I’m so sorry... but I don’t mean it, it isn’t my fault and no, you can’t sue me

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday Column

Why won’t anybody say sorry
properly any more?

The miserable behaviour of the police officers in the
Plebgate affair, questioned by the Home Affairs Committee, is just the latest
example of the strange apology crisis which has this country in its grip: too
few of the right sort; too many of the wrong sort.

Nobody is ever straightforwardly
sorry for what he  has done.

He may be ‘sorry if’ you were
upset, or inconvenienced or offended. But listen carefully. This is just a way
of telling you to stop being so sensitive. It is not an admission of fault.
Watch out for the treacherous little ‘if’, that gives the game away.

He doesn’t regret doing the thing
that angered you. But he hasn’t the courage to say so.  He just thinks it
is tiresome that you are making a fuss about it, and wants to shut you up by
faking contrition he doesn’t feel.

Then there is what I call the
Railway Apology. There are now millions of these worthless things in
circulation, like the old Zimbabwe dollar. They trickle out of station
loudspeakers in an unstoppable, computer-generated flow.

They result from some long-ago
market research, which showed that passengers thought they were due a bit of
penitence for the lateness and unreliability they constantly suffered.

They did, and they do, but what
they really wanted was some sort of readiness to put things right in future.
It’s no good saying sorry for doing something you intend to repeat almost
exactly, within a few hours, and then again and again for as long as you live,
or as long as your franchise lasts.

It’s also no good getting a robot
to do it for you. Real apologies stick in the throat, involve some shame and
humiliation, and are intensely personal.

Perhaps it’s because the Japanese
take apologies so seriously that their railways are so much better than ours.

Imagine the directors of some
wretched rail company lined up in their suits at a big London terminus, bowing
deeply to their customers as they promised to make amends for years of
profiteering, cheeseparing and neglect. You can’t? Nor can I.

Some of this is of course the
result of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s too little-known legal time
bomb, the delayed action decision to allow American-style ambulance-chasing
no-win, no-fee lawyers to operate in this country.

The 1990 Courts and Legal
Services Act (Section 58) cleared the way, followed in 1995 by the Conditional
Fee Agreements Regulations. These, not ‘Human Rights’ or ‘Health and Safety’,
are the source of the lawyer-infested culture in which we now dwell, in which a
simple, decent and sincere apology has been turned into a dangerous admission
of liability.

I am truly sorry about that. But
it’s not my fault.

A lovely
sign that Dave's in trouble

You can always tell when the
Prime Minister’s poll ratings are in trouble, for photographs of Samantha
Cameron, looking lovely, will soon appear in all the papers.

And this time she looked lovely
in her sari, left. But is this sort of thing really wise?

Our Indian community are a great
asset. But so are many others, from whom the Camerons might seek votes.

Will we see Mrs Cameron in a
hijab, attending a mosque? And why is it only the womenfolk who go all the way?

How about the premier in a
shalwar kameez?

Come to that, when things get
really bad, will  we discover that our head of government has quietly
slipped out of the back entrance in  a burqa?

I knew we were well on our way
down the plughole when, aged nine, I watched our last battleship, HMS Vanguard,
being towed out of Portsmouth to the breakers on a sultry afternoon in August
1960. She ran  aground on a mudbank, just  to make it worse.

Now poor old Pompey is to lose
its shipyards. This is sad for so many reasons. That battered old city has
suffered quite enough in the last hundred years. But there’s also this point.

Nobody is supposed to mention it,
but defence contracts have always been a quiet way of protecting our own
industries and jobs from foreign competition.

Everyone’s supposed to be in
favour of free trade, though you can be sure the French, the Germans and the
USA look after their own all the time. But we won’t do it. We abide by rules
our rivals mock. And so the dole queues lengthen, and we lose the skills to
recover.

How funny that we are being
accused of spying on the Germans from our hideous new embassy in Berlin’s
Wilhelmstrasse.

It reminds me of a much more
interesting unsolved case, revealed by that mysterious but authentic writer of
spy thrillers Alan Judd. He says a British diplomat was once caught spying on
us, on behalf of the European Union.

The wretched traitor’s reward was
to have his photograph secretly taken with Jacques Delors, then president 
of the European Commission.

Australia's
losing its past AND its future

I HAVE been spending a  few
precious days in Australia (my first visit in  20 years) and New Zealand
(my first visit).

It is still very moving for a
British person to experience these two civilisations, which are rooted in our
ideas of justice and liberty.

Would either place be so happy
and free had they been colonised instead by China, Japan, France or Germany? I
don’t think so. Yet the link is weakening.

Thrilling as it is for me
to  see Australian warships flying ensigns very similar  to our own,
and moving as  it is to see the Queen’s head on the coins, these
things  are vestiges.

The British elements are all old,
from the age of the floral clock, the war memorial, the silver sixpence, the
domed Guildhall and the bowling green. Now they have kilometres and dollars,
symbols of globalisation and of US influence. Political correctness has swept
away the old tough male Aussie  ideal, as I learned in detail when I
appeared on the local version of Question Time.

And in Sydney the other day,
Rupert Murdoch urged mass immigration on Australia, much as he has supported it
here. If he gets his way, Australia will become ‘the world’s most diverse
nation’, though Britain under the same policy must be competing  for that
dubious title.

I hope he doesn’t succeed. If Australia
just becomes another money-making multicultural desert of concrete and plastic,
its origins in our misty islands forgotten, it will lose much more than it
gains.

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