Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 85
June 12, 2019
June 11, 2019
A Discussion about Politicians, Drugs and Marriage on the BBC Radio 2 Jeremy Vine Programme
A discussion about the Michael Gove issue on the Jeremy Vine programme (begins at 7.20 minutes)
In what way does it matter?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0005v8s
June 10, 2019
Our Elite is Corrupted by Drugs
Nobody will now be able to get the picture out of their head of the Right Honourable Michael Gove, Cabinet Minister, intellectual and parliamentarian, perhaps our next Premier, snorting cocaine up his nostrils at some louche London gathering.
In the background his heedless fellow-guests are braying and giggling. Thousands of miles away, the trade they have helped to finance is destroying lives by the hundred. But the menace is close at hand as well. In the dark streets not far away, the same trade is spreading like a stain, unrestrained by police and courts who long ago lost the will to fight it.
And why did they lose the will? Because they take their signals from above, and they know, in the police force and the prosecution service, and on the magistrates��� bench, that their modern masters don���t want too much fuss about drugs. For where might it end? If the drug laws were enforced, who knows who else might be treading the fool���s parade in the exercise yards of Her Majesty���s��� Prisons ��� not just Cabinet Ministers and Privy Counsellors, but police chiefs, judges, bishops, school heads, University professors, senior civil servants, newspaper editors and BBC executives.
So rather than see that, let us be thoroughly egalitarian and just let everyone off.
I have to say Mr Gove���s confession comes as no great surprise to me. Our entire political and media elite, across all major parties, have long been corrupted by drug abuse. I am not talking about the teenage follies they sometimes confess to. Legions of them have taken illegal drugs far more recently than they care to admit, and even more of them idiotically allow their teenage children to do so.
Since I was at University in the early 1970s, where I was rare in refusing to have anything to do with drugs, I have known that this country���s educated elite is trapped in this corruption.
But drug corruption is a new and special version of the plague. It is enforced by fear, not money. All of these elite bohemians know that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of witnesses to their open criminal behaviour. By the nature of the crime, they probably cannot remember all the occasions when they broke the law.
So even if they grow up and realise how stupid they have been, they dare not act seriously against the drugs menace, in case they are exposed as hypocrites by a forgotten voice from the past. Mr Gove was Secretary of State for Justice from 2015 to 2016. If proposals for proper enforcement of drug laws had come before the Cabinet he would have known as he studied them that he had, as an adult, committed the offence of possession of a Class A drug. For this crime he would have been open to a sentence of up to 7 years in one of the prisons for which he was responsible. Knowing that, how could he have enthusiastically supported any initiative that would have genuinely made it more likely that drug abusers would go to prison?
That is why I give one faint cheer for Mr Gove���s confession. He has outed himself and so cannot be blackmailed on this issue in future, though he can and will be jeered at till the end of his days. But I am reserving the other two cheers for later. He will not get them from me unless and until he declares that he is in favour of properly enforcing the drug laws he once so carelessly broke.
By that, I don���t mean just saying he doesn���t favour getting rid of the existing laws, as he notably did in ���The Times��� towards the end of his White Powder period in 1999. As those laws are not enforced and have not been enforced for decades, and as he knows that perfectly well from personal experience, such a stance is empty and meaningless.
If he ever suggests in public that the government is enforcing the drug laws, then I shall remind him as noisily as possible that he knows directly that this is complete rubbish. If they were enforcing them, then his career would have been ruined and ended 20 years ago.
If he ever speaks of ���prohibition��� or claims that the existing laws are ruining young lives by ���criminalising��� users, I shall point out that he knows perfectly well that this is a flat lie. The young lives are being ruined because children at school have rightly noticed that the drug laws are not enforced. As a result, many of them have bought and smoked cannabis and become irreversibly mentally ill.
And older lives are being ruined too; first because these mentally ill young people are also often violent, and second because even where they are not, their families must look after them for the rest of their lives.
It is what Mr Gove does next that is decisive. Politicians quite often reveal their past drug use solely to damage and weaken the drug laws. In October 2000, a whole platoon of nonentities from the then Tory Shadow Cabinet confessed to youthful marijuana smoking. This was an organised effort to undermine an attempt by the Shadow Home Secretary, Ann Widdecombe, to toughen the penalties for cannabis possession. It worked. Her plan was destroyed. The incident effectively put an end to her political career. Real opposition to drugs was not wanted in the new Blairite Tory Party.
It also prepared the Tory Party for the reign of David Cameron. Mr Cameron���s lone significant political act as an MP, before he became Tory leader, had been to back a Home Affairs Committee report calling for the weakening of the drug laws. Why was he so keen on this dangerous policy? We can only
guess. He has always refused to answer questions about his own drug use, inventing a rule that politicians are entitled to a private past. Eventually, those who still wanted to know were shushed into silence as if the issue was not important any more, or it was rude to ask.
He got away with this, as Michael Gove will get away with his confession, because the Conservative Party is not in fact conservative, and probably never was. Even on issues like this, where its supporters long for some sort of resolve and firmness, it long ago went as soft inside as an over-ripe pear. Like all the other parties it puts individual selfishness far above the general good. Whichever way they turn, in the hope of finding some sort of rescue from lawlessness and disorder, those who once hoped for these things form the Tory Party see nothing but surrender and weakness.
June 9, 2019
PETER HITCHENS: Preening politicians should have been banned from EVERY D-Day event
This is Peter Hitchens��� Mail on Sunday colum
n
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 Donald Zec���s great cartoon 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?
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
June 7, 2019
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.
June 6, 2019
Complaining to OFCOM about the BBC is like complaining to Cherie Booth QC about Anthony Blair WMD . But I try
I have just referred to OFCOM my longstanding complaint (begun in February and pursued through every level of the BBC���s system for ignoring complaints) against the BBC���s pro-abortion bias in the drama series ���Call The Midwife���.
I have no very great hope of success. OFCOM is if anything even more politically correct than the BBC, so it is a bit like asking Cherie Booth QC to take a case against Anthony Blair WMD.
But it would be lazy of me not at least to test this procedure. How can I call for a proper impartial system for handling complaints about BBC bias, if I cannot demonstrate directly that the existing system is inadequate?
I have so far failed in in one other complaint to OFCOM, about bias in the BBC���s reporting of the Syrian conflict. But in that case, the BBC befuddled OFCOM by arguing that it was quite all right to suppress an important truth, because, well, the Russians are bad and the Syrians are guilty even if the case against them has not been proved.
See my account of the breach
And the BBC���s response :
���Thank you for your email of 1 May [2018] to the Executive Complaints Unit relating to coverage of discussions at the United Nations about Syria. I���m sorry you were not satisfied with the response you received when you first raised this matter with the BBC. I���ve considered your complaint against the BBC���s Editorial Guidelines on Accuracy, cited in your complaint. You do not specify the exact time of broadcast but for the purposes of my reply I have listened to the Radio 4 bulletin summary at 0630 and the main bulletin at 0700 where the story was one of the lead items.
You have complained that the use of the phrase Russia has rejected calls for an independent inquiry into the alleged gas attack at Douma in Syria misrepresented the true position and as such was a breach of the BBC Editorial Standards. Your argument, as I understand it, is that Russia was in fact calling for such an inquiry itself, and BBC News should have highlighted this. In coming to a decision I have looked at the earlier responses, and examined, in so far as it is possible, original source material for the events at the United Nations.
My starting point is that the requirement under the BBC Guidelines is for due accuracy. In practice this obliges the BBC not to materially mislead audiences, but also accepts that context matters. A short bulletin or headline cannot be expected to go into the depth of a newspaper or online article and by definition will only be a precis of events. The omission of a particular issue or opinion will not necessarily represent a breach of standards.
With this in mind, my understanding is that a total of three resolutions were discussed at the UN Security Council. The first, from the United States, proposed the re-establishment of a joint mechanism to investigate the attack in Douma, the work to be divided between a UN team and Inspectors from the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons; the second, sponsored by Russia, also proposed an investigation but
with the key difference that any apportioning of blame would remain in the hands of the members of the UN Security Council; a third resolution, also brought forward by Russia, largely confined itself to condemnation of the use of chemical weapons. All three failed to win sufficient support to be carried by the Security Council.
The 0630 bulletin summarised events as follows:
In bitter exchanges at the UN, Syria���s main ally Russia rejected America���s call for an independent investigation into the attack saying it had been staged in order to justify the use of force against a sovereign state.
The headline at 0700 simply stated that Russia had rejected calls for an independent inquiry but the main bulletin that followed contained this analysis.
The United States wants a new inquiry that will determine responsibility for the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Russia has blocked similar council efforts in the past to protect its ally from punishment and would be likely to veto any future attempts.
This does not seem to me an unfair conclusion to draw. As previously indicated the key difference between the US and Russian proposals rested with who would have the final authority to apportion blame. The Russian proposals left this with the UN Security Council of which Russia is of course a member, and where it has a veto. The records show it has used this veto twelve times to block action against its Syrian ally. Furthermore the Russian Government appeared to pre-empt the findings of any such inquiry by asserting the reports were bogus and there was no evidence a gas attack has taken place. It is therefore difficult to see how an inquiry working within the parameters set by the Russian resolution would have been independent in any meaningful sense of the word. By contrast an inquiry given the powers to investigate, report and come to its own conclusions would have fulfilled that remit.
It is legitimate for BBC journalists to make their own assessment of the facts, irrespective of official documentation, provided that is done with a due regard for accuracy and impartiality. And whilst greater context might always be useful, I do not believe it was necessary to discuss the intricacies of the competing resolutions in a short news bulletin. The essence of the story ��� of escalating tension between Russia and the United States and the growing likelihood of direct US military action - was conveyed to listeners, and then elaborated upon elsewhere on Today that morning.
For these reasons, and having carefully considered the evidence, I do not think you have identified a significant breach of BBC policies or standards and so am in agreement with the decision by Audience Services not to respond further to your complaint. This will be the BBC���s final word on this matter unless we see grounds for modifying it in light of any comments you may wish to make. If you do wish to respond to this finding, I would be grateful if you could send your comments to me by 13 June.���
I did reply:
Dear Mr Xxxxxx
Thank you for your letter of 31 May. You say that I do not specify the times of the suppressio veri you repeatedly broadcast on 10th April. I did in fact do so in my initial complaint. The online form asks the complainant to specify the time of broadcast, and I did as requested, to the minute. I assumed this would be recorded by you. I am sure you can obtain this from your files, but I seem to recall the suppressio veri was transmitted twice around 7.00 a.m. on 10th April. The text of my complaint makes clear that I am referring *both* to the remark by one of the presenters and to the news bulletin. For some reason you seem to be unaware of this, and refer only to one of these instances. So I reproduce below the wording of my original complaint:
On the BBC R4 Today programme, the presenter John Humphrys said 'Russia has rejected calls for an independent inquiry' (into the alleged gas attack at Douma, Syria). The newsreader, Susan Rae (?), then repeated the assertion, saying Russia had 'rejected Washington's call for an independent investigation'.
I then showed that this was clearly not in accordance with easily checkable facts, to which any competent journalist had access. The offence is even worse in the BBC which has a correspondent in New York, who presumably filed a truthful and full report and who could in any case could have been consulted.
Lacking my own New York correspondent, I still ascertained that:
The UN's own website shows https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/sc13288.doc.htm
that the Russian Federation had proposed a motion at the Security Council . The UN says: 'By the terms of that text, the Council would have established a United Nations *independent mechanism of investigation* (my emphasis, PH), also for an initial period of one year, and urged it to fully ensure a truly impartial, independent, professional and credible way to conduct its investigation.
It would have further directed the mechanism to make full use of all credible, verified and corroborated evidence collected by the OPCW fact-finding mission, while also directing it to collect and examine additional information and sources not obtained or prepared by the mission, including all information provided by the Government of Syria and others on the activities of non-State actors.'
This is quite categorical. It shows that the Russian Federation called for an inquiry into the attack, and stipulated that it should be impartial and independent.
Now, if you were in a car crash in which liability was disputed, and the other party called for an independent inquiry into it by his own insurance company, and you rejected that and said you would accept only an inquiry by an arbitrator independent of the insurer (or indeed if you asked for an independent inquiry by your own insurer), it would be untrue for the other party to say to any third party that you had ���rejected calls for an independent inquiry���. You would be justifiably cross. Such a claim would damage you in the eyes of all right-thinking people because it would make it look as if you had something to hide, and so something to fear from an independent inquiry, when the truth was that you feared that the other party���s proposed inquiry might be biased against you, and so sought a different kind of independent inquiry. The other party, and anyone else who repeated his claim, would be engaging in suppressio veri, a recognised form of lying by omission of significant truth, just as bad as suggestio falsi, the open expression of something the speaker knows to be an untruth. This is the reason for the court oath���s specific demand that the witness tells ���the whole truth���, so making suppression of significant facts in a trial perjury in law; and it was the whole truth that the BBC did not tell. The fact that it was not in a courtroom does not excuse it. It simply means it is a wrong action, rather than an actual crime.
And this is exactly what your bulletin scriptwriter did, and what Mr XXXXXX did. Both of them may have been poorly informed and so not fully responsible for broadcasting this grave untruth, deeply prejudicial to a good public understanding of a dangerous and volatile conflict.
But that is an internal matter for you. I am concerned with the simple fact that you broadcast an important untruth.
My argument is not, as you oddly say, that BBC News should have ���highlighted��� the fact that Russia called for an independent inquiry. What BBC news highlights is none of my business.
My complaint is that BBC News, if it was going to deal with the matter of the inquiry at all, should have been truthful about it. It should have at the very least mentioned the important fact that Russia was also calling for an independent inquiry. It should therefore not have broadcast words in a form which suppressed the important truth that Russia was also calling for an independent inquiry. Instead, it repeatedly gave the opposite impression, namely that Russia and its ally. Syria, had something to hide and would therefore fear such an inquiry.
It might have chosen to say nothing at all about the matter. But as soon as it concerned itself with the question of an independent inquiry into events at Douma, it was morally bound, by paragraph 6 of its Charter and section 3 of its guidelines as quoted in my original complaint, to tell the whole truth, namely that both major parties at the UN Security Council had called for inquiries which they regarded as independent.
You had no authority to conclude or rule that the mechanism which the USA and its allies supported was any more or less independent than the one the Russian Federation supported. To do so would have been an act of partiality. Even if you had decided you were justified in doing so, you would have been required to mention both competing proposals before taking sides, for how else could such a judgement have been a) necessary and b) made?
As a newspaper journalist and frequent broadcaster I understand the need for brevity. I also understand that the need for brevity is never an excuse for suppressing a significant part of the truth. It is comically impossible to suggest that, in the three hours of the Today programme, there was no time to mention the Russian Federation���s motion.
The later bulletin which you quote actually adds to the offence, and I am grateful to you for pointing it out to me. It contentiously and prejudicially attributes a motive to the Russian Federation for its veto of the continued existence of the Joint Investigative Mechanism. It states as a fact that this Russian action was taken ���to protect its ally from punishment���. But punishment surely only follows a finding of guilt. Russia���s objections to the JIM (which are at least arguably justified by a reading of the JIM report and the OPCW report on which it was based) was that it made a finding of guilt against Syria in Khan Sheykhoun, without even visiting the site, without a reliable chain of custody for material evidence, and so without anything resembling adequate objective proof (by any serious standard) of such guilt. The phrase ���to protect its ally from punishment��� presumes a guilt that has never been shown (as you also do in your unfortunately partial account of this large and complex controversy). I���d love to have this argument with you, as I have spent much of my life over the past couple of years analysing this stuff, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the matter in hand). That is a clear departure from both impartiality and accuracy.
By the way, you adduce the fact that Russia has used its veto frequently to protect an ally, as if this were somehow evidence of ill intention. But the USA likewise uses its veto to protect allies, probably rather more often that Russia does. As for the Russian government appearing to pre-empt the inquiry, surely the governments of the USA, France and Britain pre-empted it rather more by launching missiles at Syria, an action illegal under the UN Charter, which your shockingly poor journalism made much easier. You see why this matters?
You spend an awful lot of space in your letter not dealing with the simple and indisputable point of my complaint,that you failed to tell the whole truth when it mattered that you did, and so gave your listeners a gravely false impression of significant events. You spend even more space informing me of things I already know quite well, namely what actually happened at the UN Security Council that day and the nature of the argument. The problem with this lengthy self-justification is that, if they had had to rely on the BBC���s coverage of these events, nobody would have known anything at all about the controversy which you explain to me at such length.
On this occasion, you are wholly in the wrong, not as a matter of opinion but as a matter of demonstrable fact. You suppressed an important part of the truth about a major issue on a major programme, at a time of international tension where your behaviour might damage the prospects of peace between nations. I know you are accustomed to being judge and jury in your own cause and disinclined to take complaints seriously. But I do think on this occasion you might be a little less hubristic. I assume you have access to my original complaints. If not, then please let me know and I will send copies of them to you.
Sincerely,���
Well, as you can imagine, I got no satisfactory response to that, but I still feel it is important to make these points properly, and to persist . Apart from anything else, it hones the mind, brings the dispute into sharp factual and logical focus and improves my ability to argue such cases in future. Anyway, I am not discouraged, and keep going in the hope that my experiences will help to bring about the reforms of the BBC which are in my view vital if it is to survive at all.
Here are details of the current complaint against the drama series 'Call the Midwife', which I have now referred to OFCOM.
29 March 2019
30th March 2019
My final response from the BBC's 'Executive Complaints Unit' took this form:
'Dear Mr Hitchens
Call the Midwife, BBC1, 3 February 2019
Having now looked into your complaint about the storyline on abortion in this programme, which you considered to have breached the BBC���s guidelines on Impartiality, I���m afraid I don���t agree that it did.
As set out in previous replies, these guidelines allow that there is a different expectation for the coverage of controversial issues in drama programmes as compared to factual output and, in particular, news. They also allow that a balance of views is not compulsory within individual pieces of output, but can be achieved over time and a range of output. They talk of a requirement for due impartiality that is adequate and appropriate to the output and reflects the weight of opinion, and say that ���we exercise our editorial freedom to produce content about any subject, at any point on the spectrum of debate, as long as there are good editorial reasons for doing so���.
As you know, this episode of Call the Midwife was set in 1964, some three years before abortion was legalised in England, Scotland and Wales under the Abortion Act of 1967. In a drama that reflects many of the social issues of the era in which it is set I can see an editorial justification for the programme focussing on the kind of scenario that led to pressure being brought to bear on parliament to change the law in this area. Abortion is undoubtedly a controversial issue for some people, but it is currently legal in most parts of the UK in the circumstances portrayed, and polls indicate that th majority of people support a woman���s right to choose. The British Medical Association and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have both called forabortion to be treated like any other medical procedure and removed from criminal law altogether, and all indications are that public attitudes towards it are becoming more liberal rather than less. I think that considerably limits the degree to which the requirement for due impartiality necessitates the inclusion of a pro-life argument in a programme of this kind.
2
Since I do not believe there are grounds for me to uphold your complaint this will be the BBC���s final finding, unless there are reasons to modify or amend it in light of any comments you may wish to make. If you do wish to respond I would be grateful if you could send your comments to me by 12 April. Alternatively, if you wish to pursue the matter further, it is open to you to ask the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, to consider your complaint.
Yours etc������
I did in fact reply to this, in case the BBC felt it had persuaded me.
I wrote:
'Dear Ms Xxxxxx
I shall of course be in touch with OFCOM, and part of my complaint to them will be your dogged unresponsiveness to my specific points and your use of straw man arguments to avoid what I actually say. I have never suggested that you have a duty of absolute neutrality, nor criticised you for failing to exercise such a fictional duty. You have never explained how due impartiality on the abortion controversy (which the BBC admits is a controversy) has been achieved across your output ' over an appropriate timeframe' using your own phrase. As far as I know, the BBC has never in its existence made a drama in which the case *against* abortion has been sympathetically treated. If it has done so, you have had plenty of time to discover and produce the details. But you have not. You have repeatedly asserted that impartiality can be achieved over time. Well and good. I accept that. But you have not even tried to demonstrate that it *has* been achieved over time. Because it has not been. So how can you possibly offer this as a defence?
You have also never been able to point me to anything in your own rules and guidelines which justifies the (prima facie absurd) claim that impartiality is any less important in drama and fiction than it is in factual programming. The opposite is quite obviously true, and is demonstrated by the BBC's own history, as I explained to you.
Your response to me is a simple abuse of power. You are confident that I have no real redress, so you ignore what I say, or misrepresent it to yourselves and to me. I think you should be ashamed of yourselves. You have in your possession a near-sacred trust, a broadcasting organisation sustained by a licence fee collected on the basis of promises to be fair, inscribed unequivocally in a solemn Charter and Agreement. If you do not keep these promises, how can you possibly expect this trust to continue indefinitely? It would be more honest if you closed down this complaints unit altogether, as it does not treat complaints seriously. It only serves to beguile people into thinking that you have some commitment to investigate complaints, when you do not.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Hitchens���
It came to me as I wrote this that the BBC had in fact at no stage sought to claim that the programme itself was not biased. It had simply asserted that bias in drama didn���t matter that much (an absurd thing to say) and that such bias, if it took place, was not a breach of guidelines if it was offset elsewhere. But it had not shown (despite requests to do so) that it had offset the bias elsewhere, either in the series ���Call the Midwife���, or anywhere else. So in sum, its response had been to admit the offence, and tell me to get lost because I was powerless to do anything about it. This is of course true. But it ought not to be. No doubt OFCOM will do something similar, but let it be recorded.
June 4, 2019
Less Syrup, Slop and Slush, and No More Talk of a 'Special Relationship' would make Anglo-US Relations Far Better
Speaking at a splendid Buckingham Palace dinner, the President of the United States told the assembled great and good:
���You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the US. Nor must too much importance in this connection be attached to the fact that English is our common language��� no, there are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and interests.���
Good advice, in my experience. But he might as well have saved his breath. For the President was not (as it might easily have been) Donald Trump, who traces his ancestry back to the Trumps of Kallstadt in the Rhineland and so is one of 44 million German-Americans who are neither cousins nor Anglo-Saxons). It was the lofty academic Thomas Woodrow Wilson, and the words were spoken on 27th December 1918, when you might have thought the two great English-speaking powers were suffused with a joint glow of warmth at their recent victory over the Germans.
Not a bit of it. And remember that at this stage Britain had yet to default on its giant war debt to the USA, worth about ��225 Billion by today���s values. We stopped repaying or servicing that dbet in 1934, and contrary to popular belief it remains unpaid to this day (our Second World War Debts to the USA were recently paid off, which is why people wrongly assume that the 1914-18 loan has been settled as well. It hasn���t been, and it probably never will be, but it is impolite to raise the matter, which is why I do so).
In fact, US-British rivalry had been quietly growing for decades, and it had come to a head in the years just before the Great War when the USA began seriously to expand its Navy. It is amazing how much public fuss we made about Germany���s famous attempt to match our fleet, outspent by us and abandoned by the Kaiser in 1912, and how little attention we pay to the real, lasting challenge from the country which would eventually supplant us.
In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt had despatched his ���Great White Fleet��� of battleships around the world to show that the USA was now a major naval power ��� a direct challenge to Britain which, then in alliance with Japan, challenged the USA for naval dominance in the Pacific. In the end, Britain would reluctantly break the Japanese alliance in 1923 under US pressure. In hindsight, that was probably the moment at which the British Empire���s fate was settled for good.
In 1916 Woodrow Wilson had backed the so-called ���Big Navy��� act, of which he said ���Let us build a Navy bigger than hers [Britain���s] and do what we please.��� Wilson resolved to build ���incomparably, the greatest Navy in the world��� aiming to make the US Navy equal to any two others in the world. This of course is now a fact. The USSR tried and failed to challenge it. Now China, with more deliberation and care, and with far better equipment than the Soviets managed to create, is seeking at least to challenge it in its own region.
I am indebted to Adam Tooze���s marvellous, original history of the true significance of World War One ���The Deluge���, for much of what I say here. It does not mess around ridiculously trying to show that Germany didn���t start the war, when it obviously did. It doesn���t get bogged down in the British obsession of Flanders. It grasps that the centre of the war was the eastern Front, and that its wider effects were principally felt in the East of Europe and Russia, and in the power struggle between Britain and the USA, which the USA was bound to win. He also understands the huge cost of it, and what this meant to the relative standings of Britain and the USA.
Tooze records that, during his sea voyage to London in December 1918, Wilson had made it plain that he would no longer accept Britain���s total dominance at sea, saying to aides that if Britain did not come to terms over this, America would ���build the biggest Navy in the world, matching theirs and exceeding it���and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map���.
Tooze also records that the growing naval confrontation between these two supposed shoulder-to-shoulder eternal friends were so bitter that ��� by the end of March 1919 relations between the naval officers of the two sides had degenerated to such an extent that the admirals threatened war and had to be restrained form assaulting each other���.
In the end, the confrontation would be indefinitely postponed by the Washington Naval Treaty, in which Britain agreed to severe limits on strength, and the USA likewise agreed limits on building. But the Anglo-Japanese alliance was broken, and when the next world crisis came, it was partly the result of that breach.
Of course Britain fought a bitter naval war between 1939 and 1945. But the big set-piece confrontations between capital ships, such as the sinking of the Bismarck and (to a lesser extent) the sinking of the Scharnhorst, were exceptional. The main naval war was fought with destroyers (which at Narvik smashed the German destroyer fleet and so made a German invasion of Britain almost impossible), which did the real work at Dunkirk and which, supported by cheap and ill-armed corvettes, won the Battle of the Atlantic. Yes, I know that some battleships and many cruisers also did valuable convoy work, and were crucial in the D-Day bombardment. But it was a destroyer war, in which we never had enough destroyers. The really big ships were almost liabilities, since their loss, as in the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, was so devastating and demoralising that it is tempting to wonder if it might have been better never to have had them at all.
Poor Prince of Wales was also the scene of the Placentia Bay meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt. I am more and more convinced that Herman Wouk���s description of this encounter in his book ���the Winds of War��� gets closer to the substance than most British official history, which drones on about an ���Atlantic Charter��� (which doesn���t exist, though a nameless document very damaging to Britain does) and Churchill���s first meeting with Roosevelt.
Wouk records it as ���The Changing of the Guard���, the moment at which world power actually passed from Britain to the USA, and significantly this took place aboard British and US warships anchored close to each other, very near to territory (at Argentia in Newfoundland) recently ceded to the USA by Britain in return for desperately-needed destroyers. I use the word ���desperately��� as it is rarely used, in its full strength. Our need was huge. The Royal Navy had started the war with 176 destroyers. After Narvik and Dunkirk, only 68 of these were still fit for service in home waters. It was because of this crisis that Churchill was prepared to cede sovereign territory to Roosevelt, something he would never otherwise have contemplated.
Much of this, the true relationship between the two countries, is dealt with in my widely-ignores and sometimes-slandered recent book ���The Phoney Victory��� Also useful for a cooler, ess sentimental perspective on the relations between the two countries in 1939-41, is Lynne Olson���s superb book ���Those Angry Days���. Ms Olson is a fine popular historian, and most of her books are readily available here, including the recent and excellent ���Last Hope Island��� and her new book ���Madame Fourcade���s Secret War���. But I am shocked and irritated that no publisher has seen fit to bring out ���Those Angry Days��� in this country. I had to buy it in Moscow, Idaho. It would open many eyes here, and make relations between Britain and the USA better for being more honest and knowledgeable. Less slop and slush might mean a deeper, more genuine friendship based upon recognition that we are two different countries with differing interests.
June 3, 2019
PETER HITCHENS: I'm glad Alastair Campbell got the chop - he's much more dangerous than Corbyn
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Alastair Campbell is a great man, but not in a good way. And thanks to his quarrel with Jeremy Corbyn���s Labour Party, I think the time has come to wonder openly why we know so little of this enormously powerful and influential individual.
Because of the caricature of Mr Campbell in The Thick Of It, people often think that it is just a joke to suggest he was really the executive power in the Blair government. On the contrary, it is the sober truth.
I met both men before they were famous. Anthony Blair (as his wife used to refer to him until he adopted the name ���Tony��� to make him more appealing to Labour voters) was and remains a rather boring, ordinary, vague man with a limited mind.
He performs well on a stage or in front of a TV camera, and he was a Trotskyist in his student years, but politics has never really been his main interest. He went into the power game because he had failed as a barrister.
Alastair Campbell, by contrast, is a thoughtful, troubled, driven and deeply revolutionary person, filled with an energy he can barely contain. Like many such people, this has caused him personal troubles, about which he has been commendably frank. But these are just outward signs of the furnace of ambition and idealism which burns inside him.
He is enormously quick-witted. He has immensely sharp focus and executive ability. He was, for several decisive years, the true centre of power in Downing Street.
It was mainly for his benefit that the Blair government violated the constitution, through the Civil Service (Amendment) Order in Council 1997. This cunning, slick device (who thought of it?) allowed Mr Campbell, who was not an elected MP or a Minister of the Crown, to give orders to civil servants.
I do not believe this had ever happened before, and I hope it never happens again.
The simple reason for it is this: in modern Britain, nobody like Alastair Campbell could get elected to major office. Personally, I think this is a pity, but it is true. Whereas someone like Anthony Blair, seemingly bland and safe, can all too easily rise to the top. How, then, do people such as Alastair Campbell actually get power? By the methods he used.
Nobody has yet been able to get any details or minutes of the instructions he gave while in office. I suspect they went a good deal further than ordering new computers. While he was there, two things happened. What was left of the old impartial government information machine was laid waste and turned into a propaganda organ for Blairism. And the rest of Whitehall was placed firmly under the thumb of a presidential Downing Street.
Mr Campbell even had the power to force the then Foreign Secretary, the late Robin Cook, to choose between his wife and his mistress, when the press discovered he was having an affair.
What ideas drive him? We can only guess the details. We know he pushed furiously for what he saw as an idealist war in Iraq. He is, we know, a fervent zealot for the European Union. Many revolutionaries love this because they hope conservative Britain, and indeed all remaining traces of traditional Europe, will, in the end, be dissolved in the EU soup.
Many members of the Blairite apparatus were student Marxists who remained radical for the rest of their lives. But if he has some specific commitment, it is a mystery. There is no information about Alastair Campbell���s political origins that I have ever seen.
It is interesting that he has never married Fiona Millar, mother of his three children. Could this be because both of them, like many radicals of my generation, are opposed to marriage as a conservative institution? New Labour certainly did no favours to traditional marriage.
Both have also maintained a ferocious attachment to Labour���s single most fanatical revolutionary policy, comprehensive schools. And Fiona was once reported to have sighed, after the singing of the Communist anthem The Internationale at the 2001 memorial service of Tony Benn���s wife Caroline: ���Great to hear language we aren���t allowed to use any longer.���
In the lost youth of people like this, the opinions were formed, the plans were made and the alliances forged which led in the end to the revolution we are still rather painfully undergoing.
In the meantime, I fully back Jeremy Corbyn in his efforts to chuck Alastair Campbell out of the Labour Party. For here���s the really disturbing fact. Alastair, like his mate Anthony Blair, is far more Left-wing than Jeremy. And he is better at it.
********
A tiny corner of the ���antidepressant��� scandal has at last been uncovered, with the absurdly-delayed admission that these potent, poorly-understood, fantastically profitable drugs can cause hideous withdrawal symptoms.
The problem is that many people, who have been prescribed them, fervently want to believe that they are effective. So they are the loudest defenders of them. This keeps us from discussing the growing evidence that they do not in fact work significantly better than dummy pills - as shown by the drug companies��� own research, which they have been forced to cough up by Freedom of Information requests.
And it means I am pelted with insults when I point out the alarming numbers of people who take these drugs and inexplicably kill or harm themselves or others. I wish you���d listen to me now. But, as usual, I fear I shall have to wait years before everyone catches on. And in that time many will suffer needlessly.
**********
The praiseworthy Baroness Newlove has once again shown that she is her own woman and not a patsy of the Useless Tories who put her into the Lords after her brave husband was kicked to death in the street by louts.
She has pointed out the thing that cannot officially be said ��� that almost all prison sentences are lies, and those convicted will usually serve only half of the time stated by the judge.
If Boris Johnson can be prosecuted for overstating the cost of EU membership, how about prosecuting the judges who 30 times a day tell a far worse untruth?
********
Khuram Butt, leader of the London Bridge murder gang, turns out to have been a marijuana smoker, like almost every other Islamist terrorist, and like thousands of other violent criminals.
The authorities, as usual, are uninterested in this because they have given up prosecuting its use and in many cases have swallowed the billionaire propaganda for legalisation. They dare not admit that they have made a ghastly mistake.
If anyone asks for your vote in future, ask them for their views on this. They need to be frightened into thinking.
**
John Cleese is condemned for saying an obvious, true thing - that London is no longer a British city. Of course he is. One of the things that makes it unBritish is that speech is no longer free there.
******
Will the BBC ever make a drama that rings true?
The word 'preposterous' might have been invented to describe the BBC2 drama Summer of Rockets, which stars Keeley Hawes as the batty wife of an unhinged Tory MP, and is infested with Rolls-Royces and top hats.
There is not a single event in this supposed portrayal of the 1950s which rings true to me, and I was alive then. How does this expensive rubbish get chosen?
If someone at the BBC really wants to do a gripping drama about this interesting era, they should serialise the superb Alms For Oblivion novels of Simon Raven, who betrayed and satirised his establishment friends with wit and style. One of the characters is a thinly disguised portrayal of Jacob Rees-Mogg's father William.
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June 2, 2019
PETER HITCHENS: I'm glad Alistair Campbell got the chop - he's much more dangerous than Corbyn
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Alastair Campbell is a great man, but not in a good way. And thanks to his quarrel with Jeremy Corbyn���s Labour Party, I think the time has come to wonder openly why we know so little of this enormously powerful and influential individual.
Because of the caricature of Mr Campbell in The Thick Of It, people often think that it is just a joke to suggest he was really the executive power in the Blair government. On the contrary, it is the sober truth.
I met both men before they were famous. Anthony Blair (as his wife used to refer to him until he adopted the name ���Tony��� to make him more appealing to Labour voters) was and remains a rather boring, ordinary, vague man with a limited mind.
He performs well on a stage or in front of a TV camera, and he was a Trotskyist in his student years, but politics has never really been his main interest. He went into the power game because he had failed as a barrister.
Alastair Campbell, by contrast, is a thoughtful, troubled, driven and deeply revolutionary person, filled with an energy he can barely contain. Like many such people, this has caused him personal troubles, about which he has been commendably frank. But these are just outward signs of the furnace of ambition and idealism which burns inside him.
He is enormously quick-witted. He has immensely sharp focus and executive ability. He was, for several decisive years, the true centre of power in Downing Street.
It was mainly for his benefit that the Blair government violated the constitution, through the Civil Service (Amendment) Order in Council 1997. This cunning, slick device (who thought of it?) allowed Mr Campbell, who was not an elected MP or a Minister of the Crown, to give orders to civil servants.
I do not believe this had ever happened before, and I hope it never happens again.
The simple reason for it is this: in modern Britain, nobody like Alastair Campbell could get elected to major office. Personally, I think this is a pity, but it is true. Whereas someone like Anthony Blair, seemingly bland and safe, can all too easily rise to the top. How, then, do people such as Alastair Campbell actually get power? By the methods he used.
Nobody has yet been able to get any details or minutes of the instructions he gave while in office. I suspect they went a good deal further than ordering new computers. While he was there, two things happened. What was left of the old impartial government information machine was laid waste and turned into a propaganda organ for Blairism. And the rest of Whitehall was placed firmly under the thumb of a presidential Downing Street.
Mr Campbell even had the power to force the then Foreign Secretary, the late Robin Cook, to choose between his wife and his mistress, when the press discovered he was having an affair.
What ideas drive him? We can only guess the details. We know he pushed furiously for what he saw as an idealist war in Iraq. He is, we know, a fervent zealot for the European Union. Many revolutionaries love this because they hope conservative Britain, and indeed all remaining traces of traditional Europe, will, in the end, be dissolved in the EU soup.
Many members of the Blairite apparatus were student Marxists who remained radical for the rest of their lives. But if he has some specific commitment, it is a mystery. There is no information about Alastair Campbell���s political origins that I have ever seen.
It is interesting that he has never married Fiona Millar, mother of his three children. Could this be because both of them, like many radicals of my generation, are opposed to marriage as a conservative institution? New Labour certainly did no favours to traditional marriage.
Both have also maintained a ferocious attachment to Labour���s single most fanatical revolutionary policy, comprehensive schools. And Fiona was once reported to have sighed, after the singing of the Communist anthem The Internationale at the 2001 memorial service of Tony Benn���s wife Caroline: ���Great to hear language we aren���t allowed to use any longer.���
In the lost youth of people like this, the opinions were formed, the plans were made and the alliances forged which led in the end to the revolution we are still rather painfully undergoing.
In the meantime, I fully back Jeremy Corbyn in his efforts to chuck Alastair Campbell out of the Labour Party. For here���s the really disturbing fact. Alastair, like his mate Anthony Blair, is far more Left-wing than Jeremy. And he is better at it.
The praiseworthy Baroness Newlove has once again shown that she is her own woman and not a patsy of the Useless Tories who put her into the Lords after her brave husband was kicked to death in the street by louts.
She has pointed out the thing that cannot officially be said ��� that almost all prison sentences are lies, and those convicted will usually serve only half of the time stated by the judge.
If Boris Johnson can be prosecuted for overstating the cost of EU membership, how about prosecuting the judges who 30 times a day tell a far worse untruth?
Khuram Butt, leader of the London Bridge murder gang, turns out to have been a marijuana smoker, like almost every other Islamist terrorist, and like thousands of other violent criminals.
The authorities, as usual, are uninterested in this because they have given up prosecuting its use and in many cases have swallowed the billionaire propaganda for legalisation. They dare not admit that they have made a ghastly mistake.
If anyone asks for your vote in future, ask them for their views on this. They need to be frightened into thinking.
Will BBC ever make a drama that rings true?
The word 'preposterous' might have been invented to describe the BBC2 drama Summer of Rockets, which stars Keeley Hawes as the batty wife of an unhinged Tory MP, and is infested with Rolls-Royces and top hats.
There is not a single event in this supposed portrayal of the 1950s which rings true to me, and I was alive then. How does this expensive rubbish get chosen?
If someone at the BBC really wants to do a gripping drama about this interesting era, they should serialise the superb Aims For Oblivion novels of Simon Raven, who betrayed and satirised his establishment friends with wit and style. One of the characters is a thinly disguised portrayal of Jacob Rees-Mogg's father William.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
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