On Being a Bad Loser

Peter Hitchens says 'I have lost more votes at more debates than most people living'.

I like to think this has something to do with my willingness to embrace unfashionable causes, though of course there just might be other reasons. In any case, I like to think that I am fairly indifferent to the result when it goes against me, even if I get a warm glow on the rare occasions when I find myself on the winning side.

Am I deluding myself about this? ‘Tarquin’ seems to think I am . He comments , in his usual ungenerous and hostile manner on ‘A Narrow but Important Victory’ in which I briefly summarised the victory of my side in a debate on drugs at Exeter University last Thursday  (By the way, I have a good hope that there will soon be a recording of this available).

 

'Tarquin' said : ‘I'm fairly certain that Hitchens has previously dismissed the results of similar debates where he has lost the vote, and there are many good reasons to do so - and yet this one is 'an important victory' even when he admits you are supposed to vote on the quality of the argument rather than opinion on the subject Sadly I'm unable to get a quote because of the nature of this blog, I won't find it without wasting several days, if anyone can remember it would be helpful (it was one in a large hall or auditorium and was available online’

 

Well, I can’t find it either. Can anyone else? I’m not saying that I have never been guilty of such an act, but I can’t recall it just now.  In general, where I can, I provide links to, or direct readers to sites where they can see a recording and make their own minds up. I’m well aware that a participant in a  debate is unlikely to give full or fair account of it.

 

But (using the blog’s archive and a well-known search engine) I found the following accounts I had given of several debates on this subject. 

 

‘Regular readers here will be familiar with Mr Peter Reynolds, leader of the Cannabis Law Reform Society, who has tried to take me to the Press Complaints Commission for being rude about Marijuana, and has from time to time turned up at public meetings to heckle me.

 

Some months ago he challenged me to a debate on cannabis legalisation, and when I accepted, the excellent Salford University Debating Society swiftly stepped in to offer a venue for our titanic battle.

 

This took place on Tuesday evening, and – though I’ll leave it to those who were there (apparently a televised version will find its way on to the web) to give their own impressions,  I would say in general that it was fair, courteous, thoughtful and educational for all involved, and that the audience was intelligently receptive to the arguments of both sides.

 

I lost the vote (as I usually do, though I did once win the vote on the same broad subject after a tremendously high-octane clash with Howard Marks, of which I fear there is no recording ) but rather more narrowly (the margin was six votes) than anyone had expected.  All of which , I think, goes to show that the case for legalisation is not as clear cut as many silly members of the British liberal establishment think it is.’

 

(October 2011)

 

‘I can’t possibly give a full account of my encounter with Howard Marks in Oxford on Thursday evening, as you can't take notes on a debate when you're taking part in it, but I thought readers might appreciate a few notes on the event.

First, I should explain how it is we came to be debating. Mr Marks and I first met on a windy evening in Blackpool more than ten years ago, when we were both speaking at a National Union of Students event, on drug laws, in the vast and rather lovely Winter Gardens.

It was quite a big meeting and we were having quite a lot of fun arguing when some commissar from the NUS marched on to the stage,  switched off my microphone and told me I had to leave. When I asked why he told me that I surely already knew. I said I had no idea. I then foghorned my protest to the hall, not needing the microphones, and rose rather angrily to go.

Howard (as I have ever since called him) behaved magnificently. He scooped up his notes, took me by the arm in a very friendly way and said ‘Well,  if he’s going, I’m going too!’

We were besieged, as we went, by a very small crowd of angry, heavily-pierced people, who shrilled various incomprehensible but plainly critical remarks at me. (It turned out later that they had been fed, and willingly believed, a rumour that I had said I was a racist and proud of it, a false claim which later led me to threaten a lawsuit against the individual responsible for spreading it,  the only time I have done this. The person very swiftly retracted and apologised).

 I was then intercepted by a (very cunning) police officer, who led me into a side room. He offered me an escort to the railway station. I was, it seemed, actually being run out of town.

Oh come on, ‘ I said ‘Don’t be silly. They’re only Trots. I used to be one. They're all mouth and no trousers.  I’m not afraid of them. I’m quite happy to walk out there and brave whatever they want to say to me.’

‘Ah’ replied the subtle officer. 'I quite see. But you may have noticed – who couldn’t - that there’s rather a lot of glass in this building, some of it quite old and valuable? ’

I admitted that this is so. The Winter Gardens are a majestic Edwardian palace of glass and wood, the glory of Blackpool, if you like. I’m rather fond of them.

‘Well, sir, you see, if there were serious damage to that glass, I’d be held responsible for failing to keep the peace, which wouldn’t be very nice, would it? You’d be doing me a great favour if you let me slip you out by a back way I know, and on to the railway station’.

When it was put like that, I’d have been a heel if I’d refused. So  just said ‘ Oh, all right then. But no need to go to the station. I’m sure I’ll be safe in Blackpool till the morning’. And so I did.

But I never forgot Howard’s chivalry, and his instinctive rally to the side of liberty, even the liberty of an opponent he didn’t know, and had no reason to like.  If ever I seek a definition of magnanimity, I recall that evening.

A little while later we found ourselves debating again, this time in Durham.  Once again, we enjoyed the encounter, without conceding anything to each other in the argument. There was a vote, and to my surprise I won it, as Howard is a hero in the student world . Something similar happened in Exeter.

So it occurred to me to seek a rematch (I think the vote last night was more or less even, to the extent these things matter. My view is that a debate without a vote is like tennis without a net) .

Howard’s argument rested heavily on the fact that the old League of Nations had been panicked into banning cannabis by the more-or-less hysterical urgings ( as he described them) of an Egyptian delegate, plus the more usual points about the bad effects of illegality on users and on the purity etc of the drug, and the point that many eminent scientists and others had used cannabis without ill-effect.  Regular readers here will be familiar with Malcolm Muggeridge’s rather more measured description, in ‘Chronicles of Wasted Time’(and quoted in two of my books, 'Abolition of Liberty' and 'The War We Never Fought'),  of the baleful effect of widespread cannabis smoking on the Egyptian people in the 1920s. There was clearly something bad going on.

My case will be familiar to regular readers here and I won’t rehearse it. I suspect Howard is broadly right that the dangers of hashish, as it then was, were in some ways misrepresented to the League. That is because in those days we knew so little about this drug, which was then almost unknown in the western world, and in fact we knew very little about any drug. Like the exaggerations of ‘Reefer Madness’ so often mocked by the pro-dope campaign, such arguments now look foolish.

But they contained, for all their crudity, an essential truth – that  the ingredients of cannabis which we have now isolated and studied, are powerful psychotropics which can have unpredictable and long-delayed effects. Just how bad those are, and what action they justify, are the real issues for our time.

Each of us teased the other a bit, but without malice.

We then had an all-too-short period of questions, again quite like the sort of subjects which come up here. I think, at the end, many there felt that they could easily have gone on for longer. But bookshop staff have homes to go to, and we couldn’t stay there all night. We meet again on Monday 29th October, in Bristol, but I’m told that’s sold out.

Perhaps we might do it again. I’ve no doubt our discussions serve the cause of truth, and the cause of free speech. And they demonstrate that opponents in this matter can behave towards each other with humour and personal generosity (unlike reviewers in ‘The Observer’) . I’m also meeting Peter Reynolds of CLEAR at Exeter University on the evening of Thursday 29th November, and Tim Wilkinson ( see www.surelysomemistake.blogspot.com) in London on 14th November.’

 

(October 2012)

 

 

‘It always gravely saddens me to see Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, a distinguished doctor who has dedicated his life and mind to the cure of disease and the easing of pain, supporting the dangerous campaign to soften our drug laws. If successful, this will lead to greatly increased pain, misery and disease.

The pro-drug lobby – much like Big Tobacco when the link between cigarettes and lung cancer was first made – is hostile to any facts that contradict its claims. I fear Sir Ian’s allegiance to this cause has affected him in this way.

During a London debate on the subject last week, my ally Dr Hans-Christian Raabe tried to hand Sir Ian an article from the New England Journal Of Medicine that supported a point he had just made – that deaths due to legal prescription drugs (eg methadone) far exceed deaths due to illegal drugs (eg heroin) in the USA. Sir Ian flung it to the floor.

Is this what we should expect from a former president of the Royal College of Physicians?’

 

 (May 2011)

 

Wednesday night’s London debate (I’ve posted an independent account elsewhere, and would be happy to post others)  was an unusual experience for me  in that the audience largely supported me on the drug issue. How ‘typical’ this is I have no idea. Either way it was perhaps a little unfair on my opponent, who may not have shone as much as he would have done if he’d felt he had more of a home crowd. I won the vote at the beginning and the end, and few minds can have been changed. I’d only say that this couldn’t have happened if my side didn’t at least possess a coherent moral and political case.

 

(November 2012)