Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 80
September 5, 2019
How much of a confidence trick is NATO?
Defenders of Britain���s EU entanglement often like to claim that our membership of military alliances such as NATO is an equal surrender of sovereignty. I can���t begin to explain how wrong that is (NATO has no Supreme Court which can over-rule ours, does not introduce legislation into our Parliament by order, etc). But is the basic idea right? Is membership of such an alliance truly a surrender of sovereignty to a supranational power?
And if it isn���t, just how real are all the promises given currently to the countries of eastern and Central Europe who imagine that they have been given a sure shield against the supposed territorial ambitions of the wicked Russians?
The bare, chilly truth ��� that these guarantees are worth exactly as much and exactly as little as the leaders of the NATO powers want to mean, on the day when they are tested, has been revealed by that sharp-eyed, sharp-minded diplomat and public servant, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, in a book review in the Spectator.
I suspect he put it there partly because he did not expect it to be widely noticed. But as a great admirer of Sir Rodric���s acumen, and as one who thinks the eastward expansion of NATO has been the silliest piece of diplomacy since the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland (we mark the 80th anniversary of its miserable outcome this week) I thought it deserved a slightly wider audience.
The review of Lord Hennessy���s book ���Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties��� can be found here :
It is interesting in many ways (Hennessy always is, Braithwaite always is) but the key passage is this (my emphases) :
���Hennessy argues that we had already made a greater surrender of sovereignty to Nato, [than we later made to the EU] which could get us willy-nilly into a catastrophic war. But the Nato treaty is not mandatory. It calls on each of its members to come to the common defence by taking ���such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force���. It thus leaves them with full national discretion: the Americans would have agreed to nothing else.���
Below I reproduce the whole of the central and much���touted and boasted ���Article Five, so you can see what Sir Rodric means:
���The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.���
This only really meant anything because any conventional war in Europe between 1949 and 1989 would have rapidly gone nuclear. Washington was, or realistically seemed to be capable of sacrificing Chicago for Munich. NATO was conventionally weak and ill-organised. No doubt the US and British armies would have fought well, but Germans hated the idea of another war on their territory just after they had rebuilt their country, and would have been unenthusiastic about any diplomacy that looked like leading to a long-lasting conventional war on their territory.
Without the nuclear counter-threat, which kept the USSR���s enormous Third Shock Army (and the rest of the enormous Group of Soviet Forces in Germany) immobilised for decades, Germany and then the other continental nations would have gradually recognised the huge military and diplomatic power of the USSR, and adapted themselves (as Finland did, but more radically, as there would have been no real brake on Soviet power) to the foreign and domestic desires of a Communist Kremlin.
As the Poles discovered in September 1939 (and as Denmark discovered in 1864) grandiose treaty obligations are worth as much as those who gave them are prepared to pay on the day. This is often not very much. Britain and France rushed to Poland���s defence, as they had solemnly promised to do only six months before, by doing pretty much two parts of nothing. There was a diffident and indecisive French advance into the Saarland, halted after a few days and repulsed not long afterwards, plus light patrol activity on the Rhine. Meanwhile the RAF dropped some leaflets on German cities. These actions had little effect on the German advance into Poland.
And that was in the case of a blatant act of military aggression, now outlawed by the UN. If Russia ever were to destabilise and re-establish control over, say, the Baltic states, I suspect it would do so much as the EU and NATO and the USA destabilised and established control over Ukraine in January 2014. Maybe there would be mobs, maybe just an engineered change of government. No tanks would roll. But if they did roll, you have to ask, would the President of the USA, in the end, sacrifice Boston for Riga, or Warsaw or Prague? And why?
The absurd thing is that the expansion of NATO eastwards, and the needless and futile tensions which this has created in the area, make it possible that such questions might one day actually be asked. What if Russia, cornered, sanctioned, excluded, throbbing with wounded pride, convinced it is doomed to be partitioned and salami-sliced out of existence, one day gets its own Trump? If this does happen, those who now claim that Vladimir Putin is a ���new Hitler��� might wish to recalibrate their rhetoric. We may find ourselves looking back on his reign as a period of enlightened, thoughtful despotism.
September 3, 2019
More information on the Day of the Great Power Cut, Friday August 9th 2019
Here are some further facts on events on the day of the great mystery power cut, Friday 9th August.
First is the Met Office���s account of the strength of the wind that day. All emphases are mine. I've converted some (but not all) of the speeds in knots to mph, to give a rough idea of the relationship.
���There were strong gusts in the early hours of the 9th in the south west. I think the daily summary I read from gives a very general overview of the day and the top wind speeds were recorded in the afternoon as the low pressure tracked across the UK from West to East.
For example there were gusts of 39 knots in the Isles of Scilly at 01:00, 37 knots at Camborne at 01:00 and Culdrose at 02:00. Gust speeds of 44 knots were recorded at Berry Head in Devon at 04:00.
South Wales was also windy through the early hours of the 9th with 32 knots at Mumbles Head at 02:00 and 34 knots at Aberporth at 03:00. Generally across the UK it was windy, with the likes of 24 knots recorded at 04:00 in Langdon Bay, Kent, and 20 knots in Weybourne, Norfolk.
By 06:00 after a short reduction in peak gust speeds, 36 knots (41.4 mph) was recorded in Scilly. Wind speeds were also increasing further north with 40 knots recorded at Dundrennan and 38 knots at Machrihanish.
From then the gust speeds continued to build through the day and spread across the UK eastwards. For example by 18:00 41 knots (47.182 mph) was recorded in Southampton. The peak gust recorded was 73 knots on the Isle of Wight at 02:00 10th August with widespread gales.
It is worth noting that we had a wind warning issued at the time.���
Below, obtained from National Grid, are the figures showing how much of our power was supplied from various different sources at various times that day. There are two types of gas generation, CCGT and OCGT. CCGT is by a long way the more significant. ���Interconnectors��� means undersea supplies, mainly from mosty nuclear France and largely nuclear Belgium, but also from the Netherlands, which still produces a lot of its power from fossil fuels.
% of Transmission Demand
Time
CCGT
Coal
Nuclear
Wind
Pump Storage
Hydro
OCGT
Other
Interconnectors
05:30
16.3%
0.0%
27.4%
47.0%
0.0%
1.2%
0.0%
0.5%
7.7%
07:30
20.6%
1.3%
22.2%
39.8%
0.0%
1.1%
0.2%
0.4%
14.4%
09:30
27.0%
1.6%
20.2%
35.0%
0.2%
1.6%
0.2%
0.4%
13.8%
11:30
28.0%
1.7%
21.5%
31.7%
0.0%
1.3%
0.2%
0.5%
15.0%
13:30
28.6%
1.8%
22.3%
30.7%
0.0%
1.2%
0.0%
0.5%
15.0%
15:30
28.0%
1.7%
22.1%
31.8%
0.0%
1.3%
0.0%
0.4%
14.7%
17:30
29.1%
1.7%
21.5%
28.3%
1.7%
2.1%
0.3%
0.5%
14.8%
19:30
28.9%
1.7%
21.0%
27.2%
3.3%
2.1%
0.0%
0.3%
15.5%
21:30
27.6%
1.7%
21.5%
30.3%
1.9%
1.9%
0.0%
0.4%
14.8%
Note that during this officially windy day, the use of wind to generate power dropped by about a third from its high point of 47% at dawn, to 31.8% at 3.30, just over an hour before the power cut. Later it fell even further to a minimum of 27.2%. So the strength of the wind may actually have reduced availability of wind power. I���m interested by the quite heavy use of pumped storage ( water being fed from high-level storage reservoirs into turbines to produce hydro-power at short notice) in the hours immediately after the power cut. Where we would be without foreign power, gas and nuclear, on days such as this, I do not know. But gas now has to be expensively imported as the long North Sea bonanza fades into history, and Sterling���s fall against the Euro must make interconnector power increasingly costly. Yet we continue to irrevocably destroy (not mothball) working coal capacity.
As I understand it, wind turbines need winds of seven to nine miles per hour to start producing power.But at speeds above 55 mph they have to shut down. Most have brakes that shut them down to prevent blade damage. Many of the big new modern turbines are 300 feet high (some even higher) , where winds are considerably stronger than at ground level.
This story from the ���Daily Telegraph��� of 14th June 2011, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/8573885/Wind-turbines-switched-off-on-38-days-every-year.html illustrates the problems which strong winds can cause for wind generation . I reproduce the significant part below (emphases mine):
���WIND turbines will have to be switched off on 38 days every year because it is too windy, the National Grid said yesterday.
In a new report, the grid said it could not cope with the surge of power from wind farms and will have to switch off turbines to avoid overloading the power transmission networks.
The admission casts doubt on the Government's decision to push for a sevenfold increase in the amount of electricity generated by wind by 2020.
Wind farm operators are given "constraint" payments to keep their turbines idle and some experts believe this will cost almost ��300 million a year by 2020, with the cost passed on to consumers.
The National Grid fears that warm and breezy summer nights could cause a surge in the electricity, combined with a lack of consumer demand. The electricity cannot be stored, so one solution ��� known as the "balancing mechanism" ��� is to switch off or reduce the power supplied.
They are currently switched off on 25 days a year, but the National Grid says this will have to increase significantly as more turbines are built.
Wind farm operators were paid ��2.6 million to keep their turbines idle last month in the latest stealth charge on household power bills and the cost of switching them off is likely to rise.
Last week Scottish Power, one of the "Big Six" energy firms, said it will increase gas and electricity bills by 19 per cent and 10 per cent respectively from August ��� adding ��175 a year to the average bill.
According to data from National Grid, which operates the main power and gas transmission networks, Britain is expected to increase wind power capacity seven���fold by 2020 to 26.8 gigawatts, which would put additional strain on the transmission network.
Wind farm operators are paid large subsidies, with more than ��500million going on wind power last year under the Renewables Obligation, the Government's mechanism for supporting renewable energy. The average turbine is understood to generate power worth about ��150,000 a year, but is awarded incentives in the form of subsidies worth ��250,000.
Dr John Constable, director of policy and research at the Renewable Energy Foundation, said: "This work from National Grid acknowledges that wind power may cause very high system management costs in 2020, at around ��286 million a year. When combined with the required subsidy costs of upwards of ��6billion a year in 2020, the consumer burden entailed by the renewables policy is looking increasingly unsustainable." Campaigners have fought wind farms throughout Britain, insisting that they do not produce the amount of electricity claimed and also blight views.
A grid spokesman said cutting wind generation output had involved a small number of wind farms each time over a few hours: "Over the past year we have had to reduce output from wind generators on 25 days, amounting to less than half of one per cent of the output of wind generation connected to the high���voltage transmission system over the same period."
I���ll just chuck into this mix a report from Professor Gordon Hughes of the University of Edinburgh suggesting that wind turbines are actually likely to wear out (first producing diminished quantities of power) more quickly than at first believed.
In summary it says ���that the economic life of onshore wind turbines is between 10 and 15 years, not the 20 to 25 years projected by the wind industry itself, and used for government projections.���
https://www.ref.org.uk/press-releases/281-wearnandntearnhitsnwindnfarmnoutputnandneconomicnlifetime
Here are a couple of sceptical reflections on repeated claims that the cost of wind power has recently fallen. This:
https://www.thegwpf.com/christopher-booker-no-wind-power-is-not-the-cheapest-form-of-energy/
and this:
which deals with the befuddling system of ���Renewables Obligation Certificates��� by which subsidies are managed . Think this doesn���t affect you? You are wrong.
Domestic and commercial power bills are significantly increased by the cost of green subsidies, and the profitability of high energy users, such as steel plants, is directly affected by this ��� with obvious wider consequences for the competitiveness of British heavy industry.
The more you know, I find, the more you doubt the smooth assurances of the PR men.
September 1, 2019
PETER HITCHENS: Crafty Boris IS taking shocking liberties (but they're nothing to do with shutting Parliament)
This is Peter Hitchens���s Mail on Sunday column 
The enraged denunciations of Al Johnson���s suspension of Parliament are so daft that sensible people may make the mistake of thinking it doesn���t matter. Actually, it does matter.
It���s not the suppression of democracy or a military takeover. But it is an unfair use of power, and it has created a nasty precedent which somebody like Mr Corbyn may find useful in future.
Our beautiful, finely balanced constitution only works if those in charge handle it with care. When we were still governed by grown-ups, nobody would have acted like this.
But the grown-ups vanished years ago. And what keen supporters of Mr Johnson have yet to realise is that he is not what they think he is. He is a multi-culti radical revolutionary, at least as bad as the Blair creature.
In fact, his takeover of Downing Street and Whitehall, with his ruthless, hard-to-love chief commissar Dominic Cummings at his side, is astonishingly like Blair���s 1997 putsch, with his gruff, grim enforcer Alastair Campbell at his side.
You may remember that the Blairite machine flooded Downing Street with a fake crowd of Labour Party employees (all of whom would have been happier with Red Flags) waving Union Jacks.
It was the signal. In the days and weeks afterwards, New Labour raped the constitution, strangled Civil Service neutrality, sidelined the monarchy and turned the Cabinet into a vacuous committee of servile nobodies. The British State has never recovered.
All this makes it much easier for Mr Johnson to act in the same sort of way. But what is Al Johnson���s aim? He is not, like Blair and his circle, an unrepentant 1960s Marxist. I think his suspension of Parliament is tricky and cynical, and is an abuse of that power, but it is not the putsch that the liberal establishment claim. But why be surprised if he behaves like this? He is not, as I keep pointing out, who or what you think he is.
I don���t know if he was ever a conservative. I very much doubt it. Don���t be fooled by the patrician voice. Many of the worst revolutionaries have been aristocrats. But he certainly wasn���t a conservative by the time he became Mayor of London, a city whose electorate is miles to the Left of the rest of the country.
And it was there that he made the acquaintance of one of his other key aides, the head of his policy unit, Munira Mirza. She was then his ���cultural adviser���, whatever that is. Ms Mirza has a fascinating political past. She is mixed up with a strange outfit, originally Living Marxism, then rebranded as LM. Nowadays they are gathered round the ���libertarian��� website Spiked Online and various other bodies such as the Manifesto Club.
It may or may not help you to know that LM, before Ms Mirza got mixed up with it, began life as a body called the Revolutionary Communist Party.
The RCP���s most famous contribution to British political debate was back in 1993, just after the IRA had murdered 12-year-old Tim Parry and three-year-old Johnathan Ball in Warrington, and injured 56 others.
The RCP, at that time, defended ���the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures necessary in their struggle for freedom���.
No doubt they don���t feel that way now, and Ms Mirza wasn���t one of them then. But shouldn���t it have put her off since?
I suspect they were just trying to sound boldly radical, as they still like to do, and merely succeeded in sounding disgusting.
And as a very former 1960s revolutionary myself, I know that people can change their minds.
But the point is that Ms Mirza (whose husband was once an organiser of rather startling sex parties) is still closely connected with these ultra-radical weirdos. And she was chosen by Mr Johnson for a vital job. She is believed to be one of his five closest confidantes in Downing Street.
What���s going on here? Where did these people come from? What do they want? Well, it certainly has nothing to do with my desire to protect and strengthen Britain���s ancient law and liberties or to make Britain less PC and more conservative (my main reasons for wanting to leave the EU).
I think it���s much closer to a rather wild plan to revolutionise this country with unrestricted free trade, perhaps made easier to bear by plenty of sex parties and drug decriminalisation.
Am I supposed to like this, just because I don���t like Jeremy Corbyn or Angela Merkel?
Well, sorry, I don���t.
Hey presto! Classic Austen magicked up out of thin air
I have no great love for Jane Austen. I once tried to make myself read her much-lauded classic Pride And Prejudice in ideal conditions of peace and comfort.
Within five minutes my eye had slid off the page and I was reading the small print on a nearby beer-bottle label, which had suddenly become interesting by comparison.
But I still can���t see why ITV���s bonnet-festooned new series Sanditon ��� based on a novel she never finished ��� couldn���t just have been invented out of nothing.
There are a lot of things in it, from hints of incest to racial tension, which Austen would never have written about. For most TV watchers now, Andrew Davies is a big enough name in his own right, and no longer needs to smuggle his throbbing plots on to TV under the skirts of grander authors.
A deadly error... committed by cops
It���s the way things cease to be shocking that is so fascinating. If, even 30 years ago, a police force had proposed to let off drug dealers and give them free driving lessons and gym memberships, the Chief Constable involved would have had to resign in about two hours.
Now, when Avon and Somerset Police announce this mad scheme, there���s barely a tremor. To me, the interesting thing here is that those targeted for this crime-rewarding programme are drug dealers. For years, police have excused their cowardly, lawless and disastrous failure to pursue criminal drug users by saying this would free them to catch the evil dealers.
I knew they never really meant it. UK police forces long ago ceased to be police as we understand the term. They are just armed and uniformed social workers, full of excuses for crime and utterly opposed to the idea of punishing responsible wrongdoers.
As evidence has piled up that marijuana is one of the most dangerous drugs known to man, its use linked with mental illness and violence, they have thick-headedly reduced their already feeble efforts to combat its use.
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August 31, 2019
A discussion about Alexander Johnson's suspension of Parliament, with Adam Boulton and Zoe Williams
Some readers may be interested in this discussion about Alexander Johnson's suspension of Parliament, a Sky podcast, chaired by Adam Boulton, in which I debate the event with him and with the Guardian's Zoe Williams.
https://news.sky.com/story/prorogation-is-boris-johnson-being-undemocratic-11797105
Note, it contains a foolish mistake or blunder by me, in which I say that when the 2016 referendum was called I expected Mr Johnson to support the 'Leave' side. This is the exact opposite of the truth. i expected him and Michael Gove to support 'Remain'. I didn't realise I had made this error until I listened to the recording.
August 29, 2019
What if The Soviet Politburo had Acted as the Chinese Communists did in 1989, and stayed in power though mass-murder?
What if the Berlin Wall had never fallen?
On Tuesday 26th August The Times (of London) published this letter from me, pointing out the strange paradox of the West's generous, friendly, even submissive treatment of the Chinese state ( see our repeated retreats over Tibet, Taiwan, freedom of speech in China, and the Dalai Lama, and our servile, inconsistent use of the word 'Beijing' for the Chinese capital) which retained its power by mass murder in 1989, and its chilly hostility to Russia, which, for whatever reasons, did not try to save its empire and authority by drowning its opponents in blood:
'Sir, Edward Lucas (Weekend Essay, Aug 24) contrasts the crumbling of the Soviet empire with the endurance (so far) of the People's Republic of China. While it is true that the Soviet regime was guilty of a number of savage repressions in its dying years ��� I witnessed one such spasm of violence in Vilnius in January 1991 ��� in general it lacked the ruthlessness shown by the Chinese Communist Politburo in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Moscow could have acted in this disgusting fashion on many occasions after 1980, but it did not, and we can all be glad of that.
'The interesting thing is that, by and large, the free West has rewarded China for choosing merciless repression, order and growth. It has done so by cultural and political cringes and the amoral pursuit of wealth above all. And it has punished Russia for choosing to relinquish its power and withdraw from vast territories in Europe and Central Asia by portraying it as a recovering evil empire. Since this paradox seems to have escaped most contemporary commentators, I can only hope that future historians may spot it.'
Ten years ago I explored, in a counterfactual essay, what might have happened if the KGB had overthrown Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 instead of 1991, and what might then have happened. I was making a different point as, at the time, the 'New Cold War' had not really got under way. But, having seen two demonstrations of armed Soviet rage against dissent, in Vilnius and Moscow in 1991, I have often wondered what would have happened if they had gone the whole way. Also, when I was turned away by the East German border police in October 1989, I did wonder what might be about to happen. I think it is worth bringing it out of the archives.
'Twenty years ago, the totem of the Cold War was torn down by Berliners. But what if the epoch-defining event had never happened? In this compelling essay, Peter Hitchens imagines how utterly different today's society would be - and poses a provocative question: would the world have actually been a better place?
In 1989, more than 100,000 East Germans took to Leipzig's streets protesting against their hardline communist rulers and demanding an end to repression. The pro-democracy surge spread rapidly, forcing East Germany's leaders to open the Berlin Wall to the West, before it was finally destroyed. It was a seismic moment that sent shockwaves around the world. Now Peter Hitchens, who was there at the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and Russia, imagines how it could all have gone terribly wrong, and contemplates the repercussions that would have followed ...
It was the Leipzig massacre, on the evening of Monday October 9, 1989, that decided the future of Europe. No Westerners witnessed it because the East Berlin regime had efficiently expelled almost every foreign journalist from the country by noon that day, and closed all its borders. Travel to Leipzig itself was impossible for some hours before and for weeks afterwards.
On the previous Saturday night, October 7, the East German government began to shut the country to foreign media, furious at what it said were 'provocations' by Westerners during violent clashes between demonstrators and police in Berlin. These had followed the appearance in the city of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to make what turned out to be his last public speech at a parade marking the 40th anniversary of East Germany's foundation.
Young people taking part in an official marchpast had called out 'Help us, Gorby!', and later that evening there had been several outbreaks of noisy protest, some close to the Berlin Wall itself. The following day thousands of people gathered for a peaceful demonstration at the vast redbrick Gethsemane Church on Schoenhauser Allee, a few miles north of the centre. Police surrounded the church, using armoured cars and dogs, then staged a mass arrest of those leaving, eventually bursting in to the building and rounding up everyone in sight. It later emerged that many known dissidents, especially Protestant pastors, had been interned at the same time and placed in rudimentary camps in remote areas. Units of the ultra-loyal Felix Dzerzhinsky Regiment, the regime's palace guard, were seen at several key points in Berlin.
Westerners, including West Germans, were quickly identified, escorted to the Wall and ejected. Even the normally easy access via Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin was stopped 'for technical reasons'.
Telephone lines to the East 'failed' during Monday afternoon. Two Western reporters, trying to sneak on to a Leipzig-bound train at East Berlin's cavernous Hauptbahnhof station, were arrested, taken to the Friedrichstrasse crossing point and literally thrown out of the country. East German TV abruptly went off the air and was replaced by a powerful jamming signal, employing previously unused technology to black out West German broadcasts.
It was only in the days afterwards, as phone lines and postal services gradually reopened and Leipzig citizens ingeniously managed to get coded or disguised messages through to relatives in the West, that it became clear something truly terrible had taken place, probably on the scale of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Peking a few months earlier.
It would be weeks before the famous short snatch of grainy, soundless cine-film, miraculously made by a brave unknown citizen, was smuggled to Hamburg in the lavatory of a cross-border train. The footage showed tanks and armoured cars opening fire on crowds carrying home-made banners proclaiming: 'We Are The People!' Careful examination of the footage revealed dozens, including many women, mown down by what seemed to be heavy machine-gun fire, but the light was poor and details unclear. Many could also have been killed or injured in the crush as terrified marchers tried to flee.
By the time the film emerged, the dead had been secretly cremated and their relatives efficiently scared into silence. Human rights groups estimated that as many as 1,000 people died that night, but the nature of the East German state meant that an accurate figure will never be known.
The crisis had moved elsewhere, and the world was not as interested as it should have been. This was exactly what the East German rulers - and their allies in other Soviet bloc countries - had counted on.
Until Leipzig, many had thought a major revolution was about to happen, one that might even have ended with the Berlin Wall coming down. For weeks, protesters against East Germany's miserable regime had been parading each Monday night round the city centre. They had good reason to do so. The city lived under a permanent cloud of brownish filth and its water fizzed with dangerous chemicals. Life was sad, hopeless and regimented, the people spied on. Inspired by word of liberalisation in the USSR itself, the East German people were hoping it would be their turn soon.
But their leaders thought otherwise.
The ancient communist despot Erich Honecker knew that everything he lived for depended on Germany staying divided, and on the communist Warsaw Pact alliance that kept things as they were.
Like every Eastern European leader, and especially the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu, he feared his own people. He remembered the savage lynchings of Hungarian secret police by the Budapest mob during the brief uprising in 1956. And he was nervous that, if he ever lost power, he would face revenge for his vicious policy of shooting refugees who tried to escape his rule.
Honecker maintained the biggest and most sophisticated repressive machine ever to exist. About 250,000 of East Germany's 16 million people worked full or part-time for the Stasi security police. Thanks to this, plus the quiet expulsion of anyone who caused too much trouble, there was no organised resistance to the regime, apart from a few courageous pastors. The sudden rush of refugees to the West after the protests, although it resulted in the loss of many valued professionals, also meant that the most active and potentially dangerous opponents of communism were gone for good.
Increasingly frightened by the threat of revolution, Honecker and his secret police chief Erich Mielke used KGB channels to contact other hardliners in Moscow, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest and Sofia. It was clear that without intervention, Poland and Hungary were on the verge of having openly anti-communist governments.
The dangerous mood had spread to Russia, which had been hit by long strikes in the Siberian coalfields. Independence movements were under way in the three Baltic republics, where the USSR's main radar defences against nuclear attack on Moscow and Leningrad were sited. The normally liberal Gorbachev had made it plain that they must stay under Moscow rule. There were also angry stirrings in the Caucasus, especially in Georgia.
Intelligence sources claim a meeting had been held in late August, almost certainly in the former Prague monastery used as headquarters by the Czech StB secret police, at which a plot against the reformer Gorbachev was conceived. The conclave of Stalinist communists, secret policemen and military veterans agreed co-ordinated action was needed to halt and reverse what they viewed as a Western conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet state and establish American control over Eastern Europe.
Here is the little we think we know, pieced together from official accounts and persistent rumours circulating among Moscow dissidents.
Gorbachev's official plane left Berlin's Schoenefeld airport, after a notably chilly farewell from Honecker, late on Saturday, October 7. The official version says the aircraft 'developed engine trouble' soon after crossing into Soviet airspace and landed at a military base outside Minsk around midnight. There, Gorbachev was surprised to be met by Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the KGB, and General Valentin Varennikov, commander of Soviet land forces. They informed him that a special meeting of the Politburo had that afternoon removed him from all his official posts, replacing him with a new joint leadership: the former KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov and the Ukrainian Communist Party boss Vladimir Shcherbitsky.
Gorbachev was said to have protested angrily, but to have sunk into despair when told that his wife, Raisa, had suffered a stroke at the couple's dacha in the forest outside Moscow. He has made no public appearances since, and is believed to have been confined to the dacha, in some comfort but forbidden contact with the outside world.
His foreign minister and close ally, Eduard Shevardnadze, was believed to have suffered the same fate. Western journalists and diplomats who tried to reach both men were arrested and expelled. A document purporting to be Gorbachev's 'testament', which circulated for some years, is generally considered to be a fake.
In the general suppression of dissent in politics and the media, a number of prominent figures disappeared from view and were also thought to be under some form of house arrest. The closure of almost all Western newspaper offices in Moscow, and the increasingly tight restrictions under which foreign reporters and diplomats had to work, made it hard to establish the facts.
Those missing included Boris Yeltsin, the rebellious former Moscow communist boss. Russia's most prominent dissenter, the nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov, was said to have died of a heart attack soon after KGB men arrived at his Moscow apartment. His wife, the outspoken Yelena Bonner, was sent back to the closed industrial city of Gorky, the couple's former place of exile.
The invasion of Poland at the end of October took the world by surprise. Neither the Poles, nor NATO, nor any experts had thought the Kremlin was still capable of such ruthlessness.
Several units of the Third Shock Army, normally stationed in East Germany, crossed into Poland by night and moved swiftly into position to back up paratroops, hardened and clearly trigger-happy thanks to recent service in Afghanistan.
The surprise was highly effective, the Polish army hardly had time to fire a shot, and the leadership of Solidarity was swiftly rounded up. A ferocious martial law was imposed in Warsaw and Gdansk. There was surprisingly little fighting. The Pope appealed for calm, saying nothing could justify further carnage, and that the great struggle for human liberty would continue regardless.
Margaret Thatcher and President George Bush, backed by the other NATO leaders, angrily denounced the measures as 'a return to the coldest phase of the Cold War'. Mutterings against Mrs Thatcher in the Tory party died away as Conservative MPs agreed that the Iron Lady was needed to see the country through this dangerous time.
Mr Bush quite deliberately revived Ronald Reagan's phrase 'an Evil Empire' in his January 1990 State of the Union message. The same phrase would be echoed in Germany in 2009, when President Barack Obama spoke in front of the Berlin Wall at Brandenburg Gate.
A special Nato summit was held in Brussels, at which the alliance members pledged their unity in support of freedom and democracy. Tanks were moved up to the American side of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, and major manoeuvres were held in West Germany.
But, as had happened over the Soviet repressions of freedom in Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968, the Western nations did not actually do anything. And the new Soviet government responded to the protests by saying stonily that it 'would act according to its interests in its own sphere of influence'.
A miserable, silent peace descended across the entire Soviet bloc. Prominent dissidents were offered the choice of imprisonment or exile, and mostly chose imprisonment.
The events caused turmoil in the Labour Party, after Neil Kinnock's dramatic 'Which side are we on?' speech, in which he gave his full backing to a strengthening of Britain's nuclear deterrent and NATO forces. The party's pro-CND Left, together with many communist-influenced trade unionists, refused to support him. The quarrel continued to divide Labour and the unions right up to the General Election of May 1991, in which Mrs Thatcher scored an unprecedented fourth term.
The Labour Party then split into several factions, and was eventually replaced as the main Opposition by David Owen's Social and Liberal Democrats. Dr Owen's convincing Cold Warrior stance helped him score a substantial victory in the 1996 Election - in which Labour was reduced to a small rump concentrated in Scotland and Wales.
Faced with a growing crisis in education, both Norman Tebbit's Tories and David Owen's SLD agreed on the gradual reintroduction of academic selection in secondary schools, and for far more rigorous qualifications for teachers.
The rise in crime also prompted a consensus that police officers should return to regular foot patrol, and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, judged to have tied officers' hands, was repealed.
A proposal to privatise the railways was laughed out of Parliament by MPs of all parties.
The other significant development of the time was the collapse of the Provisional IRA, which lost much of its former support in the United States in the new atmosphere, and which was also accused of receiving Soviet backing. After Provisional Sinn Fein's leaders went into exile in Dublin, direct rule was made permanent and a wide-ranging programme aimed at permanently abolishing anti-Catholic discrimination set in motion.
One side effect of the new Cold War confrontation was the abrupt end of reforms in South Africa. The Communist Party dominated the African National Congress, and the Nato powers feared that an ANC government would provide bases and valuable raw materials to the USSR. So they continued to give grudging support to the minority white regime, while pressing for change.
Nelson Mandela was released from prison in the spring of 1990, but pro-communist ANC figures were not allowed to return to the country and, despite the 'liberalising' rule begun by F.W. de Klerk, the country was still plagued by violent unrest.
The new Cold War also diverted Europe's attention away from schemes for a 'European Union' and a 'Single Market' as statesmen concen-trateon strengthening Nato. A grandiose scheme for a European single currency was shelved indefinitely.
The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which would have led to the destruction of cruise missiles based in Britain, was suspended by President Bush, and the twin bases, at Greenham Common and Molesworth, were retained. A small group of 'peace women', many in their 70s, is still camped outside Greenham Common to this day.
****
A good thing? Here is Peter Hitchens's verdict Would I put the Berlin Wall up again if I could? This is harder to answer than it ought to be. I spent a lot of the Eighties roaming the oppressed and desolate Communist Empire and it was a foul place. Some of the most inspiring people I have ever met dedicated their lives to overthrowing those squalid states ruled by lies.
I was overwhelmed with delight when freedom arrived in Warsaw, in Berlin, in Prague and Bucharest. I was there for many of those moments, especially the peaceful Prague revolution, the violent downfall of Nicolae Ceausescu and the drunken putsch that finally ended Russian communism. I also tried and failed to get through Checkpoint Charlie on the night of the great Leipzig demonstration which, of course, was not crushed.
And nobody - least of all me - could possibly want things to have turned out the way I have sketched them in this imaginary account of what might have been. I was in Vilnius in January 1991 when the Kremlin did have a momentary spasm and Soviet soldiers opened fire on the Lithuanians. It was horrible, although the casualties were mercifully small.
And yet I have little doubt the end of communism has been a curse as well as a blessing. Leave aside the fact that many of the post-communist regimes have been pretty dismal. My concern, in the end, must be for my own country. I think the stupid Left in Britain were on the verge of being utterly defeated, largely because they still had a lingering sympathy with communism. Another few years and we might have said goodbye to them for good.
As it is, the end of the Warsaw Pact freed British socialists to do immense damage. They no longer had the albatross of Soviet communism round their necks. And, switching their energies into political correctness and constitutional vandalism, they have become the dominant power in our lives. Most of us no longer know who our enemy is, although I can still recognise him from long experience, and think he is very active.
The change also liberated the Eurocrats, who until then had played second fiddle to NATO. It diminished British influence and increased German power. Finally reunited, Germany was bound to dominate the continent, and to give a giant impetus to the growth and power of the European Union.
No, I would not then have said the Wall should stay, and so I cannot say it now. I passed through it too many times, and so I am bound to hate it. But if it had remained, we in Britain might have been spared many sorrows, some already suffered and some yet to come.'
August 27, 2019
70....80....90...PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER! What should we conclude from the recent hot weather?
Actually I have no serious doubt that the climate is getting warmer. In general, the summers are hotter, and the winters less sharp, than they were in my childhood and teens. I can say this because I dislike the change. I dislike hot, stifling summer days and I enjoy the exhilarating crispness of proper, frosty cold.
As someone who has always walked or bicycled to work, I also notice that the long, slow period between the end of winter and he start of spring, which was often quite bitterly chilly well into early April, is now consistently milder.
But I think we should be careful about drawing conclusions from particular events, storms, floods, hurricanes etc, unless a pattern is discernible over a pretty long time. .
Let us take the high temperatures recorded at Heathrow on Sunday. I���m inclined to be a but suspicious of any temperature recorded in this great concrete city, full of traffic, the blast of jet engines and the air-conditioning output of several enormous terminals. But perhaps that makes no difference. Certainly some of the high temperatures (101.66 degrees) recorded earlier this summer were from the Cambridge Botanical Gardens, a delightful sylvan corner of that city, with a cooling small lake in its centre.
But what about yesterday���s record of 88.9 degrees for the hottest late August bank holiday? This has caused some people to recall the great 1906 British heatwave.
Wikipedia (which I think can be ruled impatial on this occasion) records: ���The heat wave had a comparable intensity to the 1990 heat wave.[2] From 31 August to 3 September, the temperature in the UK exceeded 32 ��C (90 ��F) consecutively over most of the UK on these four days. In September, CET Central England and Birmingham recorded a highest temperature of 31.5 ��C (88.7 ��F),[3][4] and Oxford recorded a highest temperature of 33.1 ��C (91.6 ��F), the Oxford high surpassed in 1911 with a temperature of 33.4 ��C (92.1 ��F).[3]
The 2nd of September was the hottest day of the month, as temperatures reached 35.6 ��C (96.1 ��F) in Bawtry, and remains the hottest September temperature of any day in the UK and the eighth-hottest day overall in the 20th century.[5]
Scotland had temperatures reaching 32.2 ��C (90.0 ��F) at Gordon Castle, Moray.���
Wikipedia also reports a July-September heatwave and drought in 1911, thus ���The United Kingdom heatwave of 1911 was a particularly severe heat wave and associated drought. Records were set around the country for temperature in England, including the highest accepted temperature, at the time, of 36.7 ��C (98.1 ��F),[2] only broken 79 years later in the 1990 heatwave, which reached 37.1 ��C (98.8 ��F).[3] However, the temperature did reach 100 ��F (38 ��C) in Greenwich, London on 9 August.[4] .
The entry contimnues : ���Heatwave impacts
The impacts of the heatwave extended over all parts and sectors of the country. The impacts began to be felt around mid July, around three weeks after the heat wave began. Because of the extreme heat, working patterns changed in Lancashire, with work beginning at dawn, around 4:30am and finishing around midday, to avoid the hottest part of the day in the quarrying industry there. Fatalities became common and newspapers such as The Times ran Deaths by heat columns as temperatures continued to rise. The heat also caused indirect deaths, by melting the asphalt on roads, causing numerous accidents.[5]
By the beginning of August, even the health of country people was being adversely effected with stifling, humid nights, meaning food spoiled very quickly and sewage spilled out. Also in August, striking became common, most notably in the Victoria and Albert Docks, where the entire workforce of 5000 people walked out, because of the intolerable heat, meaning the whole area came to a standstill.[5]
Drought impacts
The extensive drought affected all parts of the country. Again, the effects were felt around mid July, when early harvests were taken in and fires began to break out, along railway tracks in Ascot and gorse around Newbury. By the end of July, the heat and lack of rain had begun to affect agriculture. There was a shortage of grass for cattle as pastures turned brown from drought. This forced farmers to raise the price of milk, to compensate for the lack of production. On 28 July trees and some rare plants had begun to wither and die with the lack of water in the soil, even in shaded areas all around the country. By August, wells, water pumps and water supplies had begun to run completely dry. This led to the stopping of activity in farming and pasture in Essex and the closing of wool mills in Bradford, each an important industry in its area.[5]
An unusual impact of the hot and dry 1911 summer was seen in the County Championship of 1911, where Warwickshire���s narrow win was the only time between 1890 and 1935 where the Championship was not won by one of the "Big Six" of Yorkshire, Surrey, Kent, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Middlesex. The unusually hot and dry weather created extremely fast pitches that suited Warwickshire���s pace bowlers Foster and Field and camouflaged their deficiencies in batting and spin bowling on wet pitches [6]
Sunshine
Sunshine in July 1911 broke all-time records for the UK and across the south coast of England, with Eastbourne, Sussex topping 383.9 hours [7] and many other south coast spots not far behind. Much of the south coast outshone many Mediterranean locations, and Eastbourne was very close to the levels of sunshine expected in Las Vegas and in the Nevada desert in the USA for July (my emphasis, PH). Since the average July sunshine in Eastbourne is about 255 hours, the town received about 50% more sunshine than usual.���
The summer of 1912, by the way, was the wettest in over 200 years and included the coolest and wettest August on record.
These very hot days always remind me of the old silly season headlines (usually accompanied by disgusting failed attempts to fry eggs on the pavement) , now mocked out of existence by ���Private Eye��� (they only worked with the Fahrenheit scale, for obvious reasons) ; ���London evening papers would lead their front pages by shouting:
���70���..80���.90!...PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER!���,
which does go to show that high summer temperatures in England are not in themselves especially new. The story of L.P. Hartley���s novel ���The Go-Between���, set in the summer of 1900 in Norfolk, is suffused by ever-rising temperatures, until the weather eventually breaks in a colossal thunderstorm as the story reaches its disastrous climax. But I can find no actual records that 1900 was particularly hot.
The long-forgotten 1961 film ���The Day the Earth Caught Fire���, starring a pre-Rumpole Leo McKern and the actual Daily Express offices in Fleet Street, also deals with ferocious, relentless summer heat, which eventually dries up the Thames itself. This movie is poignant for me, as it was actually filmed in the big, noisy and chaotic rooms where I worked in the final years before new technology took over. By the time I was there, from 1977, the melodramatic inter-war black-glass building (now owned by Goldman Sachs) was shabby and past its best. Even so it still breathed the last enchantments of the great days of the Street of Adventure. It���s quite fun to watch, if you can track it down, and actually features the real Arthur Christiansen, who edited the Daily Express in the days of Lord Beaverbrook, playing himself and rather woodenly intoning the command I don���t think I have ever heard in real life, ���Hold the Front Page!���
Enjoyable to recall that in those days we blamed everything inexplicable or strange (which we now blame on global warming) on nuclear tests.
The Great Hitchens-Hitchens Rift of 2001 . Edward Lucas throws new light on the Quarrel
From time to time, my famous row with my late brother still rises from its grave to trouble me. It did so again this morning (26th August 2019) from a wholly unexpected source, an article in ���The Times��� (of London) by my friend Edward Lucas, who like me was very active on the anti-Soviet side in the Cold War. Edward is writing about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, whose 80th anniversary has just taken place, and which is one of the most important, most fascinating and least understood events in modern history.
I cannot reproduce it all, because it is behind a paywall.
But this is the crucial segment: ���Freshly arrived in Washington DC from the still occupied Baltic states in 1990, I had a huge row with the late Christopher Hitchens, who insisted that for all its faults the communist experiment was fundamentally benign, whereas the Nazi one was inherently evil. I said that from the victims' viewpoint being murdered for your social rather than racial background was a distinction without a difference.���
This conversation (alas, my late brother is no position to give his account of it) was some years later than the one in about 1984 or 1985 which would eventually form the basis for my brother���s angry refusal to speak to me, which lasted for several years until he issued this olive-branch, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/06/hitchens200506 which I readily accepted.
But if the exchange took place as Edward describes, it suggests that my late brother���s attitude towards the Soviet experiment was more, er, nuanced than he might later have wished to acknowledge. Of course he was not a Stalinist, the charge which he angrily denied, though I had not made it. He was a Trotskyist, first as a member of a Trotskyist grouplet and later as an admirer (as he states clearly here) of Trotsky himself, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076zht
(This, by the way, was recorded in August 2006).
But in my experience quite a lot of Trotskyists (and he was definitely one of those) still defended aspects of the Soviet experiment, as Trotsky did himself. I was keenly aware of this as, even in my most fervent Trotskyist phase, I could never bring myself to see anything good about the USSR, and once got into trouble with my International Socialist comrades for issuing at the University of York (above the IS imprint) a leaflet saying that the Soviet Union was ���no more socialist than Surrey���.
Why dig up this row? It has a rather important core, and is at the root of my opposition to liberal interventionist wars such as those in Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and the mad romance of the ���Arab Spring���.
Others care about it, and often have false impressions of it ��� see this exchange with one of my least favourite neo-conservative commentators, David Frum. Mr Frum plainly hero-worships my late brother (and so has closed his mind to the awkward facts of his undoubted lifelong Bolshevism). He is very grudging about admitting the facts, and does so here (there are useful links to the original casus belli) while hinting that I may be suffering from some Freudian difficulty. Yikes, as one might say
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/06/christopher-peter-hitchens/488291/
Those really interested may also read this account, which shows that my late brother did not, when I first brought it out in his presence (four years after his row with Edward Lucas) , dispute the famous quotation about the Red Army watering its horses in Hendon, nor get especially exercised about it. Timing is all. I suppose. (I must stress here that when I wrote the 2001 ���Spectator��� article in which I quoted it again, I took the trouble to send it to my brother in advance, which I would hardly have done if I had been trying to wallop him with a surprise attack. I was amazed when he responded by saying I was lying).
Here���s an account of (and a link to) the 1994 C-Span exchange
August 25, 2019
PETER HITCHENS: My shocking idea for Songs Of Praise? Try some Christianity!
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 
I doubt anyone was surprised when the BBC���s Songs Of Praise featured a same-sex wedding last week. Like lesbian kisses, same-sex weddings are now more or less compulsory in all radio and TV programmes, and I fully expect to encounter one, or both together, in the early morning Shipping Forecast any day now. After failing to shock anyone, and perhaps disappointed at the lack of fuss, staff at Songs Of Praise said, in words that sound a bit petulant to me, that they were ���not afraid of controversy���. Aren���t they, though? I���ll come to that in a moment.
These events are all about turning things upside down. They are always aimed at anything which has until now been traditional or conservative. This is why such huge efforts were made to get women to sign up as firefighters or to go to sea in warships, but I have never heard of a similar scheme to persuade women to work on other mainly male tasks, such as crewing council dustcarts, or keeping the sewers running.
So poor old Songs Of Praise, once a tiny refuge for the Christian elderly amid all the swearing and violence of modern TV, was long ago measured up by the Commissars for a new role. It���s years since it adopted a ���magazine format��� (fewer hymns, less religion). In the end, it will no doubt be replaced by another panel show, in which Christianity will be just one of many religions, occasionally mentioned as an odd thing that other people do and generally mixed up with child abuse.
But if it���s really ���not afraid of controversy���, may I suggest that it commissions some special editions with the following themes:
A doctor ��� perhaps the American Dr Anthony Levatino, who used to perform abortions but now doesn���t (and has eloquently explained his decision before a Committee of the US Congress) ��� describes the procedure and opens a discussion on whether it can be justified.
The programme visits an area of one of Britain���s poorer big cities, which has been affected by large-scale migration, and asks the locals how it has changed their lives.
It gives a platform to a supporter of traditional lifelong marriage (as prescribed by the Christian church) to explain why such marriages benefit children and society as a whole.
Not afraid of controversy, eh? I think we may have to wait a long time before any of these ever come to our screens. I am used to the dreary Left-wing consensus, and long ago stopped being surprised by it. But I am still annoyed by its continuing pretence that it is brave, original and radical, when in fact it is now the safe, boring conventional wisdom.
*******
Our Prime Minister, the People���s Boar-iss, is praised for a great breakthrough after Germany���s Angela Merkel is alleged to have ���held out the prospect of a new deal��� if he can come up with a solution to the Northern Irish backstop. That���s quite an ���if��� and reminds me of the old song, ���If we had some eggs, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some ham���. The Norway option is still, just, open.
*******
���Classic��� film that tainted a generation
The death of Peter Fonda, 50 years after his nasty movie Easy Rider made him rich, brought back strong memories of seeing it when it was first released. Can it really be half a century? Yet it is.
Cruel, pro-marijuana and sexually ���liberated���, its sinister glamour left a permanent sour taint in the mind, much like an unpleasant taste or smell that will not go away and cannot be masked.
And it became part of the minds of tens of millions of people, who were ever afterwards different (and worse). This is why I so often decide not to watch certain films or TV programmes. The damage they do is irreparable.
********
Wind power will leave us in the dark
The absurd attempt to minimize the Great Power Cut of August 9 continues, because the truth undermines the Green Dogma swallowed whole by our Government and most media. We are seriously supposed to believe it was caused by lightning, which strikes power cables all the time.
My own research suggest it has more to do with the self-harming policy of scrapping reliable, heavy-duty coal and gas generators. These provide a stabilising force known as ���inertia��� and can sustain power even if the system comes under stress.
Wind power, unreliable at all times, lacks this inertia. So does the power we suck into Britain through undersea cables from nuclear France, nuclear Belgium and the largely fossil-fuel-powered Netherlands. The Dutch may soon be a less reliable source of power as they have adopted the same mad anti-coal policies we follow.
The first official report from National Grid ESO
admits this: ���Wind generation, solar and interconnectors are different to the conventional electricity generation sources, in that they do not provide much inertia. Today, we operate the system with lower levels of inertia than we have in the past.���
How very true. There has been a frantic campaign to destroy coal-fired generation, with perfectly sound stations closed down and irrevocably blown up (why not at least mothball them?).
But what for? On its own terms, the policy is futile. China���s existing coal-burning generation stations have a capacity of 993 gigawatts (GW) of power. Plans are well under way to increase this by 259GW ��� a total of 1,252GW.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45640706
India, rapidly expanding, is also increasing coal generation and last March reached 200GW.
The UK���s anti-coal purge will eventually total about 40GW ��� tiny by comparison with China���s expansion. If the warmists are right about the cause of climate change, we could close every coal and gas station and it would make no difference to the impact of Chinese and Indian coal-burning. We would just spend longer in the dark.
We are like a thirsty man refusing to take a drink from the tap, because of a water shortage, while his local water company leaves hundreds of leaks unrepaired, allowing thousands of gallons to drain away each hour. It is a futile, self-harming gesture. Is there anyone in our political system prepared to end it? Or must we get used to power cuts?
The smug face of modern morality
Making my way to the buffet car on an Edinburgh-London express, I passed a sprawled young woman. Her feet (encased in enormous, thick-soled bovver boots) were firmly planted on the seat opposite. She had an expression of unutterable smugness on her face. On the table in front of her, displayed like a holy relic, was the warmist heroine Greta Thunberg���s book No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference. I think this pretty much sums up modern morality. What you think makes you good, not what you do.
Our airports are tougher than jail
We are told that ���airport-style security��� is now being introduced in prisons, where the authorities are apparently surprised to find that convicted criminals are inclined to smuggle drugs and weapons into their cells. Isn���t this the wrong way round? In reality, prison-style security (which should long ago have been systematically applied to those found guilty by the courts) has been imposed on innocent travellers at airports for many years. This is the kind of country we live in.
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August 23, 2019
'If we had some eggs, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some ham' . Al Johnson goes to Berlin
I read in bafflement the ecstatic accounts of Al Johnson���s visit to Berlin. I suspect he may be baffled too. Chancellor Angela Merkel is alleged to have ���held out the prospect of a new deal��� if the People���s Hero, Boar-iss, can come up with a solution to the Northern Irish backstop.
That���s a jolly ���if���. I mean, a solution to the backstop surely depends on finding another Parliament to vote on it. Which is unlikely within 30 days.
Their optimistic tone reminds me of some favourite old-fashioned English music-hall mockery of conditional optimism, large heaps of hope built upon that little word ���if���.
���.such as ���If we had some eggs, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some ham���. And ���With a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn���t for the houses in between���. (Chorus repeats: ���In between!���) .
As for the strange praise given to Al for quoting auf Deutsch Frau Merkel���s famous promise that ���Wir schaffen das!��� (���We can manage this!���), I don���t begin to get it. the words were spoken after the Bundeskanzlerin���s decision to fling open her country to an enormous number of undocumented migrants from the Middle East, widely unpopular and the main reason for her and her party���s continuing weakness and division ever since (she struggles to maintain a workable coalition, and is the lamest of lame ducks) . The truth is, neither she nor the country did manage it, and the raise of the AfD anti-migration radical party was the main result. To most Germans, the words have the same flat, mocking sound as ���Brexit means Brexit!��� I can���t imagine Frau Merkel much enjoys having them quoted back at her either.
The touting of this moment as a breakthrough reminds me of the absurd portrayal of some long ago Euro-posing by the absurd boneless wonder David Cameron as the tough wielding of a veto. I analysed it here in the long-ago innocent years before Mr Cameron tumbled over his own slipperiness, and called his cynical referendum. https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/12/david-camerons-phoney-war-or-a-curse-in-disguise-.html
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