Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 84

Having Fun with Professor Scott Lucas

Sometimes I find, lurking on Twitter, an unanswered tweet or riposte. On Saturday, after returning from a long journey, I discovered that Professor Scott Lucas of Birmingham University had tweeted derisively some days ago:

 

���What Hitchens doesn't get: #OPCW worked from establishing evidence. It details this to conclude "reasonable grounds" of chlorine but does not conclude re means of delivery. Hitchens works backwards: he asserts wrongly OPCW assumed airdrops & worked back to evidence.���

 

You���d need to be an expert among experts to know what this meant, but I felt I couldn���t leave him with the impression that he had in any way foxed or flummoxed me. Professor Lucas boasts a lot about his insider knowledge of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international watchdog which is supposed to be the impartial judge of whether poison gas has been used in war, and to some extent, of who used it.

 

Alarmingly, I get the impression that his boasts may be justified, and he may have an inside track at OPCW. This is in itself alarming, as Professor Lucas is no more neutral than I am on the question of Western intervention in Syria (he is, I should say, rather more in favour of it than I am). If  senior OPCW figures have indeed chosen him as a confidant, it suggests the organisation has its own problems with neutrality. If this is so, how valuable can it be as an impartial arbiter? There is, I think much more to come out about this major international problem.  See

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/05/strange-news-from-the-opcw-in-the-hague-.html

 

Anyway, I wanted to preserve in one place my most recent replies to Professor Lucas (who amusingly popped up on the BBC last week with some interestingly strict opinions on what people should be allowed to say on Twitter https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000671s , from about 11 minutes 43 seconds.)

My main point is that he now maintains that it is none of the OPCW Fact Finding Mission���s (FFM) business to attribute responsibility for gas attacks. This opinion fits neatly with the OPCW���s recent response to a leak reported here . This leak which showed it had left out of its final report any mention of an opinion by one of its team that gas canisters found at Douma, scene of an alleged gas attack in April 2018, may not have been dropped from the air. It argues that it was left out because it was not the business of the FFM to attribute responsibility .

 

But alas, the OPCW's friend, Professor Lucas, had already used the original FFM report to attribute responsibility, so making a nonsense of this excuse.

 

 

This is crucial. Only the Syrian government had aircraft at the scene. If the canisters were dropped from the air, then the Syrian government was definitely responsible. Simply to state this as a fact was to attribute responsibility.

 

On April 30th, soon after the report was published, Professor Lucas clearly tweeted that 'OPCW was clear that 1) There was deadly chlorine attack in #Douma on April 7 2018 2) chlorine was in canisters dropped by helicopters'

 

This tweet beyond doubt attributed the attack to the Syrian state. If the excuse for not mentioning the minority report which says the canisters might *not* have been dropped from the air is genuine, then he had no business doing so, and the report had no business implying it, which I rather think it did (though whether it was right to do so is now in question). You���ll have to work out why this mix-up might have happened. I just thought it worthwhile to tease Professor Lucas about it.

 

@scottlucas_ea . Looking back at this, I feel I need to emphasise that I make absolutely *no* assumptions about what took place. See https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/05/my-urgent-questioins-to-the-organisation-for-the-prohibition-of-chemical-weapons-opcw.html ���2 @scottlucas_ea Henderson's approach was to test more than one possibility, a reasonable approach which apparently had not been used until he did so.

3 @scottlucas_ea, You still have to cope with, or explain, your own April 30 Tweet in which you summarised the OPCW report on Douma. In this you clearly took [it] to mean that gas was dropped from the air by Syrian helicopters. You now say FFM was excluded from such conclusions.

@scottlucas_ea You wrote here on April 30 : 'OPCW was clear that 1) There was deadly chlorine attack in #Douma on April 7 2018 2) chlorine was in canisters dropped by helicopters' (please check your own timeline)
@scottlucas_ea Yet OPCW, with whom you ceaselessly hint you are in close if not intimate contact, says here https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/2019/05/s-1755-2019.pdf ��� , answer 14.1 'The FFM report does not refer in any part to ���the argument that they were dropped from an aircraft.���
@scottlucas_ea So in the month between April 30 and May 30, Mr OPCW insider moves from declaring : ' OPCW was clear...chlorine was in canisters dropped by helicopters' ' to asserting ' It [OPCW] does not conclude re delivery'.
@scottlucas_ea AS we all know, Syrian state was the only body in the area which had helicopters, so your April 30th version was a clear attribution of responsibility of the kind which you *now* say the FFM was not permitted to make.

Having Fun with Professor Scott LUcas

Sometimes I find, lurking on Twitter, an unanswered tweet or riposte. On Saturday, after returning from a long journey, I discovered that Professor Scott Lucas of Birmingham University had tweeted derisively some days ago:

 

���What Hitchens doesn't get: #OPCW worked from establishing evidence. It details this to conclude "reasonable grounds" of chlorine but does not conclude re means of delivery. Hitchens works backwards: he asserts wrongly OPCW assumed airdrops & worked back to evidence.���

 

You���d need to be an expert among experts to know what this meant, but I felt I couldn���t leave him with the impression that he had in any way foxed or flummoxed me. Professor Lucas boasts a lot about his insider knowledge of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international watchdog which is supposed to be the impartial judge of whether poison gas has been used in war, and to some extent, of who used it.

 

Alarmingly, I get the impression that his boasts may be justified, and he may have an inside track at OPCW. This is in itself alarming, as Professor Lucas is no more neutral than I am on the question of Western intervention in Syria (he is, I should say, rather more in favour of it than I am). If  senior OPCW figures have indeed chosen him as a confidant, it suggests the organisation has its own problems with neutrality. If this is so, how valuable can it be as an impartial arbiter? There is, I think much more to come out about this major international problem.  See

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/05/strange-news-from-the-opcw-in-the-hague-.html

 

Anyway, I wanted to preserve in one place my most recent replies to Professor Lucas (who amusingly popped up on the BBC last week with some interestingly strict opinions on what people should be allowed to say on Twitter https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000671s , from about 11 minutes 43 seconds.)

My main point is that he now maintains that it is none of the OPCW Fact Finding Mission���s (FFM) business to attribute responsibility for gas attacks. This opinion fits neatly with the OPCW���s recent response to a leak reported here . This leak which showed it had left out of its final report any mention of an opinion by one of its team that gas canisters found at Douma, scene of an alleged gas attack in April 2018, may not have been dropped from the air. It argues that it was left out because it was not the business of the FFM to attribute responsibility .

 

But alas, the OPCW's friend, Professor Lucas, had already used the original FFM report to attribute responsibility, so making a nonsense of this excuse.

 

 

This is crucial. Only the Syrian government had aircraft at the scene. If the canisters were dropped from the air, then the Syrian government was definitely responsible. Simply to state this as a fact was to attribute responsibility.

 

On April 30th, soon after the report was published, Professor Lucas clearly tweeted that 'OPCW was clear that 1) There was deadly chlorine attack in #Douma on April 7 2018 2) chlorine was in canisters dropped by helicopters'

 

This tweet beyond doubt attributed the attack to the Syrian state. If the excuse for not mentioning the minority report which says the canisters might *not* have been dropped from the air is genuine, then he had no business doing so, and the report had no business implying it, which I rather think it did (though whether it was right to do so is now in question). You���ll have to work out why this mix-up might have happened. I just thought it worthwhile to tease Professor Lucas about it.

 

@scottlucas_ea . Looking back at this, I feel I need to emphasise that I make absolutely *no* assumptions about what took place. See https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/05/my-urgent-questioins-to-the-organisation-for-the-prohibition-of-chemical-weapons-opcw.html ���2 @scottlucas_ea Henderson's approach was to test more than one possibility, a reasonable approach which apparently had not been used until he did so.

3 @scottlucas_ea, You still have to cope with, or explain, your own April 30 Tweet in which you summarised the OPCW report on Douma. In this you clearly took [it] to mean that gas was dropped from the air by Syrian helicopters. You now say FFM was excluded from such conclusions.

@scottlucas_ea You wrote here on April 30 : 'OPCW was clear that 1) There was deadly chlorine attack in #Douma on April 7 2018 2) chlorine was in canisters dropped by helicopters' (please check your own timeline)
@scottlucas_ea Yet OPCW, with whom you ceaselessly hint you are in close if not intimate contact, says here https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/2019/05/s-1755-2019.pdf ��� , answer 14.1 'The FFM report does not refer in any part to ���the argument that they were dropped from an aircraft.���
@scottlucas_ea So in the month between April 30 and May 30, Mr OPCW insider moves from declaring : ' OPCW was clear...chlorine was in canisters dropped by helicopters' ' to asserting ' It [OPCW] does not conclude re delivery'.
@scottlucas_ea AS we all know, Syrian state was the only body in the area which had helicopters, so your April 30th version was a clear attribution of responsibility of the kind which you *now* say the FFM was not permitted to make.

PETER HITCHENS: Conservative values? They are vanishing in a cloud of cannabis smoke

This is Peter Hitchens��� Mail on Sunday column

Poisoners are bad, but doctors who poison their patients are a million times worse, traitors to their profession and their oaths.

Something similar goes for people who obtain public office by claiming they are ���Conservatives��� and who then side with forces which will destroy and ruin all the things they claim to defend.

I wouldn���t mind if they stood as Greens or Liberal Democrats, or for the Socialist Workers Party. Even the simplest voter could then see the health warning on the packet.

But a surprising number of people are still fooled by brand names, loyally continuing to buy (or vote for) products which long ago changed out of all recognition.

So, while Crispin Blunt , the Tory MP, may appear to the casual observer to be a silly old sheep, pathetically trying to fend off middle age by adopting funky causes, I cannot take him that lightly. He does terrible damage by lining up with the drug legalisers. That is why they woo him.

I have tried to argue with him about his support for marijuana legalisation, which has now led him to take part in a well-funded lobby called the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group. It is a waste of breath.

Like all supporters of this policy, he simply does not listen to facts or warnings, and ploughs on as if he has not heard what I say.

In his case, it is perhaps because he is not very bright. But the big money backers of the legalisation cause are most certainly very clever. They don���t care marijuana use is increasingly linked to severe mental illness and now to violent crime.

These facts are a just a nuisance to them, as similar facts were a nuisance to the Big Tobacco companies in the 1950s and 1960s.

Remember how many years and painful, gasping deaths were needed before they finally conceded that there might be something seriously wrong with the product that made them rich?

All they see are the enormous profits they hope to make once marijuana is legalised, advertised and on open easy sale in the high street and on the internet.

People go on about how keeping drugs illegal leaves them in the hands of criminals. Well, of course it does. Criminals, for all their faults, cannot do anything like as much damage with a dangerous product as cynical legal businessmen can.

Anyway, legalisation would not get rid of the criminal gangs. Legal marijuana would be taxed heavily. That is one of the reasons some stupid Tory ���libertarians��� advocate this policy.

Well, legal alcohol and tobacco are smuggled in huge quantities in this country, to avoid the taxes paid on them.

In the American state of Colorado, where marijuana is legal, criminal sellers continue to flourish, undercutting legal sellers on price, and deterring any attempt to impose strength limits on legal drugs. Legal traders continue to sell at devastatingly high strengths, for fear that they will lose business to the black market if they don���t.

Mind you, Mr Blunt is not that much worse than our supposedly tough Government, which sternly says it has no plans to weaken the drug laws, but which has winked for years at the refusal of lazy police forces to enforce the laws against marijuana.  We were falsely told that this would ���free up��� officers to concentrate on supposedly ���harder��� drugs.

This is baloney. In fact, weak enforcement has spread, as I long ago predicted. It was revealed last week that several forces now offer those caught with Class A drugs such as heroin, cocaine or crack cocaine the choice ���between prosecution and an education programme���. The official maximum penalty for this crime is seven years in prison, yet police now treat it much as they treat a minor breach of the speed limit.

The Government knows this policy is disastrous. Today, for example, The Mail on Sunday reports that the problem of marijuana-induced mental illness is so severe that the first NHS-funded clinic for patients with psychosis as a result of cannabis use has opened in London. There will need to be more of these.

In a letter to Admiral Lord West, one of the few people in politics who is alert to the problem, the Tory Junior Minister Lady Blackwood recently admitted that ���high potency cannabis can lead to psychosis,��� and that more than 50,000 people are now being treated by the NHS for marijuana-related problems.

Then she admitted: ���We know that drugs are a key driver of the recent increases in serious violence.���

Did you get that? I get jeered at from all quarters for saying that drug abuse is linked with serious violence. But the Government knows it is true.
Yet nothing is done to dispel the stinking cloud of marijuana smoke that lingers in all our cities.

Fools and dupes are beguiled by heartbreak stories about how this terrible drug is a miracle cure for all kinds of ills ��� PR propaganda carefully designed to change its image. And people such as Crispin Blunt are praised for their supposed courage.

Joss needs to face the facts behind the veil

Singer Joss Stone has posted this picture of herself in Saudi Arabia, wearing what she seems to think is a niqab, the face-covering veil favoured by sterner versions of Islam.

She may not have got the whole idea. Her garment is a light-hearted pink, rather than the usual midnight black, and reveals her eyebrows, her forehead and even some of her hair, which also deviates from the standard issue.

She explained chirpily: ���Women here are strong and exercising their choice to be free, wear what they want and do what they want, their want may be different to what we experience at home but there ain���t nothing wrong in that.���

I know from past experience that it is risky to say anything at all about Islamic head-coverings for women even if, like me, you think people should be able to wear what they like, but also not forced to wear what they don���t like.

In October 2015 I wrote about how the H&M chain had chosen the model Mariah Idrissi, who wears the Muslim headscarf or hijab, for a new advertisement. I said I thought this was part of a normalisation of such things which would end with non-Muslim women coming under pressure to conform to it. I was called in for a sharp interrogation on Channel Four News, headquarters of political correctness.

A cross Left-wing woman called Nesrine Malik (not wearing a headscarf herself) told me sternly that I had been wrong even to mention it. She declared: ���It shouldn���t even be something to comment on in any way other than ���This is really cool, this is representing a significant swathe of British Muslim people and it���s something we should celebrate.���������

I later found Ms Malik had strong views of her own on Muslim head-coverings, and had condemned the face-veil that Joss Stone praises, saying: ���I would rather no one wore a niqab. I would rather that no woman had effectively to disappear, from a young age, because that is the norm in her family. I would rather that no one had to go through the discomfort and social awkwardness of dealing with a woman whose face you cannot see. I would rather that Islam be purged of the niqab and all its permutations.���

She called it ���uncomfortable, hot, stuffy, limiting and impractical���. She added that she was forced to wear the face-veil in her teens and ���found it an unpleasant and initially traumatic experience���.

I think she should have a word with Joss Stone.

The Gospel truth about Russia

The shocking inability of the Western media and political elite to understand what is going on in Russia continues to astonish me.

Lionel Barber ��� editor of the grandiose, Left-wing Financial Times ��� was, by his own account, amazed during an interview with Vladimir Putin when the Russian President told him: ���We���re a society based on biblical values.���

Mr Barber then quoted back at him Karl Marx���s dismissal of religion as the opium of the people, as if he expected Mr Putin to be a Marxist, and to be embarrassed or derailed by this. Of course he wasn���t.

For all his grave faults, Putin���s Moscow glitters with the restored gold domes of dozens of churches, many full of worshippers.

Why are so many Western people so slow to grasp that Putin���s Russia has totally cast off Communism, knowing in grim detail what it really means, and is more Christian and less Marxist than we are?

PETER HITCHENS: Boris's big 'domestic' is one thing I'm not worried about...I'm more concerned about his lack of serious policies

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Actually I rather disapprove of a nosey parker neighbour recording and reporting the domestic doings of Al ���Boris��� Johnson and his girlfriend.

If couples cannot shout at each other in private, and even perhaps hurl an object or two, without a recording being sent to the Guardian newspaper (whose editor and staff no doubt have home lives of utter non-sexist calm), then we are all doomed.
Excuses will be offered that the girlfriend might have been in danger of domestic abuse and so on.
But we all know they will be excuses.

My guess is that the ageing Mr Johnson was in more danger, had things turned rough.

For heaven���s sake, this kind of thing ought not to decide the fate of nations.
We already have many perfectly respectable reasons to think Mr Johnson is utterly unfit for high office.

The main one is the very real possibility that Mr Johnson will turn out to be the new Blair.

Once again, a dying political movement is projecting all its desires and fantasies on to one man who has neither the power nor the brains nor the ability to live up to them.

In this country of unpleasant realities, too messed-up and indebted to be cured except by unpleasant, nasty-tasting remedies, Mr Johnson is a fantasy figure who can do all our worrying for us.

His laugh and wuffly voice, the long trail of lovely, mistreated but forgiving women he leaves behind him, promise a jolly picnic in the summer sunshine.

When it later turns out that he has forgotten to bring any food, and we are compelled by a predicted downpour (he did not check the forecast) to limp home, soggy and hungry, he will manage to make us all laugh as we squelch along.

Well, I say all. There will be a few sour faces, a few muttering dissenters, such as me.
But the power of Mr Johnson���s personal magic will be so great that we will be told to stop complaining, and even blamed for the disaster.
For his admirers, like zombies or cultists, immediately lose all ability to think or criticise.

To be at a Johnsonist rally is to suffer a sort of dictatorship of merriment. Fail to chortle, and you begin to get dirty looks.

He can also do no wrong. I suspect that almost all of his millions of admirers will already be dismissing the screams and yells from Camberwell with the standard shrug of ���That���s Boris!���

Well, and so what?
Except that the Johnsonists have their genuinely dark side, which is quite chortle-free.
Anyone who has watched this contest carefully will have noticed the strong smell of brimstone, of weak and inexperienced Tory MPs bullied and threatened, of attempts to breach the secrecy of the ballot.

There are, I suspect, lists of friends and lists of enemies.
And whenever those are being drawn up, it is the honourable person���s job to be sure to be numbered among the enemies.

I am still assuming here that the Johnsonists will capture the Tory Party membership and win the ultimate ballot.

Of course, I cannot know this for certain.
But as the choice of Jeremy Hunt would only be a disappointment of a different nature, I cannot really get very worked up about it.

The wearisome decision placed before the Tory Party this damp June was the inevitable result of decades during which it has simply closed its ears and eyes to real politics and survived through crude bribes and insincere slogans.

What if Mr Johnson actually manages to get the No Deal exit he says he is ready to risk?
Does he have a clue what he is doing?

But that���s only part of it. Mr Johnson, who shamefully thought the answer to street disorder was water cannon, has no serious conservative opinions or policies on anything important, such as immigration, crime, education or drugs.
Those who know him well all agree that he is as socially liberal as any Blairite.

Some think he will legalise marijuana, as many ���modern��� Tories already wish to do, so as to get down with the kids.
Because he is genuinely bamboozled by Green cultists, he will cheerfully wreck the economy and subject us to power cuts, a mad policy even on its own terms.

I suspect he quietly welcomes Left-wing attacks on his frivolous remarks about burkas, because these bring simple-minded Tommy Robinson types to his camp.

I know it won���t do any good. None of my warnings ever do. But Al Johnson perfectly embodies the hard and ancient truth that optimism is about the most dangerous attitude in life and politics, always has been and always will be. It won���t be long before I can say ���I told you so���, yet again.

Empire lives on in Hong Kong

The admirable protesters of Hong Kong who have ��� for a while ��� faced down the Chinese state by their courage and resolution, have in fact been demonstrating in favour of the British Empire.

The things they wisely seek to protect ��� free speech and the impartial rule of law ��� came with our power.
China���s modern empire, by contrast, brings surveillance and thought-control.

And while we bitterly regret episodes such as the Amritsar massacre, Peking makes no apology for the far worse massacre of Tiananmen Square.

Those who think our Empire was wholly and simply bad, and seek to wipe out all trace of it, should try explaining that to the people of Hong Kong.

Can't they just get a cab?

Why do royalty and politicians in this country need motorcycle outriders at all? This foreign panoply, best suited to military juntas, has no place on our streets.

On ceremonial rides, there is the Household Cavalry, who can certainly cope with anything a motorcycle-riding constable can.

If it���s just a journey, then what���s wrong with hailing a taxi, or riding a pushbike? Most of them aren���t half as recognisable as they vainly think they are.

Outriders, sirens and whistles just draw the attention of nutcases, and cause resentment.

We're on the road to a pointless new war

Some years ago I travelled to Iran under the guidance of my friend, Jason Rezaian, who showed me that marvellous country as it really is, and introduced me to real Iranians in their homes.

The horrible people who control the Deep State in Tehran hated what Jason was doing.

The more he persuaded Westerners to see Iran as what it is ��� an ancient civilisation most of whose people yearn for the freedoms and prosperity of the West ��� the more these despots seethed.

They did not want a rapprochement with the West. They feared it would threaten their power, so they arrested my friend on preposterous charges of espionage and locked him away.

Largely thanks to the efforts of the US Secretary of State John Kerry, who handled the case with a mixture of skill and strength rare in these times, Jason got out in the end.
But these things exact a high price, especially on kind, honest men such as he is.

Then the Mullahs were threatened again, by a clever peace deal which, in time, would in my view have brought their rule to an end.
But then President Trump made his crazy decision to rip up that deal, which can only be motivated by a desire to please tyrants in Saudi Arabia.

This decision will reinforce Iran���s hardliners, who thrive on Western hostility and wilt when exposed to openness and generosity.
It might even lead to a pointless new war.

Once again, whenever you know anything about the facts, the foreign policies of the Western powers are ridiculous and mad.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Seeing Myself as Others See Me. My Enjoyable Entry on 'Rational Wiki'

Did Robert Burns really mean it when he wrote ���O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!���. I doubt it.  Most of us don���t much like it when we find out how we really appear to others. There is a fine scene in C.S.Lewis���s ���Voyage of the Dawn Treader��� when one of the characters discovers to her considerable surprise what this means in practice.

 

But it is one of the gifts of minor celebrity (another being a need to behave better in public, lest you are observed, monitored and reported to social media). And you are given it whether you wanted it or not, and whether you expected it or not.

 

I suppose it is possible for a human being to be so self-contained, incurious and self-assured that he never watches himself or herself on YouTube, and never searches for himself or herself on Google. I am not such a person.

 

And, after an initial mixture of amazement, mild rage and gratification, I have learned to enjoy it in a way, having long ago been disabused of many false notions of what I look and sound like.

I thought I had seen it all when last week I was alerted to two entries on the internet, abouyt me, which I had previously nevr seen.

 

One was this (not wholly accurate, but who can really complain?) list of alleged quotations by me:

 

 

I link to it here for your delight. I���m not going to spend any time correcting the mistakes.

 

And the other was this from the self-proclaimed ���Rational Wiki���. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Peter_Hitchens

Unlike my actual Wikipedia entry, the ���Rational Wiki��� version is enjoyably, openly hostile to me and my arguments. I find if very useful to see exactly how those who loathe me have managed to misconstrue and misrepresent my arguments while never wholly departing from a factual basis. When my show trial comes, it will be something like this, with the Foucquier-Tinville, Freisler or Vishinsky of the day asking in sarcastic tones ���Citizen Hitchens, did you not write these words ���?���

 

Anyone with any sense can see that it is the work of a wildly-distorted, hopelessly-biased and hostile mind, and so can enjoy it, and work out what I really think without much difficulty.

 

This makes it preferable, in my mind, to the ���official��� Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hitchens

which was once far more extensive but has now been ruthlessly pruned ( see the talk page here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Peter_Hitchens )

to remove almost anything which is sourced from Associated Newspapers (apart, oddly from a hideous 2006 picture of me with a concrete background which makes me look as if I have grown gills, which is beyond doubt an official Mail on Sunday picture taken by an MoS photographer and without doubt  the copyright of Associated Newspapers, and so should not, as I understand Wikipedia rules, be there at all. I assume this has been included to annoy me because I once removed it) .This shying away from Mail on Sunday or Mailonline content is ludicrous in an entry about someone who has worked for Associated Newspapers for 19 years, and most of whose output is published there.   

 

 

It even includes a picture of my late brother, again a bizarre addition, presumably inserted by someone who thinks that I exists only as an adjunct to my sibling.

 

But, having been banned for life from Wikipedia , for sarcasm towards another user, and insubordination to others, self-appointed senior ���editors���, who took his side and, after a wholly one-sided trial in which I was not even allowed to defend myself, I can do nothing about this.

 

As I said at the time, it was, though fundamentally harmless, a hint of what it might be like to live in an actual tyranny. Oddly enough, apart from the immediate powerlessness which was imposed on me once I was accused, and the presumption of guilt, it was the humourless, literal-mindedness of it that was most disturbing. I do hope I shall never be that bad.

PETER HITCHENS: Licence fee? The BBC's real crime is betraying the public it serves...

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday Column

The BBC has just signed its own death certificate by saying it will make many over-75s start paying for their licences again. This is a pity for many reasons. I think the licence fee will just become impossible to collect, and once that happens the BBC will be swept aside by subscription services that charge only those who wish to pay for them.

But the thing that annoys me about it most is that the Corporation will be destroyed by its lavish spending of public money, which isn���t really that bad, when it ought to be destroyed by its betrayal of the public it serves, which is a horrible disgrace.

Not only does it daily break its solemn promise to be fair and unbiased. It has, since the 1960s, sought to spread its anti-gospel of bad language and sexual revolution, and its dislike of traditional Britain.

Some years ago I had two elderly neighbours who were part of the backbone of the country, much like the people who will now have to pay their licence fees. He had worked long hours all his life in the manufacturing industry and lived on a modest pension in the house he had paid for in sweat and worry. She had raised a large brood of successful men and women and was now an active grandmother.

They were churchgoing Christians, patient, tolerant, honest, patriotic, generous and kind. Their conversation was free of crude words. Having grown up in the lost Britain which existed before the 1960s, they were shocked, in a way it is no longer possible to be, by violence and dishonesty. Heaven knows what they would have made of a Tory Cabinet Minister confessing to snorting cocaine.

Yet they appeared to regard the BBC with a sort of reverence. They believed its news bulletins. They assumed that, if it had chosen to broadcast something, it must be fit for human consumption. And so they watched, and listened to, its increasingly coarse and propagandist output, and put up with it.

Of course, this is some time ago now and things weren���t nearly as bad as they are today. But I (a 1960s veteran who lacked so many of the virtues they possessed) was shocked by what they endured.

In some strange way the magic charm of the initials BBC prevented them from experiencing the outrage they would have felt if a person on the street or in a shop had treated them as the Corporation did.

Britain is full of this sort of thing. A useless police force that trades on a reputation it gained 50 years ago, political parties which have hijacked the honourable names of bodies which died long ago, just for example.

And yet people still take them at face value. I sense that this is now coming to an end very fast, and there will be a terrible reckoning when everyone realises just how badly they have been fooled.

 
 

A 'fake' row that could plunge us in to war

One day the letters OPCW could be as well-known as the initials WMD. And for similar reasons. Everyone now knows there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, and the war we fought there was a disastrous crime. But lots of people were fooled. In the modern world the only way to get a democracy into a war is to deceive kind, gentle people into thinking they are acting against an outrage. Sometimes these outrages are faked. Now it may be happening again.

In a strange, toadstool-shaped building in The Hague, a huge row is raging which could one day decide whether the world goes to war or stays at peace. The building is the headquarters of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The row, as far as we can find out through rival leaks, is between some technical experts who doubt that Syria���s tyrant, Bashar Assad, in fact used poison gas in April 2018, and others who believe that he did use such gas at that time.

The OPCW���s political chiefs seem to want very badly to believe that he did. This would suit several of the governments that pay for its existence.

The OPCW is under constant political pressure. Most famously, the current US National Security Adviser, John Bolton, is accused of having openly demanded the resignation of the OPCW���s former chief Jose Bustani in 2002 because they disagreed about Iraq. Mr Bustani declined to go quietly. According to the New Yorker magazine, Mr Bolton ��� then an Under-Secretary of State ��� told the Brazilian diplomat: ���We know you have two sons in New York. We know your daughter is in London. We know where your wife is.��� Mr Bolton denies this, but Mr Bustani stands by it. Soon afterwards American pressure forced Mr Bustani out anyway.

Now, as I wrote here almost a month ago, the OPCW is in turmoil again. A leaked document shows at least one of its expert employees had grave doubts about Assad���s responsibility for the alleged gas attack in Douma in 2018 (I believe there are other dissidents who dare not speak out publicly yet). It casts doubt on the legality of a joint US, British and French missile attack on Syria ��� supposedly in retaliation for this gas attack. Western newspapers and broadcasters, apart from The Mail on Sunday and the Independent, have only just begun to cover this. The French news agency AFP finally noticed it on Thursday.

The BBC, to its lasting shame, has yet to touch it, even though the OPCW���s chief, Fernando Arias, confirmed it on a public stage to the BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner on June 6, in Bratislava of all places. It is all very well being wise after the event over WMD.

This time, could we try to be wise before the event? Public scrutiny of what is happening at the OPCW is vital, now.

 
 

If you were having an election for the leader of a thing called the ���Conservative Party���, wouldn���t it be quite a good idea to have at least one candidate who was an actual conservative? Yet there is not one.

If I were still fool enough to be a supporter or member of this dire, clapped-out organisation, I could not find any reason to vote for any of those placed before us. Many who will vote for Al Johnson know so little of him that they even think he is called Boris which, as I tirelessly point out, is a stage name adopted to make him seem more cuddly and amusing than he is. The real Al Johnson was on display at his press conference ��� dull, constrained by ambition into meaningless slogans and the jokey avoidance of questions.

He is disappointingly different from the stage comedian so many think they love. As it happens, I have always quite liked him, but I wouldn���t ask him to look after my cat for a weekend, let alone put him in charge of a medium-sized nuclear power.

 
 

Our lawless nation needs real US police

My experience of American police forces is that they still have a lot of the features ours have lost. Many are small and local so they take care to serve the public rather than themselves. They���re unlikely to arrest you if you defend your home against burglars. In New York City they have made serious efforts to enforce small laws, on the correct theory that if you do that, the bad people are deterred and the big laws are obeyed.

So what a treat it could have been to have a TV drama about a US police chief trying to bring such methods back to a lawless English town. Instead, we get Wild Bill, a silly, pointless farce starring and wasting that fine actor, Rob Lowe, pictured in the show, centre left.

Such a missed opportunity.

 
 

The alleged comedienne Jo Brand should not be prosecuted or investigated by the police for her crass remarks about battery acid. But she should be asked, persistently, on a public stage, to say out loud what she would have done to, and said about, a Right-wing person who had said anything equally moronic.  

 

 

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Some Thoughts on The 'Morning After' Pill

New figures this morning show more abortions than ever. I���m not proposing a discussion on this. We all know what we think by now. But it is worth noting what is happening as a result of the laws we seem to have agreed to maintain.

 

As one report said: ���Some 200,608 abortions were carried out on women living in England and Wales last year ��� a 4 per cent rise on 2017. Fifty-six per cent of the women had already had at least one child or stillbirth. In 2008 the figure was 48 per cent.���

 

 

All kinds of attempts have been and will be made to blame this figure on try cuts, or some such. Well, yes, of course that;s the reason.

But, fascinatingly, the figures showed something else too. The same report stated:  ���It might be easy to assume that the rise in abortions is fuelled by unwanted pregnancies among the young but it is older women who are driving it. The potential reasons for this are many, from changes in child benefits to career and mortgage pressures.

 

���Abortion rates have plummeted among teenagers. Rates in under-16s are less than a third of their 2008 level and in 16 and 17-year-olds have more than halved.

 

���It is attributed to the drive to improve sex education and provide easier access to contraception������

 

Well, attribute it how you like. But the re;lentlless iupward curve in under-age pregnancies, which we all grew used to from the 1950s onwards, has definitely come to an end/.

 

Some say this is the result of the sex-education which has bene intensively provided since long before the downturn. Oddly, this doesn���t seem to prevent continuing high rates of sexually transmitted disease among the same age group.

 

So the second explanation, so-called ���easier access to contraception��� might have something to do with it. Or, more accurately, the increasing availability of the ���morning after pill��� For many years before the downturn, contraception was plentifully available and more or less pressed upon the young at easily accessible clinics and even in schools. I recently got into a Twitter argument when I suggested that the morning after pill was not exactly contraception, but something subtly and importantly different (which is why I think it has succeeded where contraception failed).

 

Hence my link to this interesting (though obviously partial) discussion of exactly what the morning after pill is and does.

 

https://righttolife.org.uk/news/just-say-oui-informed-debate-emergency-contraception/

 

 

It is perhaps neither as simple nor as morally straightforward as many believe.

 

By the way, some time ago I tried and completely failed to obtain figures on the numbers of morning after pills distributed to teenagers in this country, over the past 15 years or so, or indeed on its use in general since it came into common use around 2002. There is this, frankly incredible, survey

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4995725/

which caused me to make futile inquiries of the manufacturers to see if they could give me figures for production, which they somehow couldn't.

If anyone has any idea where these are to be found, I���d be most grateful.

 

But in the USA there is some information.  https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db112.htm

Which seems to suggest a revolution almost as great as that caused by the introduction of the original contraceptive pill nearly 50 years before.

 

This would not have been possible without a moral revolution as well. People will sooner or later have to start coping that we have undergone such a revolution, and that it has far wider implications for our attitude towards life itself than the freedom to abort unborn babies.

 

The implications, vast as mountains, are only beginning to emerge from the thick clouds which have obscured them from the sight of the heedless and complacent for so long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Australia's Radio National takes an intelligent interest in my recent book 'The Phoney Victory'

...in this interview

 

 

 

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/religionandethicsreport/the-phoney-victory/11180854

which is more than can be said for the BBC or any major British media.  Curious how this awkward subject still cannot be addressed. 

PETER HITCHENS: Preening politicians should have been banned from EVERY D-Day event

This is Peter Hitchens���s Mail on Sunday column

Politicians start the wars which ordinary men then have to finish. They should be made to dig and tend the graves they cause, not be allowed to preen themselves over the sacrifices of others.

It was not the politicians who, shaking with fear and green with sea-sickness, had to leap into freezing, churning waves and be torn to pieces by machine gun bullets. They are seldom present for these moments.

Who, having seen it, can forget Philip Zec���s great cartoon (I apologise for originally calling him Donald, another distinguished Zec) published on VE Day at the end of the last war? It depicts a soldier, with one badly wounded arm in a sling and his head bandaged, his face haggard and exhausted, climbing up from a landscape of ruins and corpses beneath a menacing sky.

He holds a wreath labelled ���Victory And Peace In Europe��� and he says, like a father to thoughtless children, ���Here you are. Don���t lose it again!���

It annoyed me when I first saw it in the 1960s. I had not then seen what bullets and bombs can do. I was still full of the idealised picture of war with which my blessed, safe generation grew up. I hadn���t even noticed my own father���s grumpy unwillingness to say much about the face of battle, which he had seen ��� the enemy survivors left to drown, the relentless fear and squalor of convoy work. I know now.

But as I watched the 75th anniversary of D-Day unfold, it angered me more and more that it provided a stage on which political leaders could parade. One of these, President Trump, obtained a medical exemption which kept him out of the Vietnam War.

Another, Mrs Theresa May, has followed policies in Syria (as has Mr Trump) which could yet drag this country into a new interminable Middle East conflict, on the basis of dubious and unproven claims.

She is keen on unproven claims, having also voted consistently for the mad Iraq War in 2003. Whatever were they doing in Normandy, where thousands of dutiful men died or were horribly wounded, simply to win back what should never have been lost in the first place? Only our deluded and vain political class could have created such a mess.

Oh, and one other thing. Alongside the modest and self-effacing survivors of that battle, we should have invited a few dozen veterans of the Red Army whose sacrifices were, if anything, even greater (and whose political leaders were, and are, even less appealing than ours).

When I lived in Moscow it was my privilege, on Victory Day each May, to see these grizzled, barrel-chested old men who had fought all the way to Berlin, getting their medals out, and having a little more vodka than might have been good for them.

There must be a few of them left, though Russian lifespans are harsher and shorter than ours. It would not have taken much trouble or expense to convey them to Bayeux to stand alongside their British and American equivalents.

It was stupid of us to forget them, as it is stupid of us to forget the titanic battles they fought, battles which broke the German Army and which were larger and fiercer even than the Normandy landings.

Vladimir Putin is not their fault, any more than Theresa May is the fault of the men of D-Day.

 

Peddling propaganda on primetime TV

Complaining to the politically correct Ofcom regulator about the politically correct BBC is bit like asking Cherie Booth QC to prosecute Anthony Blair WMD for war crimes.

Even so, and with no very great hope of success, I have gone to Ofcom about the BBC���s unbalanced promotion of pro-abortion arguments in its supposedly cosy drama Call The Midwife, most recently in an episode last February, set in 1964.

Over months of correspondence with the Corporation, I have realised that it is not even bothering to pretend that the programme was fair or balanced. Its first argument is that bias matters less in fiction than in current affairs. This is plainly the opposite of the truth. Everyone remembers 1960s propaganda dramas like Cathy Come Home. The documentaries of the time are forgotten.

Its second point is that balance does not have to be achieved in a single episode. Well, all right. But I have repeatedly asked for any example of a BBC drama (or indeed anything else on the BBC) in which the anti-abortion case has been made with the same force. No reply has come.

But, as it happens, there was another pro-abortion storyline in Call The Midwife in February 2013. Both episodes accepted the view that killing the unborn child was the only solution to an unwanted baby, as if adoption had never been heard of. Both seemed ignorant of the fact that ���therapeutic��� abortion was, in fact, legal in England under strict conditions before the current law came into force in 1967.

Their position also isn���t helped by the fact that the veteran campaigner for liberalised abortion, Diane Munday, has revealed in the Guardian that the episode���s makers sought her advice. I have established that they did not consult any opponent of liberalisation. A group of pro-abortion organisations are also embarrassingly pleased with the series, in a way that makes it impossible to pretend that it is fair or impartial.

They wrote to the BBC to say:���Call The Midwife has repeatedly handled this issue extremely sensitively and courageously.��� And the Left-wing magazine Private Eye noted: ���Call The Midwife has lately��� become a series of liberal editorials on medical and social issues.��� I suspect the BBC has decided that, in Britain, abortion simply is not a controversy any more, and those who are uncomfortable about its widespread use as a form of contraception are marginal and forgotten.
Given what is happening in the USA just now, I wonder how long that belief can survive. Over to you, Ofcom.

 

Did Donald's double hobnob with Her Majesty?

I have written before about the possibility that Donald Trump uses body doubles for meetings with British political figures. Why attend all these boring functions if you���d rather be at home watching Fox News?

The tie-less Trump in a famous pose with Nigel Farage didn���t look quite like the real thing to me. And why would he bother? Given that the President often speaks out of the back of his neck and says things that later have to be, er, adjusted, the double can say what he likes, too.

Now another curious event has backed up my suspicions. The Tory leadership candidate Michael Gove, interviewed Mr Trump for a whole hour for an unpopular newspaper back in 2017. He was also reintroduced to him, wearing a kilt, at the Buckingham Palace banquet on Monday. But Mr Trump, asked on Tuesday for his views of Tory leadership campaigners, said vaguely, ���I don���t know Michael. Would he do a good job?���

It may be that Mr Gove has met the real Trump, and it is the body double who gives the press conferences and dines on halibut with the Queen, while the President snaffles a cheeseburger elsewhere.

For the first time in many years, the BBC���s Reith Lectures are an event rather than a failed publicity stunt. The retired Supreme Court Judge Jonathan Sumption is witty and bitingly intelligent, understands how the world really works and, on Tuesday, delivered a tremendous attack on the operation of the human rights industry and the way it has given ���a priestly caste��� of unaccountable judges far too much arbitrary power to impose their liberal opinions on the rest of us.

It is a huge bomb under the whole thing. Coming from such a person, it ought to be devastating. But will anyone act?

 

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Why You Should Listen to the 2019 Reith Lectures

I thought I would try to explain here just why I am so keen on the current series of Reith lectures by Jonathan Sumption. There have now been four, the latest being a clever examination of the profound difference between the US and British constitutions. This fourth lecture, by the way, pays too little attention to the use of so-called ���Private Members��� Bills���, in fact covertly backed by government grants of time and drafting assistance, to enact legal changes that have never been put to the voters, and never will be (E.g. the abolition of the death penalty, and the creation of abortion on demand) .

 

These can be read or listened to here:

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00057m8

 

And I will come to the third lecture, on the subject of Human Rights, which is most interesting, but there is much more to them than that. The level of thought and intelligence on display is really quite unusual. Dammit, the man actually thinks about what he says.  Lord Sumption, born in 1948, is a historian first and a lawyer second, and was educated at Eton and Oxford, before the most frightful effects of the 1960s revolution had undone education in this country, and in the era when the fiercely rigorous and meritocratic Grammar Schools were keeping the Public Schools honest. Now the big private schools just have to amble along, plucking flowers from the hedgerows,  and their pupils will score top grades in every devalued exam there is. .

 

The first lecture, entitled ���Law���s Expanding Empire��� was an unusual admission that the law and the courts have in recent times invaded areas of life they previously stayed out of. This is a huge change and , though Lord Sumption has yet to note the source of much of it - the insane licensing by Margaret Thatcher and John Major  of no-win, no fee��� lawsuits in this country-  I am still hoping that he will. All emphases are mine

 

 

He says ���My subject, in these lectures, is the place of law in public life. The twin themes that I want to explore are the decline of politics and the rise of law to fill the void. What ought to be the role of law in a representative democracy like ours? Is there too much law? Is there, perhaps, too little? Do judges have too much power?

 

He then set out some of these growths ���In a single year, ending in May 2010, more than 700 new criminal offences were created, three-quarters of them by government regulation. Now that was, admittedly, a bumper year but the rate of increase continues to be high. On top of that, there is the relentless output of judgments of the Courts, many of them on subjects which were hardly touched by law a century ago. The powers of the Family Courts now extend to every aspect of the wellbeing of children, which once belonged to the enclosed domain of the home. Complex codes of law enforced by specialised tribunals regulates the world of employment. An elaborate system of administrative law, largely created by judges since the 1960s, governs most aspects of the relations between government and the citizen. The special areas that were once thought to be outside the purview of the Courts, such as foreign policy, the conduct of overseas military operations and the other prerogative powers of the State, have all, one by one, yielded to the power of judges. Above all, since 2000, a code of legally enforceable human rights has opened up vast new areas to judicial regulation. The impact of these changes can be gauged by the growth of the legal profession. In 1911 there was one solicitor in England for every 3000 inhabitants. Just over a century later, there is about one in 400, a sevenfold increase.���

 

 

Later he noted ���The law regulated religious worship until the 18th century. It discriminated between different religious denominations until the 19th century. It regulated private and consensual sexual relations until quite recently. Homosexual acts were criminal until 1967. Today the law has almost entirely withdrawn from all of these areas. Indeed, it���s moved to the opposite extreme and banned the discrimination that was once compulsory. Yet, in other respects, we have moved back to the much older idea that law exists to impose conformity. We live in a censorious age, more so perhaps than at any time since the evangelical movement transformed the moral sensibilities of the Victorians. Liberal voices in England, in Victorian Britain, like John Stuart Mill, were already protesting against the implications for personal liberty. Law, Mill argued, exists to protect us from harm and not to recruit us to moral conformity. Yet, today, a hectoring press can discharge an avalanche of public scorn and abuse on anybody who steps out of line. Social media encourage a resort to easy answers and generate a powerful herd instinct which suppresses, not just dissent but even doubt and nuance. Public and even private solecisms can destroy a person���s career. Advertisers pressurise editors not to publish controversial pieces and editors can be sacked for persisting. Student organisations can prevent unorthodox speakers from being heard. These things have made the pressure to conform far more intense than it ever was in Mill���s day.���

 

He warns : ���We have made a leviathan of the State, expanding and harnessing its power in order to reduce the risks that threaten our wellbeing. The 17th century may have abolished absolute monarchy but the 20th century created absolute democracy in its place.���

 

In his second lecture ���In Praise of Politics���, Lord Sumption says this obvious but seldom-recognised thing.

 

���Democracies operate on the implicit basis that although the majority has authorised policies which a minority deplores, these differences are transcended by their common acceptance of the legitimacy of its decision-making processes. Self-evidently, majority rule is the basic principle of democracy but that only means that a majority is enough to authorise the State���s acts. It isn���t enough to make them legitimate. That is because majority rule is no more than a rule of decision. It does nothing to accommodate our differences, it simply restates them in numerical terms. A democracy cannot operate on the basis that a bare majority takes a hundred percent of the political spoils. If it did, it would harbour large and permanently disaffected groups in their midst who had no common bonds to transcend their differences with the majority. A State based on that principle would quickly cease to be a political community at all. That is why all democracies have evolved methods of limiting or diluting the power of majorities. I���m going to talk about two of them. They are, really, the only two that matter. One of them is representative politics and the other is law.���

 

And here we come to the problem created by ���Human Rights��� charters, such as the European Convention, especially article 8, ��� ���Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence���  and the 14th Amendment to the U.S Constitution as now interpreted, especially its supposed provisions on ���privacy���. Both have been tortured into the basis of all kinds of social liberalism, despite the fact that it merely says ���Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.���

 

It is at least arguable that these documents have absolutely no bearing on such issues as abortion and same sex marriage. But even if they have, why should they confer the particular ���rights in such matters which have been awarded by the courts.

 

Sumption asks : ���What is the source, independent of popular endorsement, which enables us to identify some rights as so fundamental that they must not be removed or limited by political decision?

 

My simple answer to this question is that there is no such source and that these alleged rights do not exist , see https://www.theylj.co.uk/human-rights-do-not-exist/

 

Sumption, as readers or listens will gather, will not go quite that far, at least explicitly. He has some fun showing that judges have conjured much of the new human rights law out of thin air.  But in fact he says something almost equally dangerous, part of which I am reluctant to quote for fear of breaching Godwin���s Law.

 

He first of all notes that it is not really the job of judges to make such decisions in a free country ���Judges exist to apply the law. It is the business of citizens and their representatives to decide what the law ought to be. Many of the issues thrown up by the convention are not even issues between the state and the individual. They are really issues between different groups of citizens. This applies particularly to major social or moral issues, such as abortion, fetal tissue research or medically assisted suicide, about which opinion is often deeply divided. In a democracy, the appropriate way of resolving such disagreements is through the political process.���

 

He continues by asking

 

���Who is to decide what is necessary in a democratic society, or what purposes are legitimate, or what the prevention of crime, or public health, or the economic wellbeing of society requires, or what is a fair balance between the individual and the community? These are all intensely political questions. Yet, the convention reclassifies them as questions of law, thus reforming them from the realm of democratic decision making and referring them instead to national and international courts.���

 

And then comes this great thumping kick in the pants for liberal judges who wish to use the courts to impose their own personal liberalism on the country:

 

���Democracy, in its traditional sense, is a fragile construct. It is extremely vulnerable to the idea that one���s own values are so obviously urgent and right that the means by which one gets them adopted don���t matter. That is one reason why it exists in only a minority of states. Even in those states it is of relatively recent origin and its basic premises are under challenge by the advocates of various value-based systems.

 

���One of these is a system of lawbased decision making which would entrench a broad range of liberal principles as the constitutional basis of the state. Democratic choice would be impotent to remove or limit them without the authority of courts of law. Now, this is a model in which many lawyers ardently believe. The essential objection to it is that it is conceptually no different from the claim of communism, fascism, monarchism, Catholicism, Islamism and all the other great isms that have historically claimed a monopoly of legitimate political discourse on the ground that its advocates considered themselves to be obviously right. But other models are possible. One can believe in rights without wanting to remove them from the democratic arena by placing them under the exclusive jurisdiction of a priestly caste of judges. One can believe that one���s fellow citizens ought to choose liberal values without wanting to impose them.

Well, that���s the sort of liberalism I can get along with. I noted, after hearing this, that I wasn���t the only person who had noticed it. Jenni Russell, one of the smartest left-wing commentators in the business, wrote an article in ���The Times��� (alas, behind a paywall) in which she said ���On Tuesday morning I listened to a radio lecture and changed my mind on a key subject. This doesn't happen much, to any of us. Evidence shows once we have an opinion we tend to stick to it. Life is too dense and complicated for us to spend time reviewing our attitudes or researching each one. But this lecture made me realise I'd jumped to a conclusion from false assumptions. Sadly this may not be an isolated case.

���The title of the lecture was so dull and worthy that I'd never have tuned in unless by accident, and because the alternatives were worse. I promise it's better than it sounds. Human Rights and Wrongs was one of this year's Reith Lectures by the former Supreme Court justice Jonathan Sumption. It was an eloquent attack on the role of the European Convention on Human Rights in British law, and an argument for withdrawing or distancing ourselves from the judgments made by the court in Strasbourg, of which our courts must take account.���

 

Judge for yourself whether she got this right. But words which can make you think are rare, and all this is available to us, uninterrupted by ignorant presenters or silly music, jingles or advertisements, quite free of charge, on the wireless, for which you don���t need a licence. Just for a few minutes a week, you can feel a bit proud to be British.