A little glimpse of the Liberal Elite, and some general remarks

Once upon a time I really, really wanted to work for the Financial Times. I thought (as a left-wing Labour supporter, as I then was) that to work on the FT's renowned Labour Staff would be the best possible opportunity to help the socialist cause. And I came quite close to getting aboard – I remember to this day my interview with the then editor, 'Fredy' Fisher (That's not one of my typing errors. He spelt his Christian name like that, though his actual name was Max, and he had done an amazing thing , a Berlin-born,  grammar-school educated German rising to edit a major British newspaper) , in his marvellous office in the handsome old FT headquarters, looking out on to a floodlit St Paul's Cathedral.  I thought I'd acquitted myself reasonably well but I didn't, in the end, get the job.

Who knows what might have happened if I had? It's often said that newspapers work on people just as much as people work on newspapers. On the FT I would have been surrounded by left-wing graduates like me.  I certainly wouldn't have had the extraordinary remedial education in reality I received at the hands of the old Daily Express, which, when I finally made it to Fleet Street to join it in January 1977, was a broadsheet with a daily sale of more than two million, run almost entirely by non-graduates, Fleet Street hard men (many of them Scottish) who had done their time in the provinces and often done gruelling stints in Manchester or Glasgow. Higher up the scale were real veterans of the many small wars of the end of Empire, from Suez to the Congo, men who had been reporters in the days when stories had to be sent by cable.

Why this digression? Well, this morning I went to an awards ceremony. The only real benefit of this was that , as it took place at breakfast time in London, I had to leave my provincial home before dawn and bicycle to the railway station by starlight, and was able to see the silhouette of Windsor Castle outlined against a blazing red sunrise from my Paddington-bound train. If they introduce Berlin Time, I suppose I'll be able to do that almost every day in Winter, and it may grow stale. But once in a while is quite a treat.

I had been shortlisted, as I sometimes am, for an award I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get. But oddly enough, as the ceremony ground on, my hopes rose. Almost every single award went to someone from….the Financial Times (one of these was given by mistake, and had to be re-awarded to its real recipient) . Then a few went to an old left-wing trooper from the New Statesman, and to a selection of Cameroon (or even more leftist than that) figures from 'The Times', a paper which no longer has a single proper conservative writer, as far as I can recall.  The organisers of the breakfast had been so keen that I should come that I began to wonder if in fact I was going to be the figleaf for the occasion, the one 'right-wing' recipient to prove that the whole business wasn't just the Liberal Elite patting itself on the back.

But no.  This rather silly hope was dashed. When the shortlist was read out, the compere made various weak jokes about how 'right-wing' I am (though he had the grace to mention one or two other things about me) and there were the usual patronising titters.  The award went to  some teenage Cameroon who went on and on about Gordon Brown's trousers..

I might as well have stayed in bed, not least because I loathe such events at the best of times, being slightly more misanthropic than Mr Badger in 'The Wind in the Willows' , and shrivel with foreboding at the mention of the word 'networking'.

One thing  struck me about the occasion,  apart from the complete failure to avoid bias, or the appearance of it.  One was the relaxed and unembarrassed use, from the platform in front of a mixed audience, men and women, all ages, of four-letter words.  Some of these were uttered by a prominent BBC reporter, himself a former Financial Times staffer.  I am more and more convinced that the public use of such words (when not being used to get cheap and easy shock laughs,  by 'comedians' and other public performers who can't think of proper jokes) is a demonstration of power. Those who have to listen to them are being told they haven't the power  to object, those who are the direct objects of them are being personally humiliated.

Reflecting on yesterday's posting, there's something very pagan about this development. I did wonder, amid the rather splendid surroundings, what these people would have thought if the people who actually made the occasion work had followed their example. What if  the pretty girls serving their breakfast had responded to a request for more coffee with "**** off and get it yourself, you ****", or the cloakroom assistants had refused to find their coats afterwards, saying "why the **** do you think I should remember where your ****ing coat is, you ****".

I'll tell you how they would have reacted. They would have been righteously furious at being spoken to in that fashion. And it might have gone further than that.

And here's what I would have said if I'd won the award for which I was shortlisted  (the number of awards to FT staff had become a bit of a running gag by then)

'You may not believe this, but I too once almost worked for the FT. Perhaps if I had I too would have learned to use four letter words in public and be wrong about almost every major issue in our recent history . But luckily for me I found my way to the less-respectable end of Fleet Street.'

Cannabis etcetera

A few quick responses to contributors.

'Lenny' comments: 'I'm not sure what 'many silly members of the British liberal establishment' have to do with it, take a look at many discussions on cannabis in your 'Right Minds' section and I'll think you'll find an overwhelming majority are in favour of legalisation, left, right, liberal.'

Well, when major 'conservative' unpopular newspapers, influential among politicians, academics, lawyers, doctors, teachers, police chiefs etc.,  back cannabis decriminalisation (and I am thinking here very much of Sir Simon Jenkins , formerly editor of The Times, and of Frances Cairncross, formerly of the Economist, and the former Cabinet Ministers Peter Lilley and Robert Ainsworth, plus a very silly senior doctor whose name escapes me but who above all ought to know better)  it is not surprising if general opinion shifts a bit. That is what silly members of the British liberal establishment have to do with it. And I think 'silly' is really rather mild. And I call them silly because they're old enough to know better ; old enough to know that the 'harm principle' as set out by John Stuart Mill is not in fact a very good argument ; old enough to know that all crime is, in effect, caused by law – but that is not an argument for getting rid of law; and old enough to know that there is no 'war on drugs' in this country, as they absurdly continue to claim.

Mr Wooderson (does he actually come here to read, or only to write?) maintains a fiction: 'since the Home Offices of successive governments have refused to even consider it.[by which I think he means legalisation of cannabis]  They just continue spouting the same old circular justifications for the 'war on drugs'. Well, that's for the gullible, Mr Wooderson, as I have so often said here, and I only wish he'd pay attention.

People and governments should be judged by their actions, not by their rhetoric. And this government and its predecessors have steadily reduced the penalties for drug possession to such a point that back in February 1994, John O'Connor, a former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad declared that cannabis had been decriminalised 'for some time now'. Mr Wooderson will also have seen (but perhaps not observed) my many postings here about the 'cannabis warning' (the non-penalty which is the usual police response to this ex-crime)  and my recent figures on the real state of the law for users of so-called 'hard drugs'. The British government cannot actually legalise cannabis possession, because of its binding treaty commitments to have laws against it. It is however free to enforce those laws so feebly that they are (as they are) a dead letter.

Given the immense damage that their efforts have already done.  You'll have to search quite hard, these days, for any medium prepared to host- let alone make – the case against legalisation. That's not because it doesn't exist, just because , as in so many other areas, liberals and leftists have seized the commanding heights of media and culture, and are using their power to exclude contrary views. A majority is not an argument doesn't decide a moral question, or even a practical question. There are plenty of examples in 20th and 21st century history of wicked people and bad ideas achieving majorities.

I'd stick to my view on this if I were the last man alive who held my opinion, because I believe my view to be morally and practically right.

Grant Higgins (who so far as I can tell wasn't present in Salford on Tuesday) writes : 'Hitchens lost the debate HAHAHAHAHA well done Peter Reynolds. I would wish you luck in the next debate Mr Hitchens but, let's face it, cannabis should be legal.'

I'd only point out that to lose a vote (by six)  isn't necessarily to lose a debate. As I may have pointed out, the great majority of the audience declared themselves as users of cannabis at the beginning of the debate. I do remember some drug legalisers jeering on this site when this debate was first mentioned (and that was long, long ago, to those who complain that I didn't advertise it) that Mr Reynolds would 'slaughter' me and that I would be foolish to engage with him, etc., etc. Well, I respect Mr Reynolds as a debater, but I don't think it can be said that this took place.

Those who doubt me may turn to the generous and thoughtful comment from Sanj Chowdhary, who doesn't agree with me, but has the grace and sense to disagree in a civilised fashion.

I'd repeat here the point I made to him during our pleasant and affable conversation, that I would be much more interested in the case for medical cannabis,  if its advocates didn't lend their support to campaigns to decriminalise cannabis as a recreational drug. As long as they do that, they are my opponents. The two issues are separate. If cannabis does have any medical applications they are quite unconnected to its use for self-intoxication. And there remains the unpredictable  risk of irreversible mental illness, surely a worrying side-effect for any drug, however good its other results may be.

The tiresome 'Haldane' resurfaces, with another of his thought-free, unresponsive 'makes you fink, dunnit' postings.  Just as Mr 'Bunker' never notices when he is himself debunked, Mr 'Haldane' repeatedly proclaims the virtues of thinking while not troubling to do so himself.  It obviously doesn't make *him* think, as in all his many contributions here, he has never shown any sign at all of noting or responding to anything I have said.  Here he is: 'A few days ago the government's advisers on drugs recommended that heroin use be decriminalised. This is the reconfigured committee that eighteen months ago saw seven of its members resign in protest at the sacking of Prof. David Nutt, who led his committee in recommending the declassification of cannabis. So we now have a new group of advisers recommending further relaxation of criminal penalties. To be consistent, I presume, Mr. Hitchens, that you would want all these experts dismissed - and so on - until we have a body made up of right minded people such as your good self and the former communist postman.'

Mr 'Haldane' and Mr Wooderson should obviously get in touch with each other. Here's poor Mr Wooderson, convinced that the establishment is dead set against decriminalising drugs. And here's Mr 'Haldane', triumphantly pointing out that the establishment has been completely suckered by the legalisation argument (more silly establishment liberals, whose qualifications in their scientific fields do not seem to have armoured them against groupthink conformism, false logic and irresponsibility). If Mr 'Haldane' is right( and he is), Mr Wooderson can't be.

But, as I say, the fact that they all agree doesn't make them right. I don't know who this ex-communist postman is, to whom Mr 'Haldane' refers. But were I Home Secretary, I wouldn't merely sack the lot of them. I'd repeal the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act which set them up, and reinstate the 1965 Dangerous Drugs Act, which a) didn't give cannabis a special 'soft' status, b) punished possession as severely as trafficking and c) punished those who allowed their  premises to be used for consumption of illegal drugs. . Whatever they're expert in , it plainly isn't the urgent task of preserving our civilisation.


Roy Robinson a) mistakes the Christian church *as an organisation* for the Christian ethic among ordinary people. All human organisations (as Christianity states) are controlled by fallen, sinful human beings; and b) he neglects to mention that the churches, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, were severely persecuted by the German Nazis and the Soviet Communist states, can show many examples of courageous resistance to them, warned against their dangers ( see the encyclical ''Mit Brennende Sorge' – can any other body in Germany show any more courageous and well-organised attempt to attack the Hitler regime once it was in power? , or indeed match the incredible courage of Cardinal Archbishop von Galen of Muenster in standing up to extermination policies and to the Gestapo? Many Christians also took appallingrisks across occupied Europe, by sheltering Jews from murder and persecution. The murder and the persecution were, by contrast, the settled and deliberate policies of a secular and anti-Christian government. The courage of that government's opponents may often have failed, but I do wonder how Mr Robinson might have responded to the first whispered threat from the Gestapo, had he been in their power.  The amazing thing is that anyone resisted at all. Among those who did, Christians are to be found in great numbers.

As for the Christian brothers etc.,  no doubt they are rightly open to much criticism, now I think accepted by their successors, and I do not defend or excuse them  – but does Mr Robinson know or care about what happened in the orphanages of Soviet Russia, vigorously defended as a new civilisation by people such as him at the time? Or about the child-snatching policies of the East German state, likewise defended by anti-Christian bien-pensants until its fall. ?  One need only look at the sycophantic rubbish still written about Castro's Cuba by the modern western secular left to see that they are prepared to actively *defend* hell on earth while it is taking place, and to learn nothing from it. Nobody can say that the Christian churches have not learned from their mistakes.

Hitler loved his dogs. I can well believe it. But Hitler didn't *personally* kill his victims. He found others to do that. I wonder if they were kind to animals?

Did I eat any of the Eid meat in Kashgar? No, I ate nothing more than an omelette and some toast all the time I was there, plus one very non-Islamic Chinese meal involving beef and noodles. Not sure why this matters.

'Elaine' inquires(first quoting me) : ' "In Chinese Turkestan but still (just) inhabited by Turkic Muslim Uighurs, it crossed my mind that a man who had slit a sheep's throat would be bound to find it easier to do the same to a human, if it came to it). "
'If this deduction is based on the chosen method of animal slaughter then I wonder if the same deduction would be made of a Jew slaughtering a sheep following the kosher rules, since the two methods are almost identical.'

My answer to this is as follows. Perhaps it could. But here are a couple of points. There is, so far as I know, no modern Jewish equivalent of Eid, though the original Passover must have something like it, and Kosher slaughter is carried out by a minority of professional slaughtermen.  I would however point out that in Kashgar at Eid (known locally as Korban) the slaughter of sheep is not done by professional slaughtermen, but in each home by the male members of the family (all of whom are taught how to do it).

She continues 'If the deduction is based on the assumption that this method is particularly cruel, then I suggest more investigation be done because you would learn that studies actually indicate that this method actually causes less suffering to the animal. In fact that is the whole point.'

No, that is not my argument. I am dealing with the effect on the person, not the effect on the animal (though I am not wholly convinced by the claim that this form of slaughter is less distressing to the sheep. You'd have to ask some sheep). I'm no fan of modern slaughterhouses, but in Kashgar tethered sheep awaiting slaughter could clearly see, hear and smell the fate of their fellows before being killed, and some, especially the big rams purchased by the richer families, put up a fierce fight before dying.

'Elaine' continues : 'But if this deduction is based on the fact that some Muslim terrorists have slit the throats of other humans to terrorize other people, then I would hope you would not be so prejudicial.'

Elaine is extending what I said further than I said it, and then criticising me for what she thinks I might mean. I said what I said. No more, no less. It was based on direct experience and on observation. Whatever it may or may not be, it cannot be called prejudicial.