On Being Right Before Everyone Else Is

Hilarious to observe the coverage of the revelations about crime figures by the BBC – see their online text version: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30081682

 

The failure to record sex crimes is no doubt an important part of the story. But it is not the story, which is a general failure to record crimes of all kinds.  Perhaps the BBC cannot get properly outraged about any other sort of crime, whereas I am distressed by all crime.  It was also amusing to listen to discussions on the BBC Today programme, in which the very suggestion that the police themselves might be fiddling the figures for political reasons was repeatedly dismissed or minimised, and the pressure to suppress the truth attributed to ‘middle-managers’.

 

No doubt, middle managers play a part, but whom are they trying to please? In whose interests could it be to minimize the levels of crime in this country?

 

As in so many stories in which I have been years ahead of the gullible, somnolent flock which is modern British journalism, the truth eventually forces itself through the blanket of indifference and conformism.

 

I’ll no doubt return to this subject at length later but must spend most of today travelling,  so will just make the point that, yes, I told you so.

Here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/01/should-we-trust-official-crime-figures.html

 

and here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/11/the-fiddling-of-crime-figures-vindication-of-my-warnings.html

 

Will all the people who jeered at the time now apologize? Or admit that they were wrong? Or alter their scornful, dismissive attitude towards me? No.

 

I’ve been sneered at for so many things – for commuting by bicycle in the 1970s, when almost nobody did it (now the main danger is from fashionable swarms of other cyclists who think they are taking part in the Tour de France) for fighting against the Hard Left in the Labour Party in the 1980s, and objecting to leftist dominance of industrial reporting in the same period. My interest in Eastern Europe, and my desire to see it freed from Soviet dominance in the same era was regarded as eccentric.  Hilariously, I am nowadays accused of having been a supporter of that Soviet domination. Even my preference for railways over roads (in an era when railways and stations were still being closed rather than reopened and expanded) got me mocked. My opposition to rail privatization got me into trouble with right-wing dogmatists – and alerted me to their failings.   I criticized the Blair creature when he was universally praised and admired, saw the dangers of liberal interventionism as far back as Kosovo. I opposed the Iraq War from the start. I was among the first to notice that the police had ceased to be servants of the public. I opposed identity cards and pre-trial detention and criticised the Guantanamo prison-camp when it was still popular (I still remember the furious tide of e-mails I received for defending the presumption of innocence).

 

I was sceptical of the ‘Arab Spring’ from the beginning, noted the role of foreign jihadis in Syria in 2012, opposed the Libyan adventure from the start ( and dared to doubt atrocity propaganda about rapes which turned out to be without foundation) . I began to campaign for the restoration of grammar schools when the cause was regarded as hopeless, and have since seen the argument win wide acceptance everywhere accept among politicians. And I noted the complete divorce of the Tory Party from its natural supporters, and explored its consequences, many years ago. Currently I’m being sneered at for refusing to conform with the ignorant Russophobia of the mainstream, and of course for disagreeing with conventional wisdom about the non-existent ‘war on drugs’, and questioning the mass prscription of 'antidepressants'. Come back in a few years.