How Grand Can you Get? – The Economist is not as Smart as it thinks it is

Long years ago, when I published my first book (‘The Abolition of Britain’) I was still an innocent young thing, who believed that interesting books would be fairly and generously reviewed by major magazines and newspapers.

Of course this was a silly delusion, like the one I had previously suffered (and been brutally disabused of) that publishers published books because they were worth publishing, and were not influenced by petty prejudices or political bias. Oh, how I laugh to remember it now. I also thought in those days that publishers made sure that books were promoted and put in bookshops, and that bookshops wanted to sell books, whatever they were about, as it was good for business. I had so much to learn.

But in this dewy springtime of my innocence, I ensured that a review copy of my book was despatched to that great institution of serious British journalism, ‘The Economist’. Nothing whatever happened. It was not considered interesting enough. But a year later, when a strange document called the Parekh Report was published, the ‘Economist’ did finally mention my book. It chided the authors of the Parekh Report (so PC and multicultural that even the ‘Economist’ couldn’t stomach it), for giving credence to my arguments – against PC and multiculturalism – in ‘The Abolition of Britain’. Thus did I get my only ever mention. They’ve since, as far as I know, completely ignored all my subsequent books.

Some people take ‘the Economist’ very seriously. I seem to recall that the famous book Flat Earth News’ views its reporting of mass immigration as the measure of impartiality – when of course the ‘Economist’ is aligned with the sort of open-borders ‘free-movement-of-people’ liberalism which despises any attempt to maintain proper national frontiers. It is amazing how the beliefs that business is conservative and that the market is conservative persist against all evidence.

Anyway, to the point. The ‘Economist’ has finally mentioned me again. It is here

It asserts ‘When Britain last tinkered with the House of Lords, opponents foresaw a terrible future. Peter Hitchens, writing in the Daily Mail, worried that removing hereditary peers and replacing them with members appointed by the government was “the road to the British Reich”.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. I have, gleefully, to point out that this august organ has made a beautiful ‘clock striking thirteen’ error here, by saying that I wrote this in the Daily Mail, when I have never, as it happens, written a word for that fine newspaper.

But I think they are referring to an article I wrote in October 1998, in a newspaper whose name I am no longer prepared to utter, so completely has it altered since the days when I wrote for it.

The headline does indeed ask, rather than say ‘Is this the road to the British Reich?’. But that’s a headline. I don’t think I wrote it, though it is just possible that I did. A rather good cartoon by my old friend Graham Allen shows an apprehensive and toothy Anthony Blair, in the driver’s seat of an out-of-control bulldozer which has just sliced through the Palace of Westminster and is about to demolish Windsor Castle.

For much of my point was that getting rid of the hereditaries threatened the monarchy (as it does). But my other argument was that the Lords were, and as far as I know still are, the guardians of Section Two of the 1911 Parliament Act.

This means that the House of Commons cannot vote to extend its life beyond five years , unless the Lords agree.

I said that with a hereditary House of Lords, completely free to ignore the executive, we had a strong guarantee against any such thing happening. The Commons might well be (in my view is ) completely under Downing Street’s thumb. But the old Lords were not. Could we say the same of an appointed House (which then seemed to be what we were going to get)? And can we say the same of an ‘elected House’, that is, one selected by the centralised party machines? It still seems to me to be a good point, though there are now so many other threats to our liberties that it must join the queue for attention.

But the point was clear – that the Lords, among other things, were a defence against an over-mighty executive cancelling elections. Yes, I know this seems unlikely, but constitutions are supposed to take precautions against unlikely things.

So the Economist’s teenage jeer that ‘More than a decade after that reform took place, the shires are still free of brownshirts’, is cheap, childish and silly. You might have expected better. So might I, once. But I have been disillusioned about the ‘Economist’ for many years.

By the way, I have also found the old article from the same period  that another reader quoted , on war and bombing. I was right in thinking it was about the Kosovo war, and the persons who quoted from it seems to have been quite careful to leave out its main message, that it was better not to start wars at all if possible. It certainly wasn’t a defence of deliberately bombing civilians – much more a warning that, even if you fought carefully, innocents would die. Of course, if you deliberately bomb innocents, they will die in much greater numbers,  QED.