaimon, managed to get aboard the airship which took them to London. He appeared to be scampering far behind her as she ran across Merton meadow to the gangway, which she reached only just in time. But Pantalaimon somehow appeared beside her when she took her seat beside the supposedly sinister Mrs Coulter.
No doubt this rather uneven distribution of daemons, and the unclear laws governing their being, makes perfect TV sense. If everyone had an attendant creature the screen would be a throbbing, chattering, hissing, barking, braying, squawking mass of animal life, with no room for the people. But then, so would such a world be. And unless an awful lot of prejudices also ceased to exist, it would all be a bit obvious, wouldn���t it? If a new senior executive turned up for work with a rattlesnake or a vulture perched on his shoulder, we���d know what was going on rather more quickly than you often do. People who found that their daemons were dung beetles, wasps, earwigs, earthworms or cane toads would be cheesed off for their entire lives, gifted from their teens with more self-knowledge than most of us want. It would be the death of guile, but maybe the birth of something else nearly as bad. The Samaritans would be busy. I���m just pointing out that it���s an interesting idea that doesn���t really work, like a lot of what Sir Philip says.
So there are souls and there is sacredness? How odd in an atheist���s propaganda fiction. What role does a soul have in a universe without Christ? What is the point of eternal life without eternal justice and an eternal purpose? Is it that Sir Philip loathes Christianity but prefers some other sort of deity who equips us with souls whose purpose is surely to pre-exist and survive our physical sojourn on earth? If so, how does that work? What is this deity, and what is his or her purpose in giving us these daemons?
For the alternative world isn���t that alternative. It���s just things we already know, but invented in a different order and given different names (like 'Gyropter' for 'Helicopter' and 'Anbaric power' for electricity. There are airships, but there are also railways (the aerial view of London in episode one completely changes the bridges across the Thames, but Blackfriars Bridge, though it rises in the middle like Tower Bridge, is clearly a railway crossing. Pullman mentions an Oxford station in his books. So why on earth do people travel to London in dangerous, queasy, slow airships when they could go by train? It���s another mystery.
The barges of the Gyptians (whose leaders dress in rakish gangsterish headgear if they were in a Tarantino film) move as if they have engines. But apparently the bicycle has not been invented, or the car, or the telephone. The TV and the radio are also absent. There are newspapers, and police in rather modern uniforms. But academics dress like men from the 1930s, and servants like those of the Edwardian age. Yet somehow there is a mechanical device which can tell truth from falsehood, and a way of keeping a human head frozen in a block of ice for several days.
Then there is the ���the Magisterium ��� not the equivalent of any church in our world���, that Ms Tranter tells us is being portrayed. Ho. Hum. A fairly obviously priestly member of the Jordan College senior Common Room wears a Roman collar and seems to be in some way a spokesman for the, or a, faith.
The ���magisterium��� repeatedly referred to may not mean much to a lay audience, but it is a term used by the Roman Catholic Church to describe its supreme authority. I happen to know that in PullmanWorld, the Reformation is supposed to have ended in a compromise in which the ultra-Protestant John Calvin became Pope. But there���s no hint of this in the first episode. Priests are addressed as ���Father' in the Catholic style. The symbol of the Magisterium is a sort of Maltese cross. It is adorned with all kinds of extra curlicues, but it is in the end a cross. This symbol is displayed in a fascistic great hall, built in the Nazis��� favourite material, a polished limestone, and presumably owned by the Magisterium. This colossal structure has apparently replaced Buckingham Palace and its gardens in the centre of London (if my rapid scan of the aerial view is right) . A senior cleric, addressed as ���Father��� by a subordinate, also wears a tiny version of this odd cross on a pin stuck through his collar. A ���Cardinal��� is referred to in this conversation. This is a position inextricably and as far as I know exclusively associated with the Roman Catholic Church. If, as Ms Tranter says, the Magisterium is ���not the equivalent of any church in our world,��� why does it have a cross as its symbol, priests addressed as ���Father��� and senior officials called ���Cardinals���? Write on one side of the paper only.
I was also struck by a curious moment in Lyra Belacqua���s life. She is being taught about what is obviously the Bible (King James version) by her tutor at Jordan college.
The passage under examination is Man's first disobedience, the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve, Genesis Chapter Three, verses 1-8, which I often cite as a great metaphorical warning against human vanity and utopianism. Here is the whole, real thing. Please note especially the emphasised passage :
���Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.���
Now listen to what Lyra���s tutor says as he quotes : ������your eyes shall be opened, and your daemons will assume their true form and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.���
The language is more or less the same, the passage is one of the most famous in the Bible, but it has been altered. What was a dangerous temptation appears to be reordered as a reassurance. And although it is the most famous in the Bible, I doubt whether many of those watching realised that the person speaking in this passage is the Serpent, the allegorical personification of evil. I have to say this moment, beginning just before ten minutes into the iplayer recording https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000b1v0/his-dark-materials-series-1-1-lyras-jordan , seemed highly creepy to me. Who exactly does this world worship? I was strangely reminded of Roman Polanski���s film version of Ira Levin���s brilliant book ���Rosemary���s Baby���, which directly answers Yeats���s question ���What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?���
So don���t tell me this does not touch on any religious controversy.
I was also fascinated, as a resident of Oxford over many decades, by the CGI fantasy of the city. I couldn���t make sense of the animal sculptures on the college pinnacles, or the barbarically neglected crypt with exposed bones in open sarcophagi, next to the college wine cellar. Much of the action seems to take place in New College, perhaps because it contains such a large chunk of the ancient city walls, but I think I spotted Magdalen cloisters too.
When I froze the frame to examine the alternative skyline, I saw that a large number of extra gothic spires had been jammed in, two apparently amid the classical glories of the Queen's College, and that the Radcliffe Camera had been strangely flattened. While some familiar landmarks (Tom Tower, Merton tower, the telescope towers of All Souls���, the University Church) seem to have survived more or less unchanged, the city seems to have acquired even more churches than it already has. The old monastic buildings to the West, now utterly vanished thanks to Henry VIII, seem to have survived, and a rather Mussolini-esque and hideous pillared rotunda, surmounted by a flattened copper dome, stands roughly where the equally hideous new shopping mall now is. What can it be? I long to roam for a day in this alternative city and see what they are up to. Amusingly, the Victorian suburb of North Oxford, now one of the chief territories of political and social liberalism, simply does not exist. North of the colleges, fields and woods begin. How nice.
Does all this mean anything, or were they just playing with the technology? No doubt we shall find out, but my guess is that the whole thing has not been thought through, like the rest of Sir Philip���s imagined world. It is the anti-Christian message which has caught the attention of the cultural elite, and which runs through the story from start to finish. From what I recall of the books, whether they have tried to take the preaching out, or whether they have left it in, they are going to have to spend an awful lot of time on conversations in which the characters explain things to each other. At length. I wonder if it will keep the 7.2 million viewers it picked up on its first outing.
November 5, 2019
My case against Marijuana legalisation, made to students at the University of York on 29th October 2019 -the movie
Some readers may wish to watch this recording of the event organised by the York Union. I was supposed to have an opponent but for some reason he pulled out.
How Myths About WW2 make it easier for unscrupulous and ignorant modern leaders to start wars of choice in our own times
I thought some readers might be interested in this article, which I have written for the website 'Unherd'
https://unherd.com/2019/11/the-war-was-not-our-finest-hour/
November 4, 2019
My case against Matrijuana legalisation, made to students at the University of York on 29th October 2019 -the movie
Some readers may wish to watch this recording of the event organised by the York Union. I was supposed to have an opponent but for some reason he pulled out.
The sound quality is strangely poor. I have reported this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk1DJsjJvEk&feature=youtu.be
November 3, 2019
PETER HITCHENS: I used to love elections. But now I say a plague on all their houses!
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column
The grimmest horror story I have ever read* tells of a man in despair who hangs himself efficiently and lethally. After a brief, painless moment, he awakes to find he is still very much alive, in exactly the same place he was in before he tried to end it all.
Well, almost exactly. It is a lot darker. Dawn never seems to arrive, and things are stirring in the shadows that he does not much like the look of. But what is quite clear is that he has not solved his problems at all.
So it is with our Parliament and our political class. Too weak, irresponsible and cowardly to put their names to the compromise with the EU that was always going to be the outcome, they have sought oblivion by placing all the responsibilities on someone else ��� in this case, you and me.
They hope that in yet another national poll ��� the fourth since 2015 ��� they can somehow escape the moral and political debts and obligations they had before the General Election was called. It is as if an Election was some sort of cleansing ritual, in which a flurry of votes washes away the wicked past and leaves MPs born again and free from all the stupid things they have done (or the things they have stupidly not done) in the past few years.
But it is not. The debts all remain. They will be collected. The compromise still has to be accepted, and the consequences undergone. They will all pay. Alas, so must we. I will personally play no part in this. I long ago ceased to care who won or lost. The major policies available from the major parties, on important subjects, are miles from anything I could possibly desire. There may be a few marginal things I like, but they are not enough.
I do not buy goods I do not want. So why would I vote for parties I despise? More tellingly, the only thing which gives these people power over me is the vote. With the monarchy more or less dead, the only foundation of political power in this country is the ballot box.
We vote for them, so that they can ignore us.
Think what we might achieve if we simply declined to grant this power to the current political elite. What if they held an Election and nobody came? Nothing would make me laugh more than if we woke up on the morning of December 13 and nobody had any votes at all. It might force the great reform of our politics we so badly need. But you won���t risk it, will you? In which case you will get exactly what you deserve, hot and strong.
I used to love General Elections. I can just recall the thrill of adult uncertainty on the brightly moonlit night of October 8, 1959, when I was first conscious of one of these events. My parents, as it happened, owed little or nothing to Harold Macmillan, the Tory who won that night. But in those days there was no reliable polling, and nobody knew who would win.
Five years later, on October 15, 1964, my prep-school headmaster added to my education by taking me with him (probably illegally) into a Devon polling booth. He teased me (at that time I was a little, treble-voiced Tory) by letting his hand hover over the Labour candidate���s name for a second, before casting his ballot for an ancient stalwart of old-fashioned Conservatism called Sir Henry Studholme.
But at dawn the following day, we were all (rightly as it turned out), appalled by the news on the BBC Home Service that Labour���s Harold Wilson was likely to win office by a tiny margin. We felt stricken, and unsure what the future would bring ��� little knowing the scale and nature of what would, in fact, follow.
Yet, just over a year later, in March 1966, I had become an ungrateful, difficult teenager and so had switched sides, offering my services to the Labour Party���s committee rooms in East Road, Cambridge, where I was then at school, and a few days later to their counterparts in Oxford, where I lived. I can, even now, see and feel in my mind���s eye that thrilling windy, grey evening of March 31, and the astonishing dawn, in which the Tories were in full flight, losing seats they had held for generations.
By June 1970 I had actually acquired a vote, thanks to that same pestilent Harold Wilson, who had adopted the Monster Raving Loony Party���s policy and introduced votes at 18. So I was outraged to find myself on the losing side when Labour suffered an almost wholly unexpected defeat.
How shocked I was, standing outside Oxford Town Hall in the warm darkness towards midnight (polls closed earlier in those days) as the returning officer announced that the Tory Monty Woodhouse had clawed the seat back from Labour. (I did not then know that Woodhouse was a retired MI6 agent who had once overthrown the government of Iran).
Next came 1974, that year of endless thrills for anyone who was politically interested and did not have any responsibilities.
Then we had two Elections in eight months, and after the first of them I found time to go to London and heckle the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe as he emerged from 10 Downing Street after failing to make a deal with the defeated Tory Prime Minister, Ted Heath.
I didn���t know the meeting had gone badly but resented Heath���s attempt to stay in office through a deal with Thorpe, when he���d really lost. In those lost days, anyone could walk into Downing Street, a matter of pride in our free capital, and heckle, too. How I still miss that.
In 1979, as one of the two most Right-wing members of Hampstead Labour Party (Mrs Hitchens was the other) I tried and utterly failed to prevent the selection of one Ken Livingstone as our candidate. I loyally worked for him, secure in the certainty that he would lose, as he did. I quit the Left for good, not long afterwards. If Ken Livingstone was its future, I did not want to be part of it.
After that, Elections were often work rather than play. In 1983 I followed the mobile catastrophe that was Michael Foot���s campaign and have ever afterwards felt sorry for the personal humiliation (much of it achieved by his own side) of a decent, kindly, freedom-loving, educated and patriotic man, a survivor of the 1930s who had no real place in slick modern politics.
I can still hear him trying to communicate his thoughtful, ancient principles to half-empty halls. He might as well have been addressing the ocean.
In 1992 I found myself called back from Moscow, where I was then working, in the correct belief that my mere presence would irritate Neil Kinnock in some explosive fashion. Mr Kinnock and I never got on, and somehow our mutual chemistry led to an event called ���Grommetgate���. This engulfed Mr Kinnock and me in a crazy row about a broadcast in which the true case of a small girl with glue ear had been distorted.
The whole Labour campaign, until then as smooth as hair oil, shuddered and halted. At one point Mr Kinnock���s angry aides fell on me when I tried to approach him with a question, and they were so zealous that the Leader of the Opposition actually had to physically rescue me from them, putting his arm protectively round my shoulder ��� which must have cost him a lot.
What was it all about? I am less and less sure. But it all went so mad that I actually found myself giving a press conference instead of asking questions at one. Some Labour people accused me at the time of winning the Election for John Major. Later, some Tories (when they realised what a disaster he was) accused me of the same thing. It���s flattering, but I doubt it. Mr Kinnock was quite capable of losing any Election alone and unaided.
So don���t tell me that I am uninterested in politics, or unengaged. And I think I can say that, until 1992, I enjoyed every Election that touched me.
It was like Derby Day, only for people unhealthily preoccupied with Westminster.
There was a time in the 1960s when I could match every MP to his or her constituency, and identify obscure Cabinet members without difficulty.
But when I grasped ��� too late ��� who and what John Major was, I felt that I had been diddled in 1992, and wrong to be gleeful at his unexpected triumph (as I was). Nineteen-ninety-seven was a grimly foregone conclusion and 2001 even worse. Since then, these events have become increasingly unbearable.
What did I care, in a choice between David Cameron and Gordon Brown? Or David Cameron and Ed Miliband? What did I care at all about Theresa May? For all this closeness to politics had opened my eyes to the awful truth.
As a child and a teenager and a young man, I had still been beguiled by the idea that a General Election was a majestic process in which great ideas were tested and significant men and women competed chivalrously for office in a great tournament of ideas.
I also loved (and still love) the way that our wrongly derided first-past-the-post system can deliver a peaceful revolution, and leave the defeated Prime Minister in the street with his soft furnishings, out in the cold and stripped of all authority, when an hour before he was a demigod of power.
But I had found out some terrible things. The parties had no interest in any of the ideas I favour, and a lot of interest in aims I loathe.
There was no way of changing this. They had chosen a mistaken dogma and they were not going to shift.
We now lived in a curious world where David Cameron, rich, Etonian, superficially reassuring, pursued policies more radical than those of Jeremy Corbyn. Politics is also a closed circle, where candidates are, in reality, picked by small cliques. Then, at General Elections, this choice is confirmed by an electorate that still votes according to tribe, not ideas.
Very few of the constituencies are really contested. And those that are, are more or less rigged.
As far as I can see, the law now winks at huge invasions of these battlefields by outside canvassers, and at all kinds of ultra-sophisticated and vastly expensive targeting of individual voters. Technically, there are tight spending limits to keep things fair. Actually, these are almost never enforced.
What I had been watching was an increasingly futile pantomime, the image of an Election but not the reality. They had slogans for the simple which were often the opposite of their true policies. And all those policies were disastrous.
The more they talk of education, the worse the schools get. The louder they talk of law and order, the more locks I put on my house and the more care I take on the way home. The louder they talk of the health service, the more private medical insurance I use. The louder they talk of their economic policies, the more I fear for my savings. The more they claim to favour peace, the more I fear war.
You are welcome to it, if you want it. I see nothing left to gain.
I see a country that, during all these Elections, has lost almost everything precious it had.
Its tolerant freedom under law, frayed and tattered. Its manufacturing industry gone, so that we use almost nothing made by our fellow countrymen.
Its excellent, disciplined schools are destroyed. Modest competent local government has been replaced by grandiose, posturing authorities that cannot even collect garbage.
Its unarmed, friendly police force has been replaced by a glowering, absent militia. Stable family life is replaced by a fatherless chaos, which in turn demands a limitless welfare state to pick up the pieces.
We could face it, if we had wholly different leaders. But how can we find them through this process?
This Election is not designed to find leaders, just to provide an escape hatch for those who have failed to lead. But there is, in fact, no real escape.
*The story features in the novel Descent Into Hell, by Charles Williams.
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November 1, 2019
Time to be tougher with ourselves about Remembrance of War
Some readers may be interested in my article on how we could improve Remembrance Commemorations, in the new magazine 'The Critic' , whose first issue is out today: :
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2019/remember-them-more-honestly/
October 29, 2019
A debate at the Cambridge Union on nationalising Eton
I appear at about 54 minutes into this recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97NpKBdD3e8&feature=youtu.be
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