Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 78

October 6, 2019

PETER HITCHENS: The Met Police have failed us. Shut them down and start again

This is Peter Hitchens�� Mail on Sunday column

Britain��s biggest police force is now institutionally unjust, and so is not fit for the task we have entrusted to it. The report by Sir Richard Henriques into its ��VIP paedophiles�� investigation is one of the most devastating ever published about any official body.

If any other organisation was involved, we would disband it and start again, as I increasingly believe we should do with the police. This horrible mess is closely linked to their failure to control or deal with the crimes they increasingly regard as petty, of theft and disorder. The same sort of mind that ignores these things is all-too-readily convinced by mad claims that the country is beset with high-level paedophile plots.

The Met��s Commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, did not respond to the report in person, but instead sent her deputy, Sir Stephen House, out on to the doorstep. He gave a sort of railway apology, pungent with insincerity. He was ��deeply sorry�� for mistakes that ��were made�� not mistakes that he had made or the force had made. They had ��been made�� passively by somebody or other, not named.

The force, he explained, did not agree with everything Sir Richard Henriques had said. I��ll bet it doesn��t. People who have been caught bang to rights tend not to agree. And why should they? The officers involved have escaped any serious action against them despite withering criticism.

The force may have had to fork out a bit of public money in compensation to the innocent men whose reputations it casually besmirched and whose private lives it publicly trampled on. But no deterrent or exemplary punishment has been exacted and, in my view, nobody will change his or her ways. As usual in her magically propelled career, Dame Cressida, Madam Teflon, is wholly unaffected despite her personal involvement at the start of the whole thing.

Nor could her underling, Sir Stephen, stop making the same basic, wilful mistake that led to all the other miseries and stupidities that ended with his officers bursting into the home of a wholly innocent war hero in his 90s. Before he vanished back into the warmth of New Scotland Yard, he repeatedly used the word ��victim�� to describe sex abuse complainants.

The Henriques report hammers home the point that those who allege they have been sexually abused just must not be called ��victims�� until their alleged assailants have been convicted. The use of the word ��victim�� prejudices the whole procedure from the start. It lay behind all the cruel mistakes of this investigation. Some complaints are false and so those complainants are not ��victims��.

But when I asked the Yard why the Deputy Commissioner had referred to ��victims�� in defiance of the report, it responded with a flat refusal to pay any attention. It said the Henriques recommendation that they should stop talking about ��victims�� before trial ��was not accepted by the Metropolitan Police Service as this is a commonly accepted term across a wide range of guidance, policy and legislation.

��This issue has been widely debated and differing views exist. The use of the word victim is not intrinsically linked to the issue of belief. The Met police continues to support the use of the term ��victim��. This does not confer any judgment on the allegations they make which will always be investigated impartially and with an open mind.��

Which is pure garbage from start to finish. The word is plainly prejudicial. It is a direct attack on the presumption of innocence, which is all that stands between us and tyranny. Investigated and excoriated by a senior judge of huge experience, the force refuses to punish anybody, claims that plainly wrong actions were fine and continues to defy the most basic rules of justice. I wish I thought this would finish it. But it will not.

Why were the useless BBC so hard on Naga?

I am sorry for Naga Munchetty, the BBC presenter ludicrously condemned by the Corporation��s ��Executive Complaints Unit�� for expressing some perfectly reasonable and unsurprising opinions about Donald Trump.

I have had many dealings with the ECU, which is generally quite incapable of admitting the BBC has done anything wrong, especially when it has. So I am baffled that it should have made such a stern ruling on this.

Actually, it would make much more sense if the BBC stopped pretending its presenters did not have any opinions, when it is obvious from their tone of voice, slant of question and facial expressions that they do. They might as well try to pretend that they don��t have any heads.

Perhaps it just doesn��t want to admit almost all of its presenters have the same opinion, a tediously fashionable set of London Left-wing prejudices. If it conceded that, it might have to hire some staff who took a different view.

When will people learn that we live in a post-revolutionary society? In the Blair years the last traces of Christian conservatism were removed from law and government, and in the Cameron-May years nobody tried to restore them.

So Dr David Mackereth really shouldn��t have been surprised when he was sacked as a claim assessor for refusing to bow down to the Trans lobby by saying he would not call a six-foot bearded man ��madam��.

This defiance was described by a tribunal as ��lack of belief�� in transgenderism. And so it is. These ��isms�� are our new highly intolerant religion. We must all now either get our minds right, or retreat into private life and internal exile. The Tories aren��t going to save us.

The ��right to life��... twisted into the right to kill

��Human rights�� is a very stretchable term, as we all know. But I never saw it stretched so far as it was last week, when the Belfast High Court ruled that a right to life was, in fact, a right to death, and indeed a right to kill.

It decided that Northern Ireland��s laws restricting abortion breached Europe��s human rights convention.

Abortion is illegal in the province unless there is a direct threat to the mother��s life, or a risk of permanent and serious damage to her mental or physical health, a position many would regard as a reasonable compromise.

But the ever-ambitious, ever-liberal ��Supreme�� Court in London had already paved the way for this ruling by deciding any limit somehow breaches Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. How? This article says nothing at all about abortion, but simply enshrines ��private and family life��.

It also says the courts can override privacy to intervene ��for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others��. Well, how about the right to life of the baby being aborted? Isn��t that ��the rights and freedoms of others��?

Article 2 actually says ��everyone��s right to life shall be protected by law��. Everyone��s. Not just some people��s. How then can it have been interpreted to create a right to abortion?

The authors of the convention never imagined it was any such thing. This shocking twisting of its meaning is the best argument I can think of against the Rule of Lawyers we now endure.

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Published on October 06, 2019 00:23

October 4, 2019

'The World On Fire' Fizzles Out amid cliche and misunderstood history

What is the point of dramas such as the new BBC series ��World on Fire�� which began on Sunday night? We have plenty of soap operas in which clich��d characters are moved mechanically around a clich��d script so as to follow melodramatic plots based on fashionable ideas.

We have for many years had other soap operas or situation comedies set in this era, which can exploit the simple ��good versus evil�� contest which WW2 reliably provides. Or they can explore the pleasure and satisfaction to be found in adversity. Or they can exploit the supposedly sexy fashions and music of the time which, I suspect, were a good deal less glamorous and funky than what we tend to see portrayed. And there must have been other tunes apart from Glenn Miller��s�� In the Mood��, surely? Or was it played continuously throughout the later stages of the war, by every band?

And we have a number of memoirs and novels, from Evelyn Waugh to Olivia Manning, about the Second World War which could be the basis for heavyweight drama.

But it��s all getting a bit tired, as far as I��m concerned. I��m in my late 60s and even I am too young to remember the war, which ended 74 years ago. Is there really no other background for drama? I myself would be glad to see a serious modern attempt to dramatise the Suez affair, or the first modern outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland, or the extraordinary irruption of left-wing ex-students into our culture and politics after the 1960s. Or there��s the Falklands, or the Blairite takeover of the Labour Party, or the Siege of Wapping when Rupert Murdoch broke the power of the print unions. There are books about a lot of these, fiction and non-fiction, which would provide the basis for many fascinating and illuminating dramas.

But back we go to 1939. And in this case, it��s not so much the World on Fire, as somebody trying to get it to light on a wet evening.

Where to begin? The drama is tediously woke in ways viewers will already have spotted. The BBC seems to have decided to bestow stardom on the British Union of Fascists and its leader Sir Oswald Mosley (as a Knight Baronet, he inherited the ��Sir�� from his father in 1928, before he became what he used to call a ��Fassist��. It was not a personal honour). Not only is he a character in the inexplicable mad drivel known as ��Peaky Blinders��. He is important in ��World On Fire��. Too. Why is this? Mosley and the BUF never actually became politically important, never won a Parliamentary seat or made much impact in any vote anywhere. To state this is one of the biggest heresies in the modern world, and gets you attacked by Mosleyites (yes, some still exist) and by leftists alike. I suspect that left-wingers like to exaggerate him and his movement because they also like to claim to have ��defeated him�� at the ��Battle of Cable Street�� and various other events. But they too were insignificant in the 1930s. British politics in that era was remarkably free from fanaticism, despite very high levels of unemployment and the near-collapse of the Labour Party after the 1931 crisis. Mosley was very rich himself (and is persuasively alleged to have taken money from both Mussolini and Goebbels) and so was able to organize major rallies. But real political impact escaped him.

Anywhere, here he is again, and two of our main figures are heckling him at a rally in Manchester, as you do, if you very much want to get beaten up, I suppose.

She is a working class nightclub singer (yes, you have that right) and he is the son of a rich, snobbish woman who says she likes ��Mr Mosley�� (a term she would never have used of a Baronet, if she were as snobbish and ��fassist�� as portrayed). This presumably makes the point that snobbish rich people are really fascists, or ��fassists��, well, because people like that just are. Whereas working class people are left-wing or even pacifists. The pair duly get themselves beaten up and are then somehow arrested for the more or less mad act of heckling the speaker during a large rally of people who don��t like free speech and do quite like violence. (please don��t point out the error about anachronistic Black Shirts to me. My esteemed MoS colleague Chris Hastings was the first to spot it, and I feel it has been well-aired). Quite why they are arrested for this is not clear, unless it is for stupidity, but there.

Both of them are unlikely. He is a supposed toff (but absolutely without anything resembling a toff accent of the time) who is also a ��translator�� preparing to take up a post at the British Embassy in Warsaw. How, where and when (and why) he has learnt the fluent Polish which qualifies him for this post is not explained. Likewise, how the Embassy has hitherto managed without such an employee, or has not done what Embassies usually do, and hired locally, is not explained. She, by contrast, is a nightclub singer who also works in a factory, a small demographic, I should have thought. This allows the Toff��s mother (the pro-fascist Snob) to dismiss her as a ��factory girl��. Her father is a pacifist bus conductor (shell shocked in the Great War) and her brother is a petty criminal, presumably not a pacifist, pursued by the police for scrap metal offences. The fact that the pacifist bus conductor is played by Sean Bean tells us that we are supposed to like this character, I think.

But lo, we are by now in Warsaw, where the allegedly upper-class translator keeps berating his even more upper-class superiors for not standing up for Poland (as if an Embassy in a foreign capital could declare war or mount an invasion).

And then we are some woods on the Polish border where a hard-drinking (we see her drinking hard) American reporter is stumping about, drawing attention to herself as German troops murder some Poles, or perhaps people in Polish uniform.

These events are, I think based upon the much-celebrated adventures of a British journalist, Clare Hollingworth , who observed German troops on the Polish border in September 1939; and also on the Gleiwitz incident, where concentration-camp prisoners were put into Polish uniforms and killed, to provide ��evidence�� of a faked attack by Polish troops on a German radio station, so providing a pretext for war.

I��ve always thought Miss Hollingworth��s scoop a bit over-rated , as I don��t think anyone was in the slightest doubt that Germany was preparing an invasion of Poland in late August 1939. No doubt she was an intrepid reporter. But it was one of the least surprising attacks ever made. But its portrayal in this programme is ludicrous. The idea that the German Army would have allowed a foreign witness to get so close to the murders that it shows, and then to drive away with nothing worse than a smashed rear windscreen, is nonsensical. But there, perhaps ��Peaky Blinders�� has finally destroyed the last barrier between implausibility and plausibility. Nobody cares any more.

Geography also seems to be a bafflement to the programme��s makers. Do they know where Danzig (now Gdansk) is or why it mattered? A middle-aged Pole is shown saying his friends died in 1918, freeing Danzig from Germany. Did they? I��ve searched and can find no record of any such conflict. Poles, in the First World War, tended to end up in the German and Austrian Armies, and there was a serious attempt by the Kaiser to set up a phoney ��Kingdom of Poland�� to persuade Poles to fight against the Russian Empire. As far as I know, Danzig - though separated from Germany by the new post-Versailles borders - was peacefully detached from German rule in 1919 by the Versailles settlement, and classified as a ��Free City�� ruled by the League of Nations, in a customs union with Poland but not part of it. Its German population (expelled in 1945) remained.

Come to that, do they know why the Polish Post Office in that city was so important? A brief clip of presumably fake newsreel does not help much. A clue: It was almost the only Polish-controlled building in what was then an overwhelmingly (98%) German-populated city. The only other major Polish site was a small military depot in the harbour zone, in the district known as the Westerplatte. Both were attacked by German forces in the early hours of the war, not because they were militarily crucial, as Danzig was far from the front, but to demonstrate that Germany was bringing a German city back under German rule, something German governments had sought to do long before Hitler came to power.

One of the awkward facts about the German-Polish conflict is that Germany, especially over Danzig, had a much better case than it did over Czechoslovakia, none of which had ever belonged to Germany.

And as they portray Polish men (in the family of the Polish waitress with whom the flighty young Toff-Translator has now formed an attachment) flocking to the colours on the eve of war do they really not know that (like most continental countries at the time) Poland had a highly-developed system of compulsory military service, which made volunteering pretty much unnecessary? As for Poland having no tanks, and only bicycles, a point heavy-handedly made, Poland did in fact have tanks in 1939, and the story about them fighting German tanks with cavalry is a myth.. There are pictures of Polish tanks rolling into Teschen, formerly Czech territory, in the autumn of 1938, after Poland took part in the carve-up of Czechoslovakia following the Munich surrender. Poland had quite a large army, about 1.1 million in 1939 but it was poorly-equipped, not very well led and no match (as it turned out) for the modern German Army and its fast-moving tactics. Poland was not a free society at the time, but had been a military dictatorship since the 1920s, a dictatorship which feared that if it made a territorial deal with Germany, it might lose the support of Polish nationalists, and fall.

Poles fought bravely �� about 160,000 died in the brief 1939 war. But their leaders, especially the unpleasant Foreign Minister Jozef Beck, had hugely overestimated their ability to resist the much more modern and aggressive German forces. For many years Polish troops had also trained mainly for a war against the USSR. Britain and France may have overestimated the Poles too. There is a nasty whiff, in Anglo-French diplomatic manoeuvres at the time, of a hope that Poland might keep Germany occupied during the first winter of the war, while Paris and London prepared for a combat that they were certainly not ready for in September that year. Poland��s collapse, though they must have been pretty sure it would come, arrived too swiftly for them.

I shall be interested to see in future episodes, how honestly ��World on Fire�� deals with the Soviet invasion of Poland (the Polish film ��Katyn�� is worth seeing in this) or with the undoubted Anti-Semitism then prevalent in Poland (This is portrayed in Herman Wouk��s book, ��The Winds of War�� and mentioned bitterly in the brilliant and luminous post-war Polish film ��Ida�� ) . But so far it seems to me to be much more about melodrama than it is about history. There is absolutely nothing wrong with portraying great events through the eyes of small and even powerless individuals. It is often the best way to do it. But a clear understanding of those great events always helps. And cliches seldom do.

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Published on October 04, 2019 00:20

Repeated from 2011 - Britain Is No Longer a Christian Country - Official

I first published this article in 2011. I suppose I should republish it every time a court or tribunal rules against a Christian position. When will people grasp that the revolution has happened, and the other side have won. No need for guillotines and gulag.

I just thought I should expand on the amazing developments in the courts in the last year, culminating in the recent case of Mr and Mrs Johns (pictured below), the foster parents banned from fostering because they were not prepared actively to endorse the sexual revolution.

The effect of this case (and once again I'm uninterested in discussing the issue of homosexuality which has been the pretext for this development, and will not respond to posts on that subject, which I regard as exhausted and diversionary) is revolutionary in two ways. First, the Law of England is no longer based upon Christianity but upon the new secular dogma of 'Equality and Diversity', whose origins lie in the thinking of the 1960s revolutionary left.

That is to say the national dogma is suspicious of national sovereignty and the things which accompany it - patriotism, immigration control, national loyalty, national institutions. It actively defines many of these ideas as 'racist' , that is a sort of thought-crime ( a defamatory smear made much easier by those, some of whom post here, who think that a man's ethnic origin, rather than his culture, defines him).

The same dogma is militantly in favour of sexual liberation - the liberation of adults from the marriage bond, the consequent liberation of children from parental authority - which is more or less unlawful anyway.
Once again those who oppose this development are not reasoned with, but defined as thought-criminals and classified as suffering from various isms and phobias which rule them out of mainstream discourse.

And of course the Christian religion itself is allowed to continue to exist as an eccentric choice, but has no special claim on the law and must compete for status and attention against any other belief, including the fantasy of man-made global warming.

This latter is a work in progress, which is why one of the law's most important activities is to ram home the message to individual Christians that they have lost the status they formerly held (much as its prosecutions of people such as Tony Martin ram home the message that the law no longer takes the view of crime that it used to hold, and is much more concerned with asserting its monopoly of force than with apprehending, let alone punishing, wrongdoers) . A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has experienced bluntness verging on rudeness when he has protested against the new judicial attitude.

All revolutions do this. One of their most important features is the public personal degradation of figures formerly held in high regard. This lets people know that things really have changed (Charles I knew he was doomed when his military guards started blowing tobacco smoke in his face). The ejection of the Bishops from the House of Lords, which will take place within ten years by my guess (***PH notes August 2019 : I would now put this a little further off. The European constitutional crisis has paralysed almost all other processes in our society. But plainly the House of Lords in its present form cannot be sustained much longer) , will be accompanied by a great deal of cruel jeering and bad manners, you see if it isn't.

The second crucial feature of this is that it involves a totalitarian imposition. The Derby case arose not because of anything the couple had said, but because they would not promise, in a hypothetical conversation with a child, to endorse, positively, a certain type of behaviour.

Now, I'm told (I would be glad of any more details) that in a 1985 case, a sports team successfully challenged a local authority which tried to compel it to make a denunciation of the apartheid system before it would be allowed to use its facilities. What you think of apartheid has nothing to do with this. The principle is 'Can you be compelled by a government body to hold or at least express an opinion?' . A judge is reported to have said that telling people what to say was pretty much a Nazi attitude,and foreign to the laws of England. This no longer seems to be the case.

The couple said that their Christian beliefs caused them to hold a different view. The Judges, if I have correctly understood their ruling, said the couple's views did not necessarily flow from their Christianity, and thus didn't qualify for the protection granted to 'minorities' by Equality Law. One wonders what the position would have been had they been a Muslim couple, but this has yet to arise.

But this is a technicality alongside the heart of their judgement, which ran thus. First, they said that it was not yet ��well understood�� that British society was largely secular and that the law has no place for Christianity.

��Although historically this country is part of the Christian West, and although it has an established church which is Christian, there have been enormous changes in the social and religious life of our country over the last century,�� they said.

It was a ��paradox�� that society has become simultaneously both increasingly secular and increasingly diverse in religious affiliation, they said.

'We sit as secular judges serving a multicultural community of many faiths.
We are sworn (we quote the judicial oath) to 'do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will��.��

Actually, it ought to be well-understood, following the striking and rather militant judgement by Lord Justice Laws last year in the case of the 'relationship counsellor' Gary McFarlane. He said legal protection for views held on religious grounds was 'deeply unprincipled'.

'This must be so, since in the eye of everyone save the believer, religious faith is necessarily subjective,' he said.

'Law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary.'

Plainly, the message has not wholly sunk in. Interestingly, in his summing up before sentencing last November at the end of the trial of a Muslim fanatic who stabbed the Labour MP Stephen Timms, Mr Justice Cooke said of Mr Timms 'I understand that he brings to bear his own faith, which upholds very different values to those which appear to have driven this defendant.

'Those values are those upon which the common law of this country was founded and include respect and love for one��s neighbour, for the foreigner in the land, and for those who consider themselves enemies, all as part of one��s love of God. These values were the basis of our system of law and justice and I trust that they will remain so as well as motivating those, like Mr Timms, who hold public office.'

I fear his trust is misplaced. It is true that the English legal tradition was until recently consciously and specifically Christian. Here's a description of the building of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand (whose architect, G.E. Street, was also the designer of several fine churches) 'Over the highest point of the upper arch is a figure of Jesus; to the left and right at a lower level are figures of Solomon and Alfred the Great; that of Moses is at the northern front of the building.'

The Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, has above its main portal the words "Defend the Children of the poor, and punish the wrong-doer'. This is a quotation from the 72nd Psalm (Verse 4, Miles Coverdale version). Its Great Hall is adorned with the words 'Moses gave unto the people the laws of God'.

Likewise, the Houses of Parliament (where laws are made) are founded upon the original St Stephen's Chapel. They contain a consecrated and functioning chapel to this day. The Central Lobby is decorated with murals depicting the four Christian patron saints of the nations of the United Kingdom, George, Andrew, Patrick and David. The quarter chimes of Big Ben are based upon Handel's aria (from the Book of Job) 'I know that My Redeemer Liveth' . And the Monarchy itself is legally based upon a wholly Christian Coronation service. St Edward's Crown itself is surmounted with a Christian cross and the anointed and crowned monarch is presented with a copy of the Bible.

There's an amusing side issue here, as - as my friend Christopher Booker recently pointed out - : 'Mr Justice Burton ruled recently that Climate Change evangelist Tim Nicholson's "philosophical belief" in man-made global warming was on a par with religious belief and must therefore be given legal protection under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, issued under the 1972 European Communities Act to implement EC directive 2000/78.'

And I thought I might share with you the Human Rights Commission's statement about their lawyers' use of the word 'infected' to describe the possible impact of the couple's views on a child in their care.

They said :' Earlier this week the case of Johns v Derby City Council, in which the Commission had intervened, attracted some attention.

Unfortunately a mistake within our legal submission led to an inference that we did not intend and which was misconstrued as suggesting that the Commission equates Christian moral views with an infection. This oversight was caused by a drafting error in our submissions to the court. This should have been picked up in our internal clearance process for the legal documentation and does not represent the position of the Commission in any way.'

As I have said, the couple's lawyers objected to the use of the word 'infected' in court at the time. But they received no response. That was in November. Why, months later, have they suddenly discovered that this use of language was an oversight and written to the Johns to apologise? I wonder.

In the meantime, it seems to me clear that, whatever you may think of these developments, they are quite revolutionary, and probably considerably more significant, in their long-lasting effects , than the last General Election.
If our laws, having been founded for centuries on Christianity, are now founded on something else, there is no corner of our constitution that remains unaffected.

How long before the murals of the Saints in the Westminster Central Lobby are obscured by modern non-representational portraits of Equality, Diversity, Progress and Harmony? And before Christ and Moses are quietly removed from the Law Courts? As for the next Coronation Service, I increasingly dread it. It will be used to teach us how low we have sunk since 1953.

I might add for the benefit of various pestilential posters that the laws applied in this case originated in a series of Equal Treatment Directives imposed on this country by the European Commission, and enacted under duress (and without choice) by our non-independent Parliament. Doctor Sean Thomas will no doubt point out that they could have been enacted on a Tuesday rather than a Wednesday, and in a different typeface, also on more expensive paper, and accompanied by a bunch of flowers and a bottle of Chardonnay, if we had liked. Maybe so. Who cares? He seems to think this matters. It does not seem to me to be of any importance at all, and is the kind of thing you need an academic lawyer to point out (with all that implies).

It appeared to me, by the way, that Ian Duncan Smith, appearing on BBC Question Time last Thursday, took the side of the Council rather than that of the Johns. Is that now Conservative Policy?

If so, how was it arrived at? When was it discussed, or announced? How could a Conservative who disagreed achieve a change in this policy, as I am always being told I should go back into the Tory Party to do? Mr Smith is widely believed to be 'right wing'. I wonder in what way this is now true.

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Published on October 04, 2019 00:20

September 29, 2019

Gloating liberals may soon regret the power now being wielded by Supreme Court judges, writes PETER HITCHENS

This is Peter Hitchens�� Mail on Sunday column

We were warned from the start that the new 'Supreme Court' would be a menace, by people who well understood what was going on.

But as usual nobody did anything to stop it. Britain's slow-motion Left-wing revolution just carried on, rolling over old and trusted rules and institutions, and crushing them into dust.

Last week the court made a swift and cat-like grab for power, its sharp claws flashing as it swiped at Downing Street.

This, unlike so many of the things wrongly said to be 'historic', was a truly huge change in the way we are governed.

Lord Hennessy, the liberals' favourite liberal, exulted that Tuesday was the day when 'the constitution really did shift'.

He argued that 'the architecture of the British constitution will never be the same again' because 'the Supreme Court's reach�� now penetrates the most intimate relationship in the British state, that between the head of government, the prime minister, and the head of state, Her Majesty the Queen.'

Lord Sumption, perhaps the cleverest lawyer in the country, said the decision was 'revolutionary'. He is right.

This deep change has been brewing for a long time. As one very senior judge has admitted, this country's grandest lawyers, ambitious to extend their reach, have recently developed methods that might be called the Baldrick Strategy �� cunning and subtle ways of inventing laws out of nothing.

If not swiftly and firmly curbed, the Court can now use equally vague and feeble pretexts to start striking down any government action it does not like, urged on by wealthy individuals or corporations who share its liberal world view.

This was foolishly applauded by many on the Left. They did not grasp that, however much they might enjoy watching Al 'Boris' Johnson looking silly, this was a direct blow at Parliament and at accountable power, things some of them still believe in.

I should note at this point that I am not a supporter of Mr Johnson. I disapproved of his suspension of Parliament. I also agreed with the High Court when it backed Gina Miller, on Parliament's right to legislate on the activation of Article 50 of the EU treaty, back in 2016. I am not partisan on this issue. Anything but.

Proper Leftists should be careful what they wish for. What a pity that great English radical, Tony Benn, was not there to remind them of the questions we need to ask of anyone who has power: 'What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? And finally, how do we get rid of you?'

They are excellent questions and, as we shall see, the 'Supreme Court' cannot answer the final three which are most crucial. Who do they serve? We do not know. Who is above them? It remains to be seen. How do we remove them? There is no obvious way.

Just before this strange, unBritish chamber of sorrows was launched ten years ago, its future President, Lord Neuberger, spilled the beans in a BBC interview. He said there was a real risk of 'judges arrogating to themselves greater power than they have at the moment'. This was a reasonable prophecy.

The old court of final appeal, a committee of senior Law Lords, never called itself 'Supreme'. It understood that the Crown in Parliament is the only supreme thing in our constitution.

Unlike the Blairites who invented the new court, it did not think Britain was the same as the USA. It also did not sit in the grandiose white stone palace which the 'Supreme Court ' now occupies, a lovely, ornate listed building controversially converted to suit the new court, at a cost to the taxpayer of almost ��60 million.

What did those who flattered and pampered this roomful of lawyers expect to happen?

When a newly qualified policeman puts on his new uniform, perhaps with boots and baseball cap, and is given handcuffs and tasers and club, it changes his behaviour.

If you call a group of confident, well-rewarded men and women 'supreme', when they are already used to wielding unquestioned power, and then give them a majestic headquarters just across the square from Parliament itself, you will change their behaviour. You will change it for the worse.

Lord Neuberger correctly worried back in 2009 that there was no way of telling where this would end.

He said then 'the danger is that you muck around with a constitution like the British Constitution at your peril because you do not know what the consequences of any change will be.'

To be fair to Lord Neuberger, he said at the time that he feared these developments. Lord Falconer, the Blairite crony and all-purpose radical lawyer who had pushed the changes through Parliament, was delighted by them.

He happily predicted 'the Supreme Court will be bolder in vindicating both the freedoms of individuals and, coupled with that, being willing to take on the executive.'

By bolder, he meant, more aggressive, and of course more revolutionary, just as he was. And the sorts of 'freedoms' he had in mind would be the freedoms beloved by Blairites, the vague and flexible 'human rights' which have made it so very hard to enforce old-fashioned commonsense law in recent years.

More recently, the same Lord Neuberger was talking to students at the Cambridge Union, and explained to them the huge powers of the United States Supreme Court to give orders to Congress and the President.

He then told them: 'We can't do that.' But he didn't quite mean it, for he continued: 'We get round that, the Judges get round that, by what Baldrick might call a 'cunning and subtle plan' of being able to 'interpret' statutes, and sometimes we interpret them quite, um, imaginatively, so as to, as we see it, 'comply with the rule of law.' '

No better description has been given of the Baldrick-style verdict of Lady Hale's court last Tuesday. It is full of 'imaginative interpretation'.

Less politely, you could say that it makes up a whole new law out of nothing. It claims to do this to defend Parliament from the Executive. But in fact it is only able to do it because it has scented just how weak the current Government is.

It is interesting to compare it with the Baldrick-free judgment on exactly the same case given by the old-fashioned High Court on September 11.

That court �� three very clever English judges �� said simply that the prorogation of Parliament was a political affair and none of their business. This is what any English court would have said at any time in the past two centuries of parliamentary democracy.

John Finnis, Professor Emeritus of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford, is even more devastating. He says the judges dangerously evaded Britain's most fundamental constitutional statute, the 1689 Bill of Rights.

This declares: 'Proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parliament.'

In other words, the courts are simply forbidden from interfering with Parliament.

The court got round this by claiming the prorogation itself was somehow not a 'proceeding in Parliament'.

But the same 'Supreme Court' ruled in 2014 that the granting of Royal Assent to a Bill, a very similar action to prorogation, was a proceeding in Parliament, saying 'the Queen in Parliament is sovereign and its procedures cannot be questioned in the courts of the United Kingdom.'

The High Court gave a history of prorogation over the last century, which showed that the Johnson suspension was not hugely exceptional in modern times. It adds up to just ten working days, once you have subtracted from it the three weeks normally taken off by Parliament at this time of year.

Parliament was prorogued for three whole months in the summer of 1930, from August 1 to 28 October. In 1901 it was prorogued for even longer, from August 17 until November 5.

The now-sainted Clement Attlee, Labour's post-war reforming Premier, suspended Parliament to make radical reforms of the constitution. John Major is accused of suspending it to avoid embarrassment over a possible scandal.

No law or rule requires Parliament to sit in constant session, the judges rightly noted. But you would think from the squeals emitted by the 'Supreme' Court on Tuesday that Mr Johnson had surrounded Parliament with tanks, arrested the Speaker and declared that he would from now on rule in person.

They showed a total loss of proportion when they airily dismissed as 'scant' the two giant obstacles to anyone who tries to rule this country without Parliament. These are the need to raise taxes, which cannot be done without Parliament, and the Armed Forces Act, which must be renewed every year to keep a standing Army in being.

Far from being 'scant' they are a huge iron wall against tyranny which cannot be breached.

There is more evidence of a collective rush of blood to the head in the judicial chamber. Towards the end of their judgment, they say Mr Johnson's suspension of Parliament 'had such an extreme effect upon the fundamentals of our democracy'.

What are they on about? Ten days of vacation, during which Parliament in fact has little or nothing to do, does not have an 'extreme effect upon the fundamentals of our democracy'.

Any reader of the judgment who has taken it seriously up till paragraph 58 must surely realise at this point that it has jumped the rails of reality. The decision, absurdly, was unanimous. Unanimity is surely for sheep, not for independent minds. Given that the three judges of the High Court had taken the opposite view, could the 'Supreme' court not manage a single dissenter?

By the time the ruling was given, it was obvious there was no threat to Parliament. It had already defended itself robustly, without any aid from Brenda Hale and her team of SuperJudges.

The fundamentals are quite unthreatened. Look what happened. In the short time available, despite the Prime Minister's supposedly despotic decision to extend their holidays, an uncowed Parliament gave Mr Johnson two big black eyes �� stopping him from holding an Election and banning him from taking us out of the EU without a deal.

When they eventually struggled back from their supposedly tyrannical suspension, bravely rescued by Judge Brenda from Mr Johnson's non-existent Stormtroopers, MPs instantly punched the Premier on the nose by refusing him even a few days off for the Tory conference, an act of spite. It is not Mr Johnson who is doing the pushing around. If anyone needs rescuing by the courts, it is him.

But the new legal elite see themselves as heroes against a wicked Government. If you think these politicised judges are not at all full of themselves and vain, you might be interested to know that Lady Hale's interesting life, and supposed struggle against brutal misogynist discrimination, will shortly be celebrated in a children's book, Judge Brenda, Equal To Everything.

Advance publicity suggests that it will not be a critical study. It is, in fact, hard to find a critical study of this highly significant woman.

We still know remarkably little about her and her fellow judges. The Hale Court is now at least as significant as the Cabinet, but its members are for the most part a mystery to us. Two things could reasonably happen now.

A miracle could occur and we could get a serious patriotic Government with a big majority, which would disband the court and nullify this ruling, returning things to where they were before the Blairite vandalism created this dangerous tribunal.

Or public and politicians alike could demand to know, before they are appointed, what sort of people will sit in this new almighty Star Chamber. The US Supreme Court's Justices all undergo severe and searching hearings before Senators of both parties. If they are conservatives and male, they can nowadays pretty much expect to be accused of being sexual predators, or otherwise attacked.

But these hearings do at least ensure that the elected part of the US government has some idea of the people who have such awesome power over them, and who will take huge decisions for years to come.

If we cannot get rid of them, then we must know who they are and what they believe in. And if Parliament is not ready to curb this new overmighty subject, in one way or another, it can expect to be less and less powerful in the years to come.

If they thought a few days of prorogation were bad, let us see what they think of the Rule of Lawyers which now faces us and them.

You can follow Peter on Twitter @clarkemicah.

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Published on September 29, 2019 00:18

September 27, 2019

Some Initial Thoughts on the Actions of our "Supreme" Court

An article on the Court verdict that I have written for 'First Things :

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/09/the-judicial-usurpation-of-parliament

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Published on September 27, 2019 00:16

Britain's Huge Secret Private School Sector

In other, less busy times the story of Britain��s huge hidden private education sector would probably have received ��.just as little attention as it��s already getting. Almost nobody likes to talk about this, and the diligent but misguided Sutton Trust, which has revealed the truth about it, as usual avoids the obvious lesson. Instead it calls for vouchers so the poor can join in.

Odd, isn't it, that the supposed principle (which I don't understand anyway) that it is wrong and unfair to charge or pay for a full private education does not apply to this form of private schooling? Can anyone explain why? I love anomalies.

Here��s the basic report

https://www.suttontrust.com/research-paper/private-tuition-polling-2018/

The ��key findings�� are: ��More than one in four (27%) young people in England and Wales have received private or home tuition, a figure which has risen by half since the Trust began collecting the data in 2005. Just over one in ten (11%) had been tutored during the most recent school year, consistent with results from the past few years.

Pupils in London were substantially more likely to have received private tuition than the rest of the country, with two in five pupils from London (41%) having had tuition at some point.

One in three (33%) pupils received tuition for specific GCSE exams, and 27% for a school entrance exam. Almost half (47%) said it was to help with their school work in general.��

What I want to know is how many of the parents who paid for this tuition were left-wing Labour or Lib Dem voters who claim to ��hate�� private education and say over dinner with their similar friends that they would rather die than send their children to actual private schools. It would be fun to know how many were senior figures in the Labour Party, especially campaigners for even more comprehensive education of the sort that has caused them to hire tutors to overcome its problems. None of them, no doubt.

I��d also like to know how many of those affected attended state schools with supposedly ��outstanding; exam results and what would happen to those results if the private tuition was withdrawn.

It also has an interesting impact on how we regard the mysterious so-called ��London Effect�� (shared in fact with Slough, but nowhere else) �� schools in these places have had a remarkable improvement in results in recent years which cannot be explained by any measures taken by government or local authority and are not consistent with any educational intervention or level of spending. I��ll leave it to the deductive detectives among my readers to work out what *might* be going on here. I wouldn��t even try to guess. I doubt anyone will do the research which will enable anyone to say with certainty.

In general, it makes a pretty major nonsense of every claim made for our state schools. If they were doing their jobs properly, then tuition wouldn��t be necessary, especially on this colossal scale. It��s almost as interesting as the flourishing private medical sector which exists on the fringe of a stuttering NHS, though plainly the relationship cannot be precisely the same.

But one has to be glad that so many teachers have found a way to supplement their incomes, which we are so often told by their unions are not good enough. See https://www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/one-in-four-teachers-take-on-private-tuition-outside-of-school/

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Published on September 27, 2019 00:16

September 23, 2019

There's no such thing as 'The Supreme Court' , and the body that wrongly calls itself this should stay out of politics

This is Peter Hitchens�� Mail on Sunday column

Actually, there is no such thing as the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. They can call it that if they like, but the title is a fiction. There is nothing supreme about it.

Until we leave the EU, our actual Supreme Court is, as it has been for many years, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

But if we ever manage to escape from the EU, then Parliament is a far higher court than this self-important assembly of lawyers in suits.

Keen observers of the ridiculous hearings of the past few days will have noticed the bare, almost republican room in which the court meets, less grand than some council committees I have attended.

The judges �� and the lawyers appearing before them �� do not wear the traditional robes and wigs which say so loudly that those who don them are serving the law, and are not just politicians or bureaucrats.

The nasty thing has been grafted on to our free constitution by Blairite revolutionaries �� many of them Left-wing lawyers.

They had long planned a slow-motion putsch against conservative Britain. For this tiny, self-important group of men and women realised that they had an astonishing power.

They were allowed to decide what the law meant. And nobody could challenge them.

This was bad enough when they took advantage of the vague wording of ��Human Rights�� charters.

They used this to invent all kinds of rights for those members of society they favoured and wished to help.

In the same way, they abolished the former freedoms of those who had been in charge before.

No need to storm the Bastille or capture the barracks and the railway station. Just issue a judgment, and abolish the morals and customs of ten generations in an afternoon.

For example, like it or not, state schools are going to teach children about homosexuality. This is now the law.

That use of the law to change our culture and morals was revolutionary enough. That brilliant mind, and former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption, recently warned this would ��entrench a broad range of liberal principles�� in the foundations of the State.

Democracy would then be almost powerless to remove or limit them.

He then accused his fellow lawyers of being so sure they were right that they claimed a monopoly on deciding how the country should be governed.

He warned, with astonishing brutality, that such a belief is ��no different from the claim of communism, fascism, monarchism, Catholicism, Islamism and all the other great isms that have historically claimed a monopoly of legitimate political discourse on the ground that its advocates considered themselves to be obviously right��. Crikey.

The readiness of the courts to hear legal actions against the Prime Minister��s suspension of Parliament is a whole new outrage. Personally, I think Al Johnson��s action was a shabby trick (though it failed to work).

But the idea that the courts should have anything to say about proroguing Parliament is absurd.

There is no law, no precedent. Within our constitution, Prime Ministers can do this sort of thing and often it will be right and necessary.

You might as well get the Supreme Court to rule on whether the red wines of Burgundy are better than those of Bordeaux. The judges could have a lot of fun examining the matter. But their opinion, at the end, would be worth nothing.

And so we see from the ��evidence�� presented at this gathering of learned kangaroos. It��s all opinions.

I��m all in favour of opinions. I express lots of them. I wish my opinions influenced politicians and judges, and the people. But opinions are not laws, and they are not facts.

Ten thousand brilliant legal brains could not read Mr Johnson��s mind or prove that he misled the Queen, and Her Majesty is certainly not going to give them any evidence on that score.

I just hope the ��Supreme Court�� will have the sense to recognise this and throw the whole thing out. But in such frightening times as these, I can��t be sure.

Our whole tradition of fair, wise government is tottering, and I am not convinced it can survive these games.

Gripping proof our police have totally lost the plot

The superb ITV drama about the 2011 Sian O��Callaghan murder, A Confession, is not just utterly absorbing.

It raises huge questions about what has happened to the police. It stars Martin Freeman, left, as the dreadfully wronged officer Steve Fulcher.

Any sensible society would promote him and garland him with honours. He was a proper policeman, who by hard work and good instinct caught the grisly murderer of Sian O��Callaghan.

Then, by clever questioning, he uncovered another unknown killing by the same man. His task was especially hard because, at the time, he did not know that the first victim was dead.

So he rightly saw his first duty as finding and saving her. In the end, the killer was convicted for both crimes.

But because Detective Superintendent Fulcher did not follow the piffling procedures of the disastrous 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), he was not honoured, but severely disciplined for gross misconduct.

PACE is a set of rules designed by liberals who don��t trust the police (but passed, of course, by a Tory Government).

Though he was allowed to keep his job, Mr Fulcher eventually resigned. It is not hard to imagine why.

Contrast his treatment with the endless rise of Cressida Dick, now the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.

Her climb to the top has been unimpeded by anything. It is unmarked (as far as I know) by any great feats of detection.

And also contrast it with the ��celebrity paedophile�� squad.

One of its leaders very wrongly said that wild claims by the fantasist Carl Beech were ��credible and true��. They then publicly invaded the lives of several innocent people, doing great harm to their reputations. But has anyone been disciplined?

Dame Cressida, as she has now become, has rejected calls for a criminal probe into the officers involved in investigating the claims by Beech. But now it has emerged that she had herself overseen the Scotland Yard investigation in its early stages.

I think this tale of two coppers explains very well why the whole police service needs to be ferociously and totally reformed from top to bottom, now.

Some dozy Daves NEVER learn

One of the many puzzling things about the rise of David Cameron to power is that he seems to have no ability to learn from experience.

He was in deep trouble with the Queen after his first boastful claim that she had been ��purring�� down the phone after the Scottish referendum rejected independence.

He said this only to make himself sound important. I should guess it must chill the marrow, and more than the marrow, to be on the receiving end of a personal rocket from the Palace.

Now he has pretty much done exactly the same thing all over again. Is it possible that this oily nobody is, quite simply, thick? Or was it the marijuana?

A reliable sign of danger on the roads

There are so many other things that need scientific investigation, but I��m still grateful for research which shows what all cyclists and pedestrians know �� that cars which throb and bulge with ultra-noisy ��music�� are to be avoided.

A thumping beat means danger, violent acceleration, a red-eyed refusal to notice lesser mortals on the roads, and maybe something else too, which a proper police force would stop them to investigate.

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Published on September 23, 2019 00:21

September 22, 2019

This is Peter Hitchens�� Mail on Sunday column
Actuall...