A good Week for Hypocrisy and Humbug -plus, How Margaret Thatcher saved the Labour Party

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

 

This has been a great week for humbug and
hypocrisy. First we had David Cameron in Kazakhstan, a corrupt despotism
as weird as North Korea, but with oil and gas.

 

Mr Cameron was (quite reasonably) grovelling for
trade deals and for a safe exit-route by which to extract our costly
military equipment from Afghanistan.

 

But, as he sheepishly tagged along behind President
Nazarbayev’s goose-stepping ceremonial guard, did it occur to him that
he really ought to be calling for his host to be driven from power, as
he does with Syria’s President Assad?

 

Nazarbayev, like Assad, ‘kills his own people’. In
fact he shoots them in the back, most notably at Zhanaozen in December
2011, when armed police opened fire on unarmed strikers as they fled. At
least 16 died.

 

He’s sensitive, too.  A dissident newspaper’s
offices were mysteriously burned down in the night. The arsonists left a
headless dog hanging at the scene, and a terse note with the message
‘You won’t get another warning’.

 

Mr Cameron is said to have sat drinking whisky with
the President of this moral slum.  As I said, I don’t blame him. In our
weakened, insolvent state, this is the sort of thing we have to do.

 

But can he please now cease trying to drag Britain into ‘ethical’ attacks on other countries? 

 

Some hope. These people don’t learn by experience.
The comical collapse of the Egyptian experiment in democracy ought to
teach all such idealists a simple lesson. But the left-liberal mind
rejects all facts that won’t fit its dogma.

 

It was obvious to any educated person that
democracy in Egypt would lead to an Islamist government and that we were
better off with things as they were.

 

But our political and media elite went into spasms
of uncritical joy over the ‘Arab Spring’, urging it on and undermining
the old regime.

 

And now the same people find themselves greasily excusing an army putsch, which has put an end to this teenage nonsense.

 

I am called a cynic for pointing these things out.
But isn’t it much more cynical to encourage delusions which then lead to
tragedy?

 

***************

 

I think it is time for the Tories to stop being so
hoity-toity about the trade union grip on Labour. The Tory Party has a
whopping great skeleton its cupboard which I am now going to pull out
and wave about.

 

I promised to keep quiet about it nearly 30 years
ago, and I’m still not naming my source. But Mr Cameron’s self-righteous
attack on Labour has persuaded me that it’s time to come clean.

 

The Tory manifesto in 1983 pledged to do something
about one of the worst scandals in British politics, the ‘political
levy’ by which the unions take money from their members to put into
their political funds. These funds are then used
to buy influence in the Labour Party.

 

If you belong to most British unions, you pay into
this unless you opt out. Many don’t even know they’re contributing.
Others are afraid of drawing attention to themselves by opting out. As a
result, millions of people give money to Labour
without wanting to, via union political funds. And so they maintain the
union stranglehold on British politics.

 

It needn’t be so. Margaret Thatcher’s 1983
manifesto promised to end this disgrace. If the unions wouldn’t sort it
out, it said, ‘The Government will be prepared to introduce measures to
guarantee the free and effective right of choice.’

 

She won with a huge majority. It was a mandate. So
what happened? The then general secretary of the Labour Party, the late
Jim Mortimer, approached the Tories through a special back-channel. Word
was sent to the late Margaret Thatcher that
she would be unwise to act on this pledge.

 

If she did, Mortimer warned, she might well destroy
Labour and so – unintentionally - ensure that the Tories were beaten at
the next election by the SDP-Liberal Alliance. 

 

He added that if by any chance Labour survived, and
came back to power, it would take a terrible revenge. It would pass
laws to stop the Tories raising funds from business.

 

The ‘Iron Lady’ buckled and collapsed. For the sake
of party advantage and short-term gain, the plan was dropped. A few
feeble ballots were held instead, which hardly anyone noticed.

 

So Margaret Thatcher and her Tories actually saved
the Labour Party from richly deserved oblivion. The disastrous 1997-2010
Blair-Brown government is their direct fault.

 

They also made sure that the unions would keep their thumb on the national windpipe for another 25 years and maybe much longer.

 

I am sorry if my source now feels betrayed, but I
feel increasingly that the nation was betrayed, and that is far more
important.

 

*************

 

Funny, isn’t it, how BBC bias always happened in
the past but is never taking place now? A former director-general, Mark
Thompson, recently conceded that the Corporation (itals pse) had (off
itals) a ‘massive bias to the left’ 30 years
ago. But not now. Oh no.

 

Now another BBC Commissar, Helen Boaden, says it
was biased about immigration eight years ago. But not now. Oh no.  Ms
Boaden’s remarks form part of an unintentionally hilarious report by
Stuart Prebble, a nice, intelligent ‘liberal progressive’.

 

Mr Prebble invited me to come and tell him about
BBC bias. I did. I told him that the problem was that the BBC could
never understand that it was biased, just as a goldfish in a bowl does
not know he is a goldfish, or that he is in a bowl.

 

This is because BBC people have no friends who
disagree with them, and despise moral and social conservatives as
morally evil people.

 

He listened politely, though I do wonder what he
said about me after I’d gone. And then he produced a report saying the
BBC wasn’t biased. It would be funny if it didn’t matter.

**********

How long have the police been accepting people with
criminal records - sometimes quite severe records - as recruits?  My
colleague Martin Beckford tried to find out.  Nobody official seems to
know, but I am sure that it is a new development
and would guess it happened under the Blair regime. Do any proper
old-fashioned coppers know the answer?

 

***************

 

Not only are the government deliberately ensuring
power cuts five years hence, by shutting down perfectly good coal-fired
power stations and replacing them with useless windmills. Much of the
electricity that’s left will be given free to
illegal cannabis farmers.

 

Cultivating dope in the attic, using stolen power,
is one of this country’s few growth industries, thanks to the covert
legalisation of the drug. And the electricity companies apparently do
far too little to detect this crime.

 

It sums everything up really, a stoned nation, intermittently powered by wind.