White Tie and Terror - Proof that we Gave in to the IRA

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

 

So this is what it is like to live in a defeated country. Your Head of State has to consort with one of the leaders of the most successful terror gang in the world, and pretend she likes it.

 

This grisly person sits at dinner in Windsor castle, nodding and smiling at the great and the good. How witty it was of somebody to seat him next to Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, so opposed to the death penalty when it is carried out by lawful states. 

 

And hardly anyone says anything, except two dignified figures, standing outside the Castle, one robbed of a son and the other of a sister,  who will be unable to forget the IRA’s views on the ‘Right to Life’ until they die, just as many others will never be able to forget their views on torture, habeas corpus and free speech.

 

Bitter, wasn’t it, that the day (stolen by McGuinness from the peaceable Irish President Michael D. Higgins), also featured military bandsmen, like those blown to pieces by the IRA in Regent’s Park, and Household Cavalry, like those blown to pieces, with their horses, in Hyde Park (a crime for which nobody has been punished, or ever will be now)?

 

Nobody ever imagined that President Higgins, or the huge majority of good and honourable Irish men and women, ever supported or endorsed the IRA murder of the Queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten. Of course they didn’t.   It was Martin  McGuinness who should have been laying a wreath on the Mountbatten tomb. That will be the day.

 

By the way, since this misery was so typical of the IRA’s ruthless disregard for life, we should never forget the other victims of that crime, casually erased from the earth by people who believed their cause was so noble that other people’s sons and mothers should die horribly in the process  - Paul Maxwell, a 15-year old boy from Fermanagh, Nicholas Knatchbull, the Earl’s 14-year-old grandson, and the 83-year old Dowager Lady Brabourne. Three others were terribly injured.

 

At the time Gerry Adams (McGuinness’s close ally and now a frequent guest at the White House) called the outrage an ‘execution’ (Shami Chakrabarti please note) in a creepy statement, while the IRA itself willingly took responsibility for it.

 

There is a silly myth that we somehow ‘defeated’ the IRA. Oh, really. Do the victors withdraw their troops? Do the victors dismantle their surveillance systems and haul down their flags? Do the victors release from just imprisonment scores of the enemy’s worst and most cunning killers and bombers? Do the defeated keep their arms and bombs, and receive what amounts to immunity from future prosecution?  Do the victors install the vanquished in well-paid ministerial jobs? Do the victors entertain the defeated enemy at dinner in Windsor Castle?  Don’t be silly.

 

The whole event gives a strange new meaning to the phrase ‘Her Majesty’s Pleasure’.  Once the whole country would have been enraged by this immoral, humiliating spectacle. It is a measure of what has happened to us that almost all of us just sat and took it. And we still dare to sneer at the French for the way they behaved when they were beaten by a much bigger foe.

 

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My view of Maria Miller is that what she needed above all was a train timetable and a road map. Both would have showed that the journey from Wimbledon to Basingstoke is so brief that she didn’t need a house in both places. The same is true of the journey between David Cameron’s London home and Witney. By the way, is it true he is now renting out that London home? If so, perhaps he could help reduce the deficit by paying back some of the vast housing claims he made in the old days.

 

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The jail book ban that's just fiction

 

In this age of teenage juries, majority verdicts, feeble judges and liberal bigotry, I’m increasingly worried that my enemies will one day manage to lock me up in prison.

 

Reading will be a useful way of getting through that, so I was personally interested in the noisy campaign claiming that prisoners are being deprived of books by the supposedly cruel and ruthless Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling. Should I join the protest?

 

Well, no. I’ve checked the facts and the claim just isn’t true. There’s a new restriction on parcels, which seems to me to be reasonably justified by worries about weapons and drugs. I really can’t see what interest Mr Grayling would have in stopping prisoners getting books. I wonder how many actually want books. 

 

The parcels rule may incidentally prevent the delivery of some books, but it simply isn’t a book ban. If it were, I repeat, I’d protest against it.

 

Prisoners can still get books. Not as easily as you or I can, but they can. The measure isn’t intended to stop them getting books, or having books, or reading books.

 

Heaven knows, I wish we could return to the sort of ordered, disciplined prisons where inmates at least had the peace and solitude to read. The reality, as I’ve seen for myself, isn’t much like that now. Those who claim to be concerned about prisoners should look into that instead.

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Well, now we’ve found out that Tamiflu was more or less useless, does it cross anyone’s mind to wonder if all those expensive much-hyped ‘antidepressants’ do what it says on the box? Given the drug companies’ efforts to hide their own research, it might be wise to be suspicious.

 

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And still people swallow the claim that crime is falling. This week, Parliament’s Public Administration Committee actually produced a report called ‘Caught red-handed: why we can’t count on police recorded crime statistics’ Readers of this column will already know most of what’s in it. 

 

But there’s one new thing. The ‘Crime Survey for England and Wales’, a glorified opinion poll generally treated as little short of holy writ, has quietly cut its sample from 46,000 adults to 35,000 adults, and from 4,000 children to 3,000 children.

 

Hitchens’s Law states that: ‘All politically important statistics will be fiddled’. Crime figures started dropping because they became politically important, so crime was redefined to exclude millions of crimes. The same thing, we now see, is happening with immigration figures where thousands of arrivals were simply ignored altogether. We didn’t log them, so they aren’t here. The Big Society in action.

 

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Heard for the first time, ‘partner’ as a verb. An expert on housing, on the radio, explaining why people were buying houses later in life, because they were ‘partnering’ later, Not long ago, they would have said ‘marrying’. Not long in the future, nobody will say ‘marrying’. It matters.