What happened at Canterbury, Metric Reflections, Classic Cinema and When Not to Stand up for the National Anthem.

I hope to wrap up (or at least loosely wrap up) one or two continuing discussions here. On the Kent debate, I should remind readers of the 500-word limit on postings. Please keep to it. We very rarely waive it for a contribution of exceptional value, or for a person whose arguments have been attacked to reply at length. But in general it’s a good discipline.

 

One (pseudonymous) contributor said ‘From the perspective of any seasoned debater, your performance at UKC was atrocious. Evading of facts and constant accusations of ignoring your points at Professor Stevens really did highlight to us all how out of depth you were when confronted with a current academic on the subject of decriminalisation. You approached the audience at the start and asked us all to keep an open mind. While then proceeding to deny the numerous statistics and studies presented by Professor Stevens, not to challenge, simply to insist that they were false and to refer back to statistics you had from decades ago.’

 

**I reply : This is not my recollection of the event. As there were plenty of witnesses, I’d welcome any other accounts. But in the absence of these, my main disagreement with Professor Stevens was over his portrayal of regimes in this country and elsewhere as being in some way punitive. My whole point, (specifically in this country, though it is equally true elsewhere) is that Western countries have maintained formal legal bans on the possession of certain drugs, while informally abandoning them. They have further camouflaged this behaviour by pursuing noisy and well-publicised campaigns against traffickers, rendered entirely futile by their lack of action to interdict demand. I demonstrated this with statistics about the British response which Professor Stevens did not challenge.  

 

Likewise I successfully (by the use of statistics) challenged his contention that this country’s introduction of a relaxed attitude towards heroin abuse had not been followed by a large increase in the numbers of abusers. We argued a bit about Sweden, which I brought in only as an example of a country which, uniquely in western Europe, had attempted (not, in my view, vigorously enough) to act against possession of cannabis. He attempted to show that the reduction in cannabis use had not been caused by this, since it began before the policy’s implementation. I disputed this logic. There are many factors in such reductions. It may well be that the Swedish policy accelerated a process already under way. I don’t think the possibility can be dismissed. The Swedish government certainly thought so, when it gave evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee some years ago.

 

 

 

My pseudonymous critic continues: ‘They didn't count the votes at the end because it seemed slightly tragic to do so.’

 

***To which I reply, not to me (has he asked the Chairman if this was his reason?) . I thought the position had quite possibly shifted a bit towards me, though not as much as I might have hoped. Given the overwhelming preponderance against me from the start, that wouldn’t be a surprise’

 

He goes on ‘You had lost so overwhelmingly to a room of people who were left not feeling as though they hadn’t learnt anything but had sat in a room for two hours while you led scathing attacks on anyone you deemed to be a ‘pothead’ or ‘doper’. Or God forbid, those who suffer from depression or addiction. At which point, you not only lost the interest of the room but the last modicums of respect from anyone in the audience who came with a truly open mind.’

 

***To which I reply that this is no doubt his opinion and that of several others, but not that of quite  a few individuals who spoke to me afterwards. It may not, therefore, be an incontestable fact.  I don’t actually recall using the words ‘pothead’ or ‘doper’ (only referring to the fictional multinational ‘DopeCo’, which I posited as the putative name of the giant corporation which will arise once the legalisers get their way).

 

He goes on ‘And since you were so keen last night to convince everyone in the room of the falsity that is the medical research benefits of illegal substances, particularly cannabis’,

 

***Actually the subject hardly came up. Though I pointed out that the principal ingredient of cannabis is now available on special prescription on the NHS (which it is) and I dismissed the idea that any medicine could be prescribed except in closely-measured and regulated quantities; and also said that if people seriously wanted to see THC used as a medicine, then they would obviously separate themselves from any campaign to have it licensed as a permitted pleasure drug. If medical cannabis is so urgently needed, then surely the narrower the campaign, the more likely it is to succeed. And yet, in so many of these debates, I find alleged campaigners for ‘medical’ cannabis, sitting alongside, and supporting, campaigners for what I might politely call ‘non-medical cannabis’. This defies all logic, if this is a genuine campaign to relieve human suffering.

 

And I also said that drugs might often have apparently beneficial effects but were unusable because of their other impacts (such as Thalidomide, which when first prescribed was a highly effective treatment of morning sickness in pregnant women, but whose ‘side-effects’ were notoriously appalling).

 

He says : ‘I thought I’d leave a link so you may perhaps update some of your facts and gain a more well-informed opinion. [LINK REMOVED BY MODERATOR] The Centre for Medicinal Cannabis Research, University of California. Here you can see a number of scientific publications and reports which discuss Cannabis’ use for a number of conditions and their symptoms; including MS, HIV and Cancer and the on-going research into its medicinal potential.’

 

No doubt you can. And here you can see a link to my discussion of Keith Stroup’s statement that legalisers would use medical marijuana as a red herring to get pot a good name http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/stroup-keith/ . There is also a long passage on the Stroup affair in my book ‘The War we Never Fought’.

 

On the Metric system, I know perfectly well that it is legally permissible in this country, and am perfectly happy for anybody who wishes to use it, to use it. I just don't wish to have it imposed on me, either by law or by the use of immensely powerful cultural forces such as the BBC.  In these days of near-universal access to enormously powerful calculating engines, incredibly accurate conversions between the two systems are available to anyone who needs them, making it easier than ever for them to co-exist. What irks me is the insistent effort to supersede customary measures, by schools, broadcasters, publishers, map-makers and others, by refusing to mention or refer to them.

 

As has been pointed out here, these measures are human in scale, polished in use like old iron, derive from centuries of use and custom, have English names which resonate in poetry, proverb, scripture and literature, and are much-liked by many. They continue in use long after schools ceased to teach them, in such things as the weights of babies, and our own self-descriptions, in terms of height and weight. This is because they conjure up mental pictures which metric measurements do not, and are part of the actual, spoken, living language of these islands.  BBC reporters often make comical errors with metric masurements (I have sometimes mentioned the wondrous invention, by a BBC Radio 4 nature programme, of some '2,000 metre high' cliffs in the Falkland Islands.  Of course, they are 600 feet high. And, had the scripts said '6,000 feet' , I suspect someone would have said 'really?'. But the use of metres (based as they are on nothing more than a dud calculation made in a laboratory) brought no mental picture to mind.

 

Customary measures (more or less) survive here because we remain (more or less) free, and because we have not been invaded by a foreign power. The same, only more so, is true of the USA.  In all but a very few cases, metric measurements have been imposed on the countries which have them,  by revolutions, by colonial ‘liberations’ or by conquerors. In the few exceptions, the Anglosphere Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and the secessionist ex-Commonwealth country of South Africa) they were adopted as a (now rather ironic) declaration of difference from the former home country and Imperial power, or (in the case of Canada) as a gesture of independence from the USA.

 

I challenge my metrifying critics to tell me at what stage, and by what process, our supposedly sovereign Parliament ever removed customary measures from normal use, and mandated the substitution of metric ones. Permission is one thing. Imposition is another.

 

Metric measures represent an idealistic, top-down,  civil-law approach to society, as opposed to the pragmatic, common-law tradition of the English-speaking peoples. Thai is one fothe reasons why this quarrel has a sigbnificance much larger than some prosaic persons seem to think, and why Steve Thoburn was prepared to risk prosecution rather than abandon thje customary measures he and his customers preferred.

 

The BBC has no mandate from any place to decide that it must exclusively use or promote metric measures. As long as it is financed by a legally-enforced poll-tax, for non-payment of which we can go to prison, it has to serve the whole people, not its own whim.

 

It is, alas, true, that our woeful education system now fails to teach either system properly ( I was lucky enough to be taught both, and my objection to the metric system does not arise from any difficulty in using it. I used it in the Soviet Union, when I lived there. It seemed very well-fitted to that centralised, utopian, regulated, top-down chilly state, and may have found easier acceptance because the old Imperial Verst was quite close to a kilometre in length. I’d be interested to know from those with good Russian what form measurements take in the fairy-tales, literature and poetry of the former era, or whether Soviet editors have inserted metric measures in the tale of Baba Yaga, or the prose of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Lermontov.

 

Those who use street markets may well have noticed the growing habit of selling fruit and other goods in 'bowls', by which what you see is what you get, because so many people now udnerstand neither system. Petrol likewise, is now commonly sold by the Pound Sterling rather than by litre or gallon.

 

I’ll stay away from formal politics at the moment, but I’m glad of the response to my mention of ‘Bicycle Thieves’ . If I have introduced even one person to this moving and thoughtful film, I’m delighted. It is one of the blessings of our times that old films (which few commercial cinemas would ever show) are now so widely available. Just as second-hand bookshops are, these days, often far more interesting than those selling newly-published works, old films have much more to say to us than most new ones.

 

This gives me the excuse to mention the old Scala Cinema (now reincarnated in another form) in what was then a rather scruffy part of Oxford, where I went to see many art-house movies of the kind you can only get on DVD these days. The thing it provided was an audience,  often very engaged, which of course you can’t get when you watch films at home.

 

But what an audience! Those of you who think I’ve imagined the revolutionary attitudes of the sixties university generation would all benefit from reading this fascinating, multifaceted reminiscence by Tariq Ali, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/may/07/1963-beginning-of-modern-era

 from the Oxford of the middle 1960s. I was living in the city then,  then as now an Oxford Townie, and remember that one of my Trotskyist comrades, a Parsee from India who had a large moustache but otherwise had almost no resemblance to Tariq,  was constantly being pulled in by the police who thought he was the great revolutionary. I have long been puzzled that these recollections attracted so little attention when the Guardian published them back in May.

 

Apart from the interesting note about Suze Rotolo (whose classically Marxist influence on Bob Dylan was evident to us revolutionaries in so many of his songs) , do please be sure to read the bit about what happened when Tariq stood up for the playing of the national Anthem - which I can still remember ending cinema performances as late as 1968, the last time I experienced it, at a showing of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’)