Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 83
July 21, 2019
PETER HITCHENS: We���re destroying the Armed Forces - the last great institution that Britain has left
This is Peter Hitchens��� Mail on Sunday column
Having wrecked the schools, the police, the courts and the Civil Service, destroyed the married family and debauched the economy, the slow-motion British Revolution now plans to ruin the Armed Forces, the last truly conservative institutions left standing after 60 years of upheaval.
At the end of this process, the Army, Navy and Air Force will still exist in outward form, but they will be useless for the purpose for which we have them ��� fighting the enemy. Instead, they will produce plenty of annual reports showing how sexually equal and inclusive they are.
The appointment of officers will be made on the grounds of subservience to dogma rather than on the grounds of known bravery or competence, and also of course on the basis of sex, with women preferred over men.
If ever such disembowelled, politically corrected forces come up against the fighters of any country which still puts national defence before political fashion, then I do not think there is much doubt of the outcome.
I am amazed there has not been more fuss about the grotesque ���report��� claiming that the Forces have ���unacceptable levels of sexism, racism and bullying��� and are led by ���a pack of white middle-aged men���.
���Report��� these days is a grand title given to any miserable little pamphlet, light on evidence and long on denunciation, produced by any fool who cares to line himself up with the prevailing ideology.
This ideology hates conservative attitudes towards discipline, courage, self-restraint and freedom of speech. It hates, above all, any expression of the blazing truth that women are different from men.
It entirely accepts the revolutionary beliefs of the #MeToo movement that men are basically not to be trusted in the presence of women. It smears any outbreak of patriotism as ���racist���.
Well, we���ve heard all this before, notably in the Macpherson Report���s claim that the Metropolitan Police were ���institutionally racist���, which triggered a 20-year inquisition by fanatics.
No evidence for this supposed ���institutional racism��� was ever produced, as the few who have actually read the report have found.
But the allegation was enough, and the police forces of this country are now under the leadership of people whose ideas about crime, punishment, right and wrong, might have come out of a Trotskyist pamphlet of the 1970s (I should know. I used to write Trotskyist pamphlets in the 1970s). Which is why they are so bad at what they do.
Now, under a similar thin excuse, it is proposed that all ��� yes, all ��� senior officers above the rank of brigadier should be sent on mandatory ���diversity training courses���. It also calls for the appointment of a ���culture and behaviour tsar��� to supervise the new regime.
I���ve had some dealings with our Armed Forces. I���d say that their officers and NCOs are about the last bit of our country where ��� in return for shockingly small rewards ��� serious responsibility, discipline and skill are still encouraged, and where failure is not tolerated, not out of cruelty or spite but because, in battle, you cannot fail.
Until now, they have just about fought off the modern world. Now it is coming to get them, just as the planet darkens and grows more dangerous. And people ask me why I recommend pessimism.
A perfect glimpse of the past
Why can���t we in Britain make decent films or TV shows about our past? Rubbishy, pseudo-nostalgic re-creations of old cars and clothes, accompanied by enough smoking to give the cast cancer, is all we get.
That could be one of the reasons why we make such a mess of the past and the future.
By contrast, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the brilliant director of The Lives Of Others, a film about the East German Stasi, has now made a superb, beautiful and moving panorama of his own country���s bitter, cruel 20th Century history.
It is called Never Look Away, and you���ll need some stamina to watch it as it is very long and subtitled.
But Charles Dickens would have liked the oily, plausible villain at the heart of it ��� Nazi one year, Communist the next, Democratic after that ��� and the way his wickedness is uncovered by the pointing finger of a child in a mysterious painting.
What happens to Saskia Rosendahl, the beautiful star of the film, is a reminder of a part of the Nazi horror that has been overshadowed by even worse crimes, but should never be forgotten.
Pull the plug on this electric menace
Of all the phoney rubbish about climate change, perhaps the phoniest is the current fashion for electric road vehicles.
The voltage that charges the batteries of these devices comes from French nuclear power stations, gas turbines and even (on occasion) diesel generators.
Electric cars are just a way to feel good about a means of transport that gives its users heart disease, back pain and depression, and endangers everyone else.
Electric bicycles (just about OK for the over-80s) are disguised motorbikes, capable of frightening speeds. Users rarely move their legs yet look self-righteous as if they were exercising, and use facilities hard-won over decades by real cyclists.
But perhaps worst of all is the pestilence of electric scooters. Our absent police completely fail to enforce the laws against these devices, which now career along footpaths and pavements, as well as crazily on busy roads.
I suspect they are popular with people who have lost their licences, or can���t be bothered to take a test, but still want motor transport.
They are starting to injure and kill, and if not stopped this will get much, much worse.
The Big Dope lobby have stupefied us
I am convinced our governing class are actively committed to stupefying the population.
After all, since they have failed on the EU, economy, housing, crime, NHS, employment, education and transport, the idea of doping us all into stoned submission with the legalisation of cannabis must begin to look like a realistic option.
If we���re all out of our minds, we won���t notice.
The grittier ultra-Thatcherite ���libertarian��� Tories justify this plan on the grounds that it will raise a lot of tax, as cigarettes used to do before so many sensibly realised that smoking kills you.
If only this plan were as nice as it sounds. But as the horrible news from Scotland showed last week, drugs which provide easy, unearned pleasure exact a high price in physical and mental health.
The obvious response to the Scottish deaths is to ensure fewer people start taking drugs in the first place, through deterrent punishment of users.
If you believe, as one BBC reporter declared as if it were a fact on the Radio 4 news, that these abusers cannot stop, then the only policy that makes sense is to ensure they never start.
Before drug abuse became common, and before the police gave up enforcing the possession laws, we had very few such deaths. But the BBC has become the British Bureau for Cannabis, missing no opportunity to promote legalisation. Alas, the political world is now the same.
I do not think I can now identify a single MP who has not been swallowed up by the Big Dope campaign, regurgitating their weary, untrue claims, unchallenged by any informed or principled voice.
The catastrophe of mental illness, violence, sloth and incompetence which will result from marijuana legalisation is appalling beyond belief.
Yet it seems set to happen. You elect these stupid, gullible people. Perhaps you can find out what is wrong with them, the next time they ask for your votes.
July 14, 2019
PETER HITCHENS: Let Sir Kim resign? No! I'd send him a guard of honour and a warship!
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column 
British cringing to the USA is just as bad as British cringing to the EU, if not worse. If I were in charge, we���d stop it now and for ever.
Sloppy American sentimentality about Winston Churchill doesn���t actually get us anything important. They often walk all over us while clutching damp handkerchiefs and recalling the great ���shoulder to shoulder��� days of old.
And being scared by the great baying hole in the air that is Donald J. Trump doesn���t help us either. If he respects anyone, it is the people who stand up to him.
Our ambassador, Sir Kim Darroch, should have been told firmly by Theresa May that he couldn���t resign. Why on earth should he? It wasn���t his fault that his perfectly reasonable private messages became public. If a childish President really couldn���t cope with that, then we should have made it his problem, not ours.
France���s envoy to Washington DC once publicly called Mr Trump a ���vulture��� on Twitter, and Paris quite rightly resisted any attempt to get rid of him for this. They said it was their business who represented them, which is of course what a proper country must do if it wishes to remain a proper country.
Far from letting Sir Kim quit, we should have announced that he would remain in post until July 3, 2020, when he would mark his departure with a huge, lavish party to commemorate the anniversary of the last sensible day before the Americans foolishly declared independence.
Someone might point out at this event, humorously and wittily of course, that the rebels only beat us thanks to French warships, money and soldiers, provided by the despot Louis XVI. And that their boasts of liberty didn���t extend to the black slaves who would remain in chains until nearly a century later, only to be freed by a terrible Civil War.
Someone might also remember (everyone else has forgotten) the many thousands of American colonists who remained loyal to King George III and who, after 1776, were cruelly persecuted, tarred and feathered and driven from their homes.
These Empire Loyalists are the actual reason that Canada exists. Canadians still quietly but politely point out that the USA���s idea of freedom is not the only one in the world or necessarily the best, even if it is the noisiest.
To welcome guests to this event, I think I���d fly out a detachment of Grenadier Guards to stand in full kit at the gates of our embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, just as US embassies have squads of uniformed marines.
After that, perhaps Sir Kim could return home aboard the largest warship we could find that wasn���t leaking or broken. But only then. And from that day onwards, we���d behave just like a normal country, neither expecting nor giving any special favours and speaking our minds just as we liked.
As one of our smartest ambassadors to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, said last week: ���The relationship with the US is, as it has always been, a transactional one, rooted in realpolitik.
���There is no longer room for the windy rhetoric of the ���special relationship��� to which British politicians are delusionally attached.���
We're helping Iran's hated ayatollahs
I���m really not sure why we are trying so hard to pick a fight with Iran. Is it the same twits who got us into a needless war with Iraq and created permanent chaos in Libya and Syria, at work again? The clash in the Strait of Hormuz was obviously connected to our strange seizure of an Iranian oil cargo off Gibraltar, a superpower action we aren���t really strong enough to take on our own.
The thing I learned from my one visit to Iran is that the horrible fanatics who control that country rejoice in Western enmity. Millions of Iranians are friendly to the West and long to be on good terms with us. But their hardline rulers believe that war and sanctions give them the excuse to prolong a largely despised regime. They threw my friend Jason Rezaian into solitary confinement on ridiculous spying charges to punish him for trying to improve Iran���s relations with the West. Yes, you read that right. So whenever we stir up this sort of trouble, we are actually helping the ayatollahs stay in power.
Do the Iranians have any grievances against us? Well, yes, they do. In 1953, the British MI6 agent Monty Woodhouse, later Tory MP for Oxford, helped mount a putsch in Tehran, ���Operation Boot���. This overthrew the closest thing to a democratic, constitutional ruler Iran has ever had, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The records of this nasty, corrupt, violent episode have been published. Many democratic-minded Iranians still resent this, as well they might.
And we also just happen to owe Tehran ��450 million (an impartial international court ruled against us on this in 2009) for tanks ordered by the Shah in the 1970s. We were paid up front. But we never delivered most of them because we did not like the new Islamic Republic. Instead, we sold quite a few of them to Saddam Hussein, against whom we would later go to war ��� a pretty good illustration of what a stupid mess our foreign policy is these days.
Ah, yes, requiring all police officers to be graduates, as the ���College of Policing��� now demands we do, will be a great idea, just as good as the triumphant plan to do the same with nurses.
Don���t the police regard quite enough of their proper work as beneath them already? If they are all Sociology BAs in future, they���ll be far too busy understanding burglars to deter or catch them.
Dull as an evening with Stephen Fry
Film-makers and TV executives increasingly use lesbian romance to try to inject some sort of thrill into their drama. The effect is a little like running the national grid through a dead frog. It jumps about a bit, but remains relentlessly dead.
Alas, this is so with Vita And Virginia, in which two attractive actresses, Elizabeth Debicki and Gemma Arterton, portray the barmy romance between the grand self-published Bloomsbury novelist Virginia Woolf and the crashing supersnob Vita Sackville-West.
The story, though appalling for Vita���s children and for the husbands of both women, is blackly comical thanks to Virginia Woolf���s relentless seriousness, especially about herself. Ms Debicki���s lovely nose plays Virginia Woolf���s famous hooter with great panache and apparently without artificial aid. Otherwise, watching the film is like an evening with Stephen Fry, a struggle between boredom and pretentiousness in which neither ultimately triumphs.
Another ultra-violent killer turns out to be a marijuana smoker, and it just gets mentioned casually at the end of his trial. The pitiful, politically pressured failure by police and courts to enforce marijuana possession laws is now bearing fruit ��� perhaps thousands of people who are dangerously crazy, wandering in public places.
In 1987, a huge study of Swedish soldiers found a clear link between marijuana and mental illness, such as the one Darren Pencille suffers from. Ross Grainger���s ever-expanding website of crimes whose perpetrators used marijuana ��� called Attacker Smoked Cannabis ��� demands an investigation into this link. Yet nothing happens. Our governing class is corrupted by its own use of marijuana, that���s why.
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July 12, 2019
July 11, 2019
My Response to the Adam Spliff/ Adam Smith Institute's Latest Call for Drug Legalisation
There are probably women still dying in agony today because of the brilliant public relations of the Big Tobacco lobby 90 years ago, when Edward Bernays persuaded women to smoke, on the basis that cigarettes were ���torches of freedom��� and that for women to smoke them was a gesture of self-liberation. A variation of this theme was still being used in cigarette advertising and promotion as recently as the 1990s. See:
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/2001/highlights/marketing/
Fashion and gullibility are terrible things, keeping people from seeing truth and reason when they most need them.
No doubt ��� if the current marijuana legalization campaign succeeds ��� there will be sad cases , mumbling in shop doorways or curled up, heavily drugged with antipsychotics, on musty beds in in corners of locked wards, 90 years from now, who will owe their plight to the slick PR of Big Dope today. ���I thought it was about the freedom to do what I liked with my body���, they will mutter, trying to remember what else it was all about.
The crematoriums and cemeteries of the future will also have received the bodies of many hundreds of people killed by criminals deranged by marijuana, or killed by drivers intoxicated by marijuana, who - if marijuana had not been legalized ��� would have lived full, safe lives.
May God forgive those who will have helped to bring this about. Because I cannot.
I do hope that, before they go to their final rewards, the authors of the campaign to legalise marijuana will come to realise the sheer irresponsible wickedness of their behaviour, and have time for amendment of life and restitution. They will find these things come to matter, as the years pile up.
Alas, whenever I encounter them in debate they are either in the grip of fashion, believing what they think they believe because everyone they know thinks it, or they suffer from the terrible narrowness of the greedy, so engorged by self-interest that their ears, eyes and brains can absorb only what suits them.
I do not know the authors of the latest ���report��� by the ���Adam Smith Institute. It can be read in full here:
or in summary here
I cannot say which of these categories they are in. They may simply be not very intelligent or they may just be very poorly informed. I would ignore them if they had not drawn so much attention to themselves, and if they were not bound to receive easy publicity from a media and political world too ill-educated to see what is wrong with them.
I have had previous brushes with this organisation, which by the way, last night (9th July) repeatedly ignored requests from me to identify its donors and continued to do so throughout the next day.
These previous encounters with these 'libertarians' are to be found here:
Today I will examine the ASI���s latest ���report��� . It is of course nothing of the kind. It is a propaganda pamphlet, masquerading as research.
The first giveaway is right at the beginning: ���Britain is falling behind the rest of the world on recreational cannabis legalisation���. In what way ���behind���? The unconscious presupposition here is almost laughable. We are doing something *different* from a subjectively chosen group of other countries. But that does not mean that we are ���behind��� them. Our policies are also different from those of South Korea and Japan, which continue to do as we once did, and to prosecute and punish the possession of marijuana. Are we ���behind��� them? To make such a claim would be to state a preference. It is the same with the opening words of the document. The assumption is that marijuana legalisation is itself ���progress���. Like many such arrogant proclamations of bias, it is unconsciously made. It sets the tone for all that follows.
Here goes:
First it asserts that ���The UK���s current approach to cannabis is generating misery, fuelling gang violence and increasing knife crime.���
I would tend to agree with this, but not for the reasons the ASI would expect. Years of de facto decriminalisation, police feeebleness, political lies and the delusion that drug abuse is a disease requiring 'treatment and 'rehabiitation' have been followed by an immense increase in drug abuse and the tragedies, large and small, which it brings with it.
But it omits to mention at this stage (though its authors later grudgingly admit they are aware of this point) that ���the UK���s current approach��� is in fact pretty much what legalisers have been seeking since the Wootton report of the 1960s ��� decriminalisation in all but name. This is only one step short of the full legalisation it demands. The authorities have de facto decriminalised the use of marijuana. The main likely effects on use of the drug thanks to legalisation of supply and sale will probably be an intensification of use among those who already use it and a moderate but significant increase in the numbers of users, as the ease of *obtaining* the drug will not alter greatly.
But the real purpose of taking the extra step is to enable businesses to move in on the market, and to enable HMRC to tax it. Banks and stock exchanges would also hope to do well out of investment in it, and handling its profits.
Let us take first of all the ���six point plan��� announced in the Executive Summary.
It admits openly something which legalisers are often rightly coy about, given the long (and still incomplete, see product placement) struggle to prevent the advertising of cigarettes, which this brings to the minds of most. Legal marijuana would be advertised.
Here it is ���Advertising and branding: Some forms of advertising and branded packaging should be allowed���as in many US states���in order to signal quality, consistency, and safety, giving legal products another advantage over the black market.���
Interestingly, when I have pointed out that the legalisation of advertising was a key part of California���s Proposition 64 plebiscite on legalisation, drug advocates have claimed in TV debates with me that they personally would not favour this, as if their own delicate personal opinions matter to the billionaire business bulldozers who will move in once the law has been passed.
It also makes it plain that tax revenue is a major target of legalisers ��� they sell it to politicians in this way. Then, in the passage explaining this, they insult our intelligence. ���Taxation: The taxation of cannabis must be low enough to ensure the final product is as cheap as illicit cannabis, or risk continuation of the black market like in California. High potency cannabis (skunk) should be taxed more than lower potency varieties, encouraging consumers to switch to safer products.���
This will not happen. High taxes (and the Treasury will be greedy, as it always is) will simply keep alive existing illegal sales channels. Low taxes, should they actually exist, would not be effective in curbing the use of high-strength drugs, which are in any case the choice of consumers - as they are with legal alcohol.
As the document itself says on page 15, ���credible estimates��� for taxable revenue range between ��500 million and��2.26 billion. Well, given the unceasing pressure to balance the budget and the political difficulty of raising basic rate income tax or uprating fuel duty, any Chancellor would aim for the upper figure. And this would guarantee the survival of the illicit market, the removal of which is one of the ASI���s main claims. This can be shown:
We now have a living laboratory of legalisation in the US state of Colorado. And there, a sizeable illegal market continues to flourish alongside the legal sellers.
Reports such as these (there are many)...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/colorado-marijuana-black-market-1.4647198
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/us/marijuana-california-legalization.html
���make it plain that two of the legalisers��� main ,and most repeated claims ��� that by legalising they can control strengths and that legalisation will drive criminals out of the market ��� are simply false, and proven to be false by experience. There���s no solution to this for them. Yet they carry on parroting them in the hope that you won���t notice.
Then there is this feeble suggestion, ���Education: Users should be presented with the latest evidence on the health effects of cannabis at point-of-sale - like in Canada.��� Education? Most people are more interested in what authority does than in what it says. If it permits the legal sale of something, let alone the advertising of it, the government has removed all the real warnings from it. The really effective part of the campaign against smoking has been the legal bit ��� under which employers who allow it on their premises, or restaurants, cinemas, bars etc who allow it on theirs ��� risk painful and expensive legal sanctions. Legalisation in itself will demolish any remaining effect of ���education���, not that the government���s feeble, defeatist ���Talk to Frank��� website (typical of what passes for drug education in this country) actually offers much in the way of warning or deterrence even now. See https://www.talktofrank.com/drug/cannabis
I shall have to be selective in what follows, as a sentence-by-sentence destruction of the entire pamphlet would take volumes. The use of the cases of Billie Caldwell and Alfie Dingley, on page 7, is shocking. There is simply no practical, reasoned, factual connection between the claims made for the efficacy of some marijuana-derived substances in treating these children, and the case for legalising marijuana as a recreational drug. None. It is purely emotional propaganda.
The plight of the mothers of such children is great, and we should all do what we can to help and comfort them.
But we are here talking about the commercial legalisation of a potent mind-altering drug strongly correlated with several bad effects. I do not think that people should employ such methods for such a purpose.
Mind you, it is true what they say, that these cases ���helped destigmatise cannabis.���
They should not have done. There was no logical or factual reason why they should have done so.
Let us go straight to the admissions the pamphlet quietly makes such as (on page 5) ���It [legalisation] will likely increase adult cannabis use to an extent...���
I���m interested in the use of ���adult��� here. Shocking as it is to acknowledge this, the writers must know that there is major concern among psychiatrists - see http://bit.ly/29XRS0v - about the mental health dangers of the drug they seek to legalise, that this is especially worrying among the young ��� see
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2892048
and
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/27/cannabis-damaging-under-18s-study
and
They even admit the existence of this problem on page 11.
The trickiest part for the authors is also on page 7. They summarise the law in a completely absurd way ���Recreational cannabis is unlawful to use and supply in the UK. The Misuse of Drugs Act, introduced in 1971, stipulates that the possession of cannabis can result in a five year prison sentence for users, an unlimited fine or both. Police can also issue a warning or an on-the-spot fine of ��90 if a person is found with cannabis.���
Well, which is it? The five years in prison and the devastating fine, or the trivial fine and the empty, unrecorded warning? They know perfectly well, which is why they don���t say, but still quote the utterly unused maximal penalties to give a false impression. Five years ago they would have claimed that we still had a cruel system of draconian ���prohibition��� under which the young were viciously ���criminalised��� (an absurd expression. In a free society those who knowingly break the law ���criminalise��� themselves and have nobody else to blame). .
They still make a few mild references to ���prohibition���, but these lack confidence. Thanks largely to my relentless efforts to get the truth out, that enforcement of the laws against possession has been eviscerated, and enforcement of laws against supply is a mere going through the motions for public consumption, they no longer quite have the nerve to say this.
They claim there is ���patchy��� enforcement and that this is unfair. I doubt that it is in fact that patchy (and would welcome any prosecution of possession figures from supposedly stern Merseyside, for example, to show it to be so) but I do not think that the Adam Smith Institute would welcome a consistent national enforcement of the possession laws, as practiced successfully in South Korea and Japan (examples they studiously ignore, see below at length).
Likewise, if their complaints (pp 7-8) of class and racial discrimination in arrests etc. were met by an increase in arrests and prosecutions of rich white drug abusers, which I would much favour, I doubt they would regard that as the sort of fairness they would like.
These problems are raised not because of a desire for actual justice, but to curry favour with the holders of other fashionable political positions.
I have shown that the experience of Colorado simply demolishes standard propaganda predictions that legalization will allow regulation of strength or drive crime out of the business. Criminals are already very active in the British legal alcohol and tobacco markets, stimulated by the huge taxes in these products which the exchequer would certainly impose on cannabis.
Legal drugs are still involved in crime because of taxation. The cases of alcohol and cigarettes both show this beyond doubt (���regulated��� cigarettes, by the way, remain as deadly as ���unregulated��� ones). Here is evidence reasonably recently submitted to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee (I would welcome anything more recent, but I do not think the position has greatly altered since then)
https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/home-affairs/Tobacco-written-evidence.pdf
I have been told by legalisers that this is a minor problem. Really? The alert reader will notice that it says: ���In 2010/11 650 million cigarettes were seized at the border.��� This seems to me to be a substantial quantity.
This HMRC document
likewise notes that : ���the illicit alcohol market still costs the taxpayer approximately ��1.2 billion a year. The criminality involved, including the use of the proceeds to fund other crimes, has a devastating effect on people and businesses across the UK���
It states that 50 million litres of untaxed alcohol have been seized since 2010. Again, this hardly suggests that the matter is trivial.
In Colorado, where marijuana is legal, strengths of THC are not restricted, as my opponent repeatedly asserts that they will be under the legalisation that he seeks. . Here a CNBC report from March 2015 https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/23/colorado-marijuana-study-finds-legal-weed-contains-potent-thc-levels.html
which states that ���Colorado marijuana is nearly twice as potent as illegal pot of past decades, and some modern cannabis packs triple the punch of vintage ganja, lab tests reveal for the first time.
���In old-school dope, levels of THC ��� the psychoactive chemical that makes people high ��� were typically well below 10 percent. But in Colorado���s legal bud, the average THC level is 18.7 percent, and some retail pot contains 30 percent THC or more, according to research released Monday.���
As to the levels of use among the young, it is impossible to measure them as far as I can see. But it seems Pollyanna-ish or perhaps Boris Johnson-ish to assume that they will fall if the drug is legalised. The report resorts to a sort of opinion survey which claims that marijuana is more easily obtained than alcohol, as if this is an argument for legalisation. Even if this is true, which I very much doubt (having witnessed 12 year old children swigging vodka in a Birkenhead Park not all that long ago), so what?
Supermarkets have neither any interest in, nor any control over what happens to the alcohol they sell provided that the purchaser is legally entitled to buy. The same would be the case for shops selling legal marijuana and for the door-to-door legal delivery agencies which the report promotes on page 27 thus : ���Cannabis legalisation goals: ��� Ensuring adult cannabis users have a range of accessible legal retail options to purchase cannabis. If a legal cannabis market is extremely difficult for adults to purchase from, they will continue to use the black market. This black market is characterised by dealers who are able to deliver to a customer���s door at short notice and legal alternatives must be able to do the same (my emphasis, PH). While cannabis users are willing to pay a premium for the legality of their purchases, this is limited to the extent that they are able to order reliably online or travel to a nearby retail store.���
As I have pointed out, an illegal market will continue after legalization, and it will then be strengthened by the flow of legally bought products obtained for younger friends ,siblings etc by those legally entitled to buy (the ASI suggests a legal age of 18 ��� see p.28 ���The minimum age of purchase for cannabis products should be set at 18.���(my emphasis)) .
This from Colorado, at the very least, does not suggest that legalisation of marijuana leads to lower use among the young https://www.cannabisskunksense.co.uk/articles/press-article/colorado-schools-report-nearly-19-percent-increase-in-marijuana-suspensions
Here are a few other pieces of notable spin:
On page 19 ���Very high potency products have emerged but in states such as Colorado, the average potency of cannabis flower has only increased slightly since legalisation, according to state testing data.���
Slightly, indeed. This, being interpreted, means that one of the few working models of legalization in a major country has produced an increase in the strength of the drug.
On page 11, the pamphlet says ���Five years after legalisation in Colorado, the executive director of the Department of Revenue gave evidence to the House of Commons health committee, saying that it believed that more than 70% of the cannabis had been brought under control by the legal market.���
This of course means that a huge 30 per cent had not been brought under such control.
On page 16, referring to a hostile newspaper���s account of my position rather any of my (readily available in print or on the web) original arguments, the document notes: ���Critics argue that the reason we face such problems is because the UK has never been fully committed to the war on drugs. There has only been a rhetoric of toughness, encouraging the UK to wage this ���war���. The evidence suggests this would not work, with a 2014 Home Office international comparators report concluding that there is a ���lack of any clear correlation between the ���toughness��� of an approach and levels of drug use���. It found that prevalence rates are more influenced by ���historical patterns of drug use, cultural attitudes, and the wider range of policy and operational responses to drugs misuse in a country, such as treatment provision���.
This is a lazy and self-serving misrepresentation of the Home Office report. This both recorded, and swerved to avoid the implications of, evidence from Japan (they���d have got the same from South Korea if they had gone there) which shows clearly that there *is* a correlation between enforcement and levels of use (though not, of course between the fictional severity of unenforced paper laws and abuse). The report used more-or-less blatantly racist arguments about Japan having a ���different culture���, to dismiss the otherwise inconvenient fact it had gathered and nw did not like. The report fund a fact that did not fit its argument so, rather than change the argument, it tried to club the fact into submission. As well as its nasty implications, this argument is a double dud, as pre-1970 Britain was likewise quite successful in restraining drug abuse by enforcement of the laws against possession.
I summarise the matter thus: There is successful discouragement of marijuana use in both Japan and South Korea, where laws are strongly enforced against drug possession, and use is also much lower. Before 1971, when British drug laws were more stringent and more enforced, drug use was also much lower in Britain. The idea that the Japanese and South Korean difference is ���cultural��� is fatuous. ���Culture��� on such matters is greatly influenced by law. Japan���s laws were introduced in response to widespread amphetamine use in the post-war period, a fact which rather undermines the claim that Japan���s ���culture��� is responsible for its lower drug use. Weak drug laws have hugely changed British culture��� since 1971.
See the November 2014 Home Office study on differing responses to the drug problem around the world
P.46:
���Japan: We visited Japan, which operates a strong enforcement-led approach to drug misuse, often regarded as a ���zero tolerance��� policy. Substances are more strictly controlled than in many other countries. Some products that are available over the counter as cold and flu remedies in the UK are banned. Possession of even small amounts of drugs is punishable by lengthy imprisonment.'
And p.51, which sneakily admits that tougher enforcement is accompanied by lower use (a conclusion perhaps unwelcome to the sponsors of this particular document) but then asserts, without a scrap of evidence, that this is really because of a different 'culture') It says (my emphases) : ' In Japan, where cultural conformity is traditionally valued, drug use is subject to a degree of stigma. In this context, it is difficult to
tell whether low levels of drug use (see how slyly the document admits that there are low levels of drug use) are a consequence of legislation, or a product of the same cultural attitudes that have informed the zero-tolerance approach.���
This is more or less openly racist, to use a term the authors of this report would well understand. These supposedly 'cultural' attitudes also existed in the Britain of the mid-1960s, when we too enforced our drug laws. NB: The study does not mention South Korea, which has similar levels of enforcement and also has lower drug use. It overstates the level of enforcement in Sweden which can hardly be described as 'zero tolerance' or equated with Japanese practice.
Note the way the Home Office report records a) that the laws in Japan are tougher than elsewhere and b) that Japan does have lower drug use. But this does not fit with the message the report seems to have decided to send anyway. Had the investigators visited South Korea, another free law-governed democracy, I believe they would have found the same thing. Would they have dismissed that, too, as the result of 'culture'? I rather think they would. Note that I here specifically do not cite any of the various Asian despotisms, which supposedly maintain tough enforcement of drug laws. I absolutely do not regard them as useful examples
But the ���researchers��� of the ASI have no need of any of this sort of thing. As far as I can discover, their document makes no mention at all of either Japan or South Korea, which is very convenient for their case, but underlines the real nature of this document as a propaganda pamphlet, not to be relied upon for serious research or argument.
I could say much more, and probably shall in time, but felt a timely and succinct response was necessary.
July 10, 2019
Melanie Phillips is Wrong. Please sign this petition now.
I am puzzled by the poor response (still only about 23,000 signatures) to this petition, which needs 100,000 to trigger a Parliamentary debate and probably rather more to bring about legislation.
It is easy to sign. It is clearly a good cause. Yet, while some causes garner tens of thousands in hours, this is only slowly crawling towards the 100,000 minimum it needs to be taken seriously, despite a well-publicised launch by Sir Cliff Richard.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/247912
It calls very simply for these outcomes;
���To protect the reputations of all innocent suspects, whether well-known or not, from the lasting stigma of a false sexual allegation.
More details
To provide balance in the criminal justice system since complainants have anonymity for life.
To prevent the suspects becoming targets of opportunist and deluded claimants.
To prevent police searches of the homes of suspects who have not been charged being publicised.���
The feebleness of the response so far will mainly come because otherwise intelligent people don���t realise how important the matter is, or because they imagine that they themselves could suddenly be sucked into the quicksand of false or mistaken accusation.
Well, that is the whole point. Nobody is immune from this sort of thing. With police, prosecutors, media and public in their present febrile state, anybody could be dragged under, without warning or mercy. That is the whole point. If any charge must be believed, and the police have not, in my opinion, weaned themselves off this belief in reality, then it could be you, tonight, or next year. At least, if you have signed this petition, you will not need to reproach yourself, when this disaster happens, for having done absolutely two parts of nothing to prevent it. Think of signing this petition as an insurance policy. It is not very likely that a tree will fall upon your house, say. But if one does, and you have insured your house, then that is one thing you needn���t feel stupid about not having done.
The most bizarre response to this has come from Melanie Phillips, in ���The Times��� (of London) . I believe she repeated these points on BBC Radio 4���s Moral Maze but have not yet had time to listen.
In ���The Times���, she said : ��� ���this petition is the wrong response. After all, where would this end? Why restrict anonymity to those suspected of sexual offences? At the petition's launch yesterday, Richard (surely ���Sir Cliff���?, PH) said that he thought anonymity for suspects should be extended further. That is surely the inescapable implication of this proposal. True, there's a particular odium attached to sexual offences. Yet people falsely accused of murder, assault or other crimes may similarly suffer from a taint that is never totally expunged.
���The implications don't stop there. If suspects are granted anonymity before charge, it surely follows that it should be extended to those who actually have been charged.���
I simply don���t follow this (I think I have given a fair extract here ��� the whole article is behind a pay wall and I cannot reproduce or link to the whole thing, alas).
Why does it ���surely follow[s] that it should be extended to those who actually have been charged��� ?
On the contrary. I doubt whether one in 100 of those supporting Sir Cliff���s petition would support such a move. This is solely about the police losing the power to destroy people against whom there is not even a case.
We will be very lucky if this protection is ever given to those who have merely been arrested, on an untested suspicion. Any such protection will be wrung, in tiny spoonfuls, from a justice system which has almost no interest at all in maintaining the presumption of innocence in practice? Doesn���t Melanie know that majority verdicts have ripped the guts out of jury trial already, and that accused persons are at the mercy of a jury selected from the electoral roll, which may well soon consist partly of 16-year-olds?
Has she not noticed the increasing resort, by prosecutors who have no actual evidence to emotive speeches, and the failure eof judges to halt trials where evidence against the accuse dis scanty to the point of non-existence?
The old safeguards, skeptical, cautious police officers, fair-minded unpoliticised prosecutors, crusty, independent-minded judges ready to stop dud prosecutions, experienced jurors who were required to produce a *unanimous* verdict, have vanished, in many cases decades ago.
No, our Ministry of ���Justice��� is only interested in granting anonymity to *accusers*, an astonishing development which far too many people regard as normal and unexceptionable, when it is a shocking development.
This proposal is a very small brake on a huge and dangerous juggernaut of People���s Justice. Everyone interested in justice, and that includes you, Melanie, should support its introduction.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/247912
July 9, 2019
An Appearance on the BBC's 'Politics Live'
Subjects under discussion - leaked ambassadorial telegrams, yes, the EU, civil service neutrality and - again! - marijuana,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006pjc/politics-live-08072019
July 8, 2019
My appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Tuesday 20th August
I'll be at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Tuesday 20th August at 11.45 a.m. https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/peter-hitchens-13235 ��� talking about my latest book, The Phoney Victory
July 7, 2019
Even Wimbledon's joined the rush to smash the family
This is Peter Hitchens��� Mail on Sunday column
Nobody seems to have asked for it. No real reason was given for it. But female players at Wimbledon will no longer be referred to as 'Mrs' or 'Miss' by the umpires. It will just be bare, unadorned surnames.
Why is this small thing so dispiriting? Because it is by a thousand such small things, imposed by faceless people, impossible to prevent, that our world is being changed beyond all recognition.
I will be told that it is trivial and that it does not matter. But if that is so, why did they bother to do it? Because it matters greatly to them, just as the incessant, relentless imposition of the metric system matters greatly to them. Oppose any of these things and you will be told that you are fussing about trivia.
But you didn't start it. They did. And see the expression that comes over their faces if you accuse them of obsessing over trifles. And that is why it should matter to you. These titles symbolise a great deal.
Wimbledon has done away with titles for women so married Serena Williams, pictured playing mixed doubles with Andy Murray, is not referred to as Ms or Mrs
Likewise Coco Gauff, pictured on Friday, is not referred to as Miss anymore by umpires
Above all, they refer to the distinction, once enormously important but now more or less abolished, between those who were married and those who are not.
The force behind this is the same force that caused the British State to seek out and destroy every possible mention of the words 'husband' and 'wife' from official forms and documents.
You would have thought that this stately old practice might have been allowed to continue in picturesque, old-fashioned bits of biscuit-tin Britain such as Wimbledon, in so many ways a museum of pre-1939 middle-class suburbia.
But no. The thing about totalitarians is that they have to control everything, that everything must be brought into line.
Every last trace of the old regime must be discovered, erased, painted over, demolished or chiselled away.
The process is still not quite complete. Marriage, that fortress of private life, has pretty much been destroyed in this country.
It still has an official existence, but the authorities give it no privileges or help, and the law waits like a vulture to pounce on every united home, and impose a high-speed divorce at the first sign of trouble.
The whole way in which we deal with each other has been transformed by this sort of change.
The main beneficiary has been the all-powerful State, which now reaches into what were once our personal lives in ways that would have been quite shocking even in 1980.
And the main sufferers, as always, are the abandoned, neglected, baffled, misled, miseducated children, so many thousands of them, with no secure place to turn to, just more freedom than they have ever been shown how to cope with.
Farewell to a real hero
A sad farewell to my old friend and frequent ally Christopher Booker, never afraid to defy the many stupid orthodoxies of our time, and to endure and enjoy the resulting abuse which is often the dissenter's main reward.
He died at home last week, full of years and surrounded by his family, leaving behind a great body of courageous and original thinking as his monument.
He would have been delighted to see that, even after his death, his spiteful enemies were still attacking him. But, oh, I shall miss him.
We all will.
I wish the Beatles era WOULD vanish
What if almost all trace of the Beatles disappeared, as happens in the silly but sometimes enjoyable new film Yesterday?
If only, in my view. Yes, some of the songs are OK, but as those around at the time well remember, it wasn't really about the songs.
The teeny fans screamed so loud at Beatles concerts it was impossible to hear what they were singing or playing.
Peter Hitchens wishes the Beatles era really would vanish, as is the plot of the film Yesterday starring Himesh Patel, pictured
Like the whole weird era from 1963 to about 1970, it was a convulsion of something else, and a lot of it wasn't very nice.
If, as in the film, a nice young man started playing old Beatles songs to people who'd never heard them, I suspect the world we have now ��� which long ago moved into far rougher, noisier tastes in music ��� would ignore him.
The same thing would happen to the early works of a lot of now-famous authors and artists if they were re-released into the world quietly without hype.
What really still needs to be explained is what exactly was behind the collective madness of the 1960s, which blew the lid off Western civilisation. It wasn't a song about Yesterday.
Al's criminal ignorance
On and on they go about police numbers. First it's Al Johnson, whose campaign to lead the Tory Party has all the depth and carefully-costed honesty of an Oxford Union Presidential struggle.
Then it's a gaggle of police chiefs, moaning about cuts and lobbying for a national force, an unthinkable menace to liberty in a free country of this size.
Mr Johnson plainly knows nothing about policing, as like almost all politicians he has never studied it. He thinks there are still things called 'bobbies' on a thing called the 'beat'. Crikey, as he might say. Only a member of the liberal elite could possible think that.
The moaning police chiefs presided over an accelerated collapse in police effectiveness, especially their arrogant, catastrophic decision to stop enforcing the marijuana laws, for which we pay daily in violence and madness.
They likewise have little to say. They all embraced the useless form of policing that involves waiting for crime to happen and then reacting inadequately to it.
They are just the same as the teachers' leaders whose response to the 50-year demonstrable failure of comprehensives is to call for more teachers and more money, but the same methods.
If you are doing the wrong thing, a million extra staff and ten billion pounds won't make it work.
Freedom begins at home
I utterly support Hong Kong's peaceful protesters in their battle to defend their liberty, though I am highly suspicious of the violent, masked thugs so oddly allowed to smash up a government building while police stood by mysteriously.
But can a modern British government give them any real backing? Do they care much about freedom or the rule of law?
Remember, this is the Government which sacked Sir Roger Scruton, without a hearing, from an official post on the basis of a smear in a Left-wing magazine. Sir Roger used to take great risks in aiding free thought and speech in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. But as he wrote in this paper last week, organised and potent attacks on free thought in Britain today 'bring uncannily to mind those official documents our Czech colleagues were called upon to sign which denounced this or that innocent person'.
'The witch-hunting hysteria has returned with a vengeance, not in Eastern Europe but here,' he added.
Most frightening of all was the verdict of his old Czech friends, who know tyranny when they see it, on the recent witch-hunts in Britain: 'My Czech colleagues said, 'Yes, it is starting again.' And by 'It' they really did mean It.' They really did. We should really listen.
Please back Sir Cliff Richard in his excellent campaign to stop the naming of suspects before the authorities have enough evidence to charge them.
This nasty practice is destroying the presumption of innocence and enables false accusers to ruin the lives of innocent people at will.
His petition badly needs tens of thousands more signatures. You may sign it here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petiti...
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
July 3, 2019
All Free Now. Some Thoughts on Kingsley Amis's Novel 'Girl, 20'
Many people are now unaware there ever was a novelist called Kingsley Amis. The huge public profile of his son Martin, also a novelist, has so overshadowed and occluded that of his now dead father that, when I quote the works of Kingsley, I am now sometimes assumed to be quoting those of Martin.
This is a loss. I don���t myself much enjoy the works of the younger Amis, though the fault presumably lies in me, since so many others do. I think that some of Kingsley Amis���s work is likely to endure, and shouldn���t be accidentally eclipsed by the current strange inability to recall even the quite recent past, though increasingly ancient matters such as World War Two (it ended 74 years ago) are still obsessively studied as if they were current affairs. I was struck this year and last by the passage of quite important 50th anniversaries, Paris in May 1968, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoskovakia, the beginning of the Northern Irish Troubles, and the very small interest in them.
I have had a strong regard for many, though not all, of Kingsley Amis���s books, especially since, back in the early 1980s, I was for the first time in my life given an important privilege. I was then a junior industrial reporter at the old Daily Express. The industrial department���s office was next door to the equally secluded room used by the paper���s books editor, Peter Grosvenor. It is a measure of how long ago this all was that a popular daily had an industrial department at all, and that we had our own office. I remember the formidable, ancient, largely wooden intercom device which connected my boss, the late Barrie Devney, directly to the editor at moments of crisis. These were signalled by an irritable wasp-like buzzing from this odd machine, usually in the late afternoon when the fumes of lunchtime���s appalling, virtually compulsory consumption of alcohol still lingered thickly around us all. Barrie was seldom in a good mood at this stage in the working day. I wouldn���t have dreamed of answering the thing myself had it begun to buzz when I was there alone. Insignificant junior reporters were barely acknowledged by editors in those days, and were wise to keep things that way. But Peter Grosvenor (who brought a black Labrador dog into work each day, unthinkable now )was always pleasant to me, and, noting my interest in the elder Amis, one day offered me a bound proof of a new novel, ���Russian Hide and Seek��� . I have checked, and this must have been some time in 1980 itself.
For the first time in my life, I was able to read and form an opinion on a novel before I had read any review, or experienced anyone else���s view of it. I thought the book clever and powerful and still do. I quoted from it on my first book ���The Abolition of Britain���, and added a second excerpt from it in the latest edition.
I did not, as Mrs Thatcher apparently did, imagine for a moment that Amis was predicting a Soviet invasion of Britain ��� though the novel is set in a Britain which has for many decades been under Soviet occupation.
I thought and think that he used such an occupation as a metaphor for the cultural decay of the country, and I still recommend it to people for that reason. Things he hated ��� the ceaseless massacre of trees by authorities incapable of such swift action on any other matter, the unnoticed decline on standards of education and behaviour, the loss of memory in literature, the inability of actors to speak Shakespearean verse properly, architectural vandalism, the casual cruelty to animals and then to people of persons brought up without morals, all feature. I have never forgotten it and still re-read it from time to time. It passes the key test ��� that the reader is a better person for having read it than he would have been had he not done so. I was amazed to read the reviews and find them at best tepid. They seemed to have missed the point altogether. I have never read reviews in the same way since, and never will.
I can, as it happens, take or leave his most famous novel ���Lucky Jim���. I think ���Take a Girl Like You��� (also quoted in ���Abolition of Britain���) is far better. I have never been able to read ���The Old Devils��� for which he was given the Booker Prize. I never met him, but, as it were, experienced him as a public performer at a sort of recital in Hampstead in the early 1980s, and did not like him at all. I doubt I would have liked him any more had I known him better. I am rather appalled by his treatment of his first wife, Hilary Bardwell, to whom he sort of returned in old age. I know a bit about him from my late brother, who seems to have got on quite well with him. I think the claim made against him that he was a woman-hater is false. I think, on the contrary, that he liked women, and devoted a lot of effort to understanding women, but that some people have taken this understanding as criticism. I am open to persuasion by example.
Anyway, the point of all this preamble is that, on a recent longish series of journeys I took with me his 1971 book ���Girl, 20���, which I had not read for perhaps 20 years.
When I first read it, oh, 40 years ago, I thought it one of the funniest things I had ever read. The description of the all-in wrestling bout, experienced for the first time, made me speechless with laughter, and even now, with its novelty gone and its bloom faded, it still produces a belly laugh or two. A lot of his humour and perception come from the fact that he actually listened to what people actually said, and how it sounded. Keith Waterhouse had a similar ear for actual speech.
I suspect, though I cannot be sure, that he was actually writing it during 1969, my own annus horribilis in which the High 1960s, having got going reasonably smoothly, turned very nasty indeed for me, though I cannot claim it wasn���t my fault. It���s a year I still see through a sort of hazy sunshine, that easy warmth and lazy light of early summer, though it cannot all have been like that. There���s a reference in the book to the reduction of the voting age to 18, which took effect that year, which is one of many things which make me suspect this. There���s also no reference at all to the change of government which happened in 1970, the only other possible year to which it could refer. But by 1970 the mad glitter of the times, and the haunting notes of the Pied Piper���s flute, had already departed. The thing had happened, and continued to go through the motions of happening, but the seductively evil spirit had gone. So had the world which had existed before the change. We were in a sort of limbo, a gestation. Eventually, the rape having happened and everyone having calmed down about it, because there was nothing else to be done, the child would be born and we would bring it up, and it would bring us up.
Oddly enough, some of the more wretched events in the book take place around the Angel in Islington, the starting point of one of my own less delightful adventures in that year. It also features an auditorium in a converted tram shed, which reminds me greatly of the Roundhouse, the disused Camden Town locomotive depot which was for a time in the late 1960s a sort of counter-cultural version of the Festival Hall. If you had been looking for Suzy Creamcheese, the mythical good-time girl of the 1960s, you might have found her there, smiling in that vague, stunned way of hers, in the very early hours of any morning.
But the book is principally about a composer and conductor, Sir Roy Vandervane, who I have been told (by whom? Ah, that would be telling) is based on a certain prominent atheist philosopher, whose private life was highly, er, complicated, and so this is not incredible.
Sir Roy���s wife begs the narrator (a sober and restrained music journalist, who himself has more problems with women than he realises, and who happens to be a friend of the family) to help her. Her husband, it seems, is about to embark on yet another affair. He has done this before, but the girls get younger as he gets older, and his latest obsession is officially 20, but in fact 17. The thing is plainly an embarrassing, nasty disaster, made more complicated by the identity of the girl���s father. I will not tell you exactly how the story plays out.
Some scenes are set in a newspaper office which sounds not completely unlike the old Daily Telegraph (not much connection with the paper of the same name nowadays). The narrator is jostled in a doorway by a ���small man coming out, white-haired yet wearing a cerise corduroy suit, gamboge Paisley shirt and goliath-sized orange tie���. This sort of thing was genuinely possible at the time. As in so many other things, the point abut the High Sixtes was that we all went further out into the deep water than anyone dares to do now. Those who did so were irrevocably changed by the experience, have never fully returned, and their influence on morals, culture, politics and the academy reflects this to this day. The wildly-clad man turns out to be the paper���s new education correspondent, an Amisian cry of despair if ever there was one. This was the era in which the comprehensive education disaster was just getting into third gear, and when it could -just have been prevented if anyone had tried. But education journalism had been largely captured by the reformers.
But there are several scenes so full of furious regret at the collapse of authority, education, order, obligation and culture that you can almost feel Amis wanting to kick or punch something as he writes them (at one moment the narrator actually does this) . In one of these, we discover something very important about Sir Roy���s daughter, Penny. Her personal tragedy, which I will not describe, turns out to be the main theme of the story, though she appears quite rarely in it. It suddenly becomes clear that Penny, whose privileged and wealthy life is already a chaotic disaster, has inherited her father���s genuine love of and appreciation for music.
���Nothing being more strongly inherited than musical talent, I felt I knew that, if Roy and Penny���s mother and Penny and everybody had been born twenty years earlier, Penny would now be near the front of the first violins in a decent orchestra, if not in a string quartet. Anyway, even the back desk of the seconds in some grimy provincial city would be a better place for her than anywhere she was likely to find herself in twenty years��� time.��� This turns out to be altogether true.
I don���t think I will spoil the story if I also dwell on the scene at the tram shed, near the end, in which Sir Roy tries to get down with the kids by performing a stupid piece of non-music, with his treasured Stradivarius violin, together with a rock band or pop group as they would then have been known, called ���Pigs Out���.
Someone has put butter on his bow, to sabotage the ghastly event. But he borrows another, a much shorter double-bass bow, and it sort of goes ahead. It is of course a disaster, and then it is worse than a disaster. The audience begin to walk out while it is still in progress.
The narrator asks: ���How many of those still inside this abode of muck would recognize the 'wit' and 'piquancy' of this last transmedial stroke, or would fail to jeer at it in the rare event that they did? And what followed was worse: a passage of fast double-stopping into which Roy was putting everything he had, making what must have been troublesome enough with a violin bow, and quite fiendishly difficult with the short and clumsy double-bass bow, sound natural, effortless, easy. Oh God, I thought, how could he possibly not know that this lot positively disliked the idea of the difficult being made to seem easy, seem anything at all, exist in any form ��� that what they liked was the easy seeming easy?���
But it is worse than that. As Sir Roy leaves the tram shed, he is set upon by a jeering group of youths. He is hurt, not too badly, but the Stradivarius is irreparably smashed.
In hospital afterwards, the narrator asks
���How are you, Roy?���
���Fit as a fiddle, old lad. They������ His face went loose. ���Though that���s hardly the������
He stopped speaking and drew in his breath. I was afraid he was going to cry and that, if he did, I would do the same.
���There are others���, I said.
���Not enough others. You probably know four hundred odd were destroyed in the last war, but even if they hadn���t been there still wouldn���t be enough���.
Worse is to come. Far from being chastened by the experience, Sir Roy is still set on running away, with Girl, 17. He is the spirit of the age, the supposedly mature and responsible guardian of the good and the fine, seemingly possessed by a desire to wreck it all and dance on the broken violins and demolished glories, even though he knows the grief he is causing. Civilisation is committing suicide, and cannot be persuaded out of it.
The narrator loses his temper and snarls sarcastically at the bandaged Sir Roy ���You learnt a lot last night, did you? You didn���t learn the most obvious lesson anyone could possibly have in his whole life. You���re just incapable of���.���
At this point the horrible girlfriend appears, more horrible than ever, and more certain she will get what she wants however much everyone else will have to pay for it.
The narrator bursts out again ���You know what I honestly expected after last night? After your piece had failed and you���d been beaten up and had your Strad smashed ��� which is like having your child maimed. Isn���t it, Roy? After that I honestly expected you to have nothing more to do with any of it, no more pop, no more youth, no more new ways of this and that������
Then he goes to see Penny and finds, well, what he finds. You may be sure that her final words, the last in the book, carry a grimmer freight than they might at first appear to do. She says ���We���re all free now���.
And so we were, all free now, playing in our sunny suburban gardens, accustomed to safety and to the small scale risks of wasps and gnats and grazed knees. Yet somehow, by our newly-learned slogans and incantations, we seemed to have summoneed something altogether more worrying and venomous into the undergrowth, and the evening was coming on faster and darker than expected, and safety was further away than we had at first thought. As it still is. All free now.
July 2, 2019
All Free Now. Some thoughts on Kingsley Amis's Novel 'Girl, 20'
Many people are now unaware there ever was a novelist called Kingsley Amis. The huge public profile of his son Martin, also a novelist, has so overshadowed and occluded that of his now dead father that, when I quote the works of Kingsley, I am now sometimes assumed to be quoting those of Martin.
This is a loss. I don���t myself much enjoy the works of the younger Amis, though the fault presumably lies in me, since so many others do. I think that some Kingsley Amis���s work is likely to endure, and shouldn���t be accidentally eclipsed by the current strange inability to recall even the quite recent past, though increasingly ancient matters such as World War Two (it ended 74 years ago) are still obsessively studied as if they were current affairs. I was struck this year and last by the passage of quite important 50th anniversaries, Paris in May 1968, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoskovakia, the beginning of the Northern Irish Troubles, and the very small interest in them.
I have had a strong regard for many, though not all, of Kingsley Amis���s books, especially since, back in the early 1980s, I was for the first time in my life given an important privilege. I was then a junior industrial reporter at the old Daily Express. The industrial department���s office was next door to the equally secluded room used by the paper���s books editor, Peter Grosvenor. It is a measure of how long ago this all was that a popular daily had an industrial department at all, that we had our own office. I remember the formidable, ancient, largely wooden intercom device which connected my boss, the late Barrie Devney, directly to the editor at moments of crisis. These were signalled by an irritable wasp-like buzzing from this odd machine, usually in the late afternoon when the fumes of lunchtime���s appalling, virtually compulsory consumption of alcohol still lingered thickly around us all. Barrie was seldom in a good mood at this stage in the working day. I wouldn���t have dreamed of answering the thing myself had it begun to buzz when I was there alone. Insignificant junior reporters were barely acknowledged by editors in those days, and were wise to keep things that way. But Peter Grosvenor (who brought a black Labrador dog into work each day, unhinkable now )was always pleasant to me, and, noting my interest in the elder Amis, one day offered me a bound proof of a new novel, ���Russian Hide and Seek��� . I have checked, and this must have been some time in 1980 itself.
For the first time in my life, I was able to read, and form an opinion on, a novel before I had read any review, or experienced anyone else���s view of it. I thought the book clever and powerful and still do. I quoted from it on my first book ���The Abolition of Britain���, and added a second excerpt from it in the latest edition.
I did not, as Mrs Thatcher apparently did, imagine for a moment that Amis was predicting a Soviet invasion of Britain ��� though the novel is set in a Britain which has for many decades been under Soviet occupation.
I thought and think that he used such an occupation as a metaphor for the cultural decay of the country, and I still recommend it to people for that reason. Things he hated ��� the ceaseless massacre of trees by authorities incapable of such swift action on any other matter, the unnoticed decline on standards of education and behaviour, the loss of memory in literature, the inability of actors to speak Shakespearean verse properly, architectural vandalism, the casual cruelty of person brought up without morals, all feature. I have never forgotten it and still re-read it from time to time. It passes the key test ��� that the reader is a better person for having read it than he would have been had he not done so. I was amazed to read the reviews and find them at best tepid. They seemed to have missed the point altogether. I have never read reviews in the same way since, and never will.
I can, as it happens, take or leave his most famous novel ���Lucky Jim���. I think ���Take a Girl Like You��� (also quoted in ���Abolition of Britain���) far better. I have never been able to read ���the Old Devils��� for which he was given the Booker Prize. I never met him, but, as it were, experienced him as a public performer at a sort of recital in Hampstead in the early 1980s, and did not like him at all. I doubt I would have liked him any more had I known him better. I am rather appalled by his treatment of his first wife, Hilary Bardwell to whom he sort of returned in old age. I know a bit about him from my late brother, who seems to have got on quite well with him. I think the claim made against him that he was a woman-hater is false. I think, on the contrary, that he liked women, and devoted a lot of effort to understanding women, but that some people have taken this understanding as criticism. I am open to persuasion by example.
Anyway, the point of all this preamble is that, on a recent longish series of journeys I took with me his 1971 book ���Girl, 20���, which I had not read for perhaps 20 years.
When I first read it, oh, 40 years ago, I thought it one of the funniest things I had ever read. The description of the all-in wrestling bout, experienced for the first time, seemed to me to be one of the funniest things I had ever read and even now, with its novelty gone and its bloom faded, it still produces a belly laugh or two. A lot of his humour and perception come from the fact that he actually listened to what people actually said, and how it sounded. Keith Waterhouse had a similar ear for actual speech.
I suspect, though cannot be sure, that he was actually writing it during 1969, my own annus horribilis in which the High 1960s, having got going reasonably smoothly, turned very nasty indeed for me, though I cannot claim it wasn���t my fault. It���s a year I still see through a sort of hazy sunshine, that easy warmth and lazy light of early summer, though it cannot all have been like that. There���s a reference in the book to the reduction of the voting age to 18, which took effect that year, which is one of many things which make me suspect this. There���s also no reference at all to the change of government which happened in 1970, the only other possible year to which it could refer. But by 1970 the mad glitter of the times, and the haunting notes of the Pied Piper���s flute had already departed. The thing had happened, and continued to go through the motions of happening, but the seductively evil spirit had gone. So had the world which had existed before the change. We were in a sort of limbo, a gestation. Eventually, the rape having happened and everyone having calmed down about it, because there was nothing else to be done, the child would be born and we would bring it up, and it would bring us up.
Oddly enough, some of the more wretched events in the book take place around the Angel in Islington, the starting point of one of my less delightful adventures in that year. It also features an auditorium in a converted tram shed, which reminds me greatly of the Roundhouse, the disused Camden Town locomotive depot which was for a time in the late 1960s a sort of counter-cultural version of the Festival Hall. If you had been looking for Suzy Creamcheese, the mythical good-time girl of the 1960s, you might have found her there, in the very early hours of any morning.
But the book is principally about a composer and conductor, Sir Roy Vandervane, who I have been told (by whom?) is based on a certain prominent atheist philosopher, whose private life was highly, er, complicated, and so this is not incredible.
Sir Roy���s wife begs the narrator (a sober and restrained music journalist, who himself has more problems with women than he realises, and who happens to be a friend of the family) to help her. Her husband, it seems, is about to embark on yet another affair. He has done this before, but the girls get younger as he gets older, and his latest obsession is officially 20, but in fact 17. The thing is plainly an embarrassing, nasty disaster, made more complicated by the identity of the girl���s father. I will not tell you exactly how the story plays out.
Some scenes are set in a newspaper office which sounds not completely unlike the old Daily Telegraph (not much connection with the paper of the same name nowadays). The narrator is jostled in a doorway by a ���small man coming out, white-haired yet wearing a cerise corduroy suit, gamboge Paisley shirt and goliath-sized orange tie���. This sort of thing was genuinely possible at the time. He turns out to be the paper���s new education correspondent, an Amisian cry of despair if ever there was one.
But there are several scenes so full of furious regret at the collapse of authority, education, order, obligation and culture that you can almost feel Amis wanting to kick or punch something as he writes them. In one of these, we discover something very important about Sir Roy���s daughter, Penny. Her personal tragedy, which I will not describe, turns out to be the main theme of the story, though she appears quite rarely in it. In one scene it becomes clear that Penny, whose privileged and wealthy life is already a chaotic disaster, has inherited her father���s genuine love of and appreciation for music.
���Nothing being more strongly inherited than musical talent, I felt I knew that, if Roy and Penny���s mother and Penny and everybody had been born twenty years earlier, Penny would now be near the front of the first violins in a decent orchestra, if not in a string quartet. Anyway, even the back desk of the seconds in some grimy provincial city would be a better place for her than anywhere she was likely to find herself in twenty years��� time.��� This turns out to be altogether true.
I don���t think I will spoil the story if I also dwell on the scene at the tram shed, near the end, in which Sir Roy tries to get down with the kids by performing a stupid piece of non-music, with his treasured Stradivarius violin, together with a rock band or pop group as they would then have been known, called ���Pigs Out���.
Someone has put butter on his bow, to sabotage the ghastly event. But he borrows another, a much shorter double-bass bow, and it sort of goes ahead. It is of course a disaster, and then it is worse than a disaster. The audience begin to walk out while it is still in progress.
The narrator asks: ���How many of those still inside this abode of muck would recognize the ���wit��� and ���piquancy; of this last transmedial stroke, or would fail to jeer at it in the rare event that they did. And what followed was worse: a passage of fast double-stopping into which Roy was putting everything he had, making what must have been troublesome enough with a violin bow, and quite fiendishly difficult with the short and clumsy double-bass bow , sound natural, effortless, easy. Oh God, I thought how could he possibly not know that this lot positively disliked the idea of the difficult being made to seem easy, seem anything at all, exist in any form ��� that what they liked was the easy seeming easy?���
But it is worse than that. As Sir Roy leaves the tram shed, he is set upon by a jeering group of youths. He is hurt, not too badly, but the Stradivarius is irreparably smashed.
In hospital afterwards, the narrator asks
���How are you, Roy?���
���Fit as a fiddle, old lad. They������ His face went loose. ���Though that���s hardly the������
He stopped speaking and drew in his breath. I was afraid he was going to cry and that, if he did, I would do the same.
���There are others���, I said.
���Not enough others. You probably know four hundred odd were destroyed in the last war. , but even if they hadn���t been there still wouldn���t be enough���.
Worse is to come. Far from being chastened by the experience, Sir Roy is still set on running away, with Girl, 17. He is the spirit of the age, the supposedly mature and responsible guardian of the good and the fine, seemingly possessed by a desire to wreck it all and dance on the broken violins and demolished glories, even though he knows the grief he is causing. Civilisation is committing suicide, and cannot be persuaded out of it.
The narrator loses his temper and snarls sarcastically at the bandaged Sir Roy ���You learnt a lot last night, did you? You didn���t learn the most obvious lesson anyone could possibly have in his whole life. You���re just incapable of���.���
At this point the horrible girlfriend appears, more horrible than ever, and more certain she will get what she want however much everyone else will have to pay for it.
The narrator bursts out again ��� You know what I honestly expected after last night? After your piece had failed and you���d been beaten up and had your Strad smashed ��� which is like having your child maimed. Isn���t it, Roy? After that I honestly expected you to have nothing more to do with any of it, no more pop, no more youth, no more new ways of this and that������
Then he goes to see Penny and finds, well, what he finds. You may be sure that her final words, the last in the book, carry a grimmer freight than they might at first appear to do. She says ���We���re all free now���.
And so we were, all free now, playing in our sunny suburban gardens, accustomed to safety and to the small scale risks of wasps and gnats and grazed knees. Yet somehow, by our newly-learned slogans and incantations, we seemed to have called something altogether more worrying into the undergrowth, and the evening was coming on faster and darker than expected, and safety was further away than we had at first thought. As it still is. All free now.
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