A Interview with a Polish Website

I recently gave an interview to the Polish website Prosto Z Mostu

 

My Polish-speaking readers may see it here

 

http://prostozmostu.net/swiat/hitchens-cameron-chce-unii-do-gor-ural

 

But those of you without Polish may see the English version below:

 

 

 

Let���s start with current affairs. Are you surprised after the last elections?

***Very much so. I had believed the Conservative Party was so decrepit that it could never win another election. I���ve also found that opinion polls are usually broadly right, if you read them carefully.  I was wrong.  I���ve tried to explain, in various blogs, why I think I might have been wrong, but I think the very careful targeting of certain seats, and unscrupulous propaganda uncritically swallowed by most of the media achieved this unlikely victory.  The first of these was made possible by very successful fundraising among the super-rich, as big money can keep alive parties which are otherwise dead. Since 1997, there has been a tendency on the part of the great bulk of the British media to approve of one party, which is awarded the title of ���the centre���. This title was granted to the Conervat9ves after they adopted a broadly left-liberal, pro-EU, politically correct programme under Mr Cameron. Labour *might* have won it back had they chosen the establishment candidate, David Miliband, as leader. But by choosing Ed Miliband, who actually dared to have some opinions, they lost all chance of media backing.

 

 

British electoral system - First Past The Post ��� was widely criticized, mostly by the UKIP. In the same time in Poland, Kukiz���s Movement, which is quite similar in rhetoric to UKIP, seems to become soon the third or even second power in our politics. Their most important pledge is imposing FPTP instead of existing now proportional system. Which one is better?

****FPTP is good in two ways. It allows strong decisive government and tough discipline opposition from a second party which knows it could be the government tomorrow and so is forced to be realistic about its opposition. And it allows the electorate to throw out an unpopular government. Neither of these things is possible in PR systems. I think they suit our country, with its strong adversarial tradition in law, debate and politics, and its potent class system. I wouldn���t necessarily recommend it to anyone else. I think UKIP���s support for PR is baffling  and opportunist. To get a British exit from the EU, they need an overall majority in the Commons. With PR, they will never get this. With FPTP, they might, or a future party might. Perhaps they have been diverted from their political aim by the joys of official recognition

 

 

Is the Conservative Party���s intention to go out from the European Union?

***Of course not. The Conservative Party has from the start been in favour of British integration into the European project.  All its major leaders since Macmillan have been keen supporters (including Margaret Thatcher for most of her political life) David Cameron wants an EU extending to the Urals, and has said so. Some Tory MPs feel the need, from time to time, to pretend to be patriotic. But it���s just posing, and not to be taken seriously.

 

Are they not Eurosceptics?

***Indeed they are, but so what?. A ���Eurosceptic��� is a person who criticises the EU when he is out of office, or at elections, but supports it when he is in office. It is a silly expression anyway. What is there to be ���sceptical��� about? The thing exists. You can be in it or out of it, and that���s the choice.  You might as well be ���sceptical��� about breakfast, or the Moon.

 

You are personally against the idea of referendum in/out. Why?

***Because plebiscites (except in Switzerland where voters rather than the state decide the question, the timing and the conduct) are devices by which governments legitimise with votes what they want to do anyway. They are never fair, or fairly conducted. If by any chance they go wrong, they are soon afterwards re-run and reversed. This referendum is a baited trap. Once it has happened, and the pro-EU side has won, opponents of the EU in Britain will be told that the issue is now settled for good.

 

 We all have firmly in our heads some labels concerning British politics. Right-wing, conservative values and strong opposition to the European Union ��� that���s kind of Tories��� image. Would you say something instead?

***I cannot imagine how the Tories, in practice one of the most socially, morally, educationally and left-wing parties in Europe, manage to sustain this image. It���s much as if people still expected London to be full of people in bowler hats, groping around in smog.  One visit to Britain should be enough to dispel this outdated rubbish. The Tory Party has always been a cynical organisation for gaining office at all costs. At times this may have given it a conservative appearance, but surely not in living memory? The Thatcher era was one of economic and social liberalism, not conservatism.

 

 

What about Labour Party? Left-wing, welfare state, help for poor?

***Labour���s original welfare agenda was long ago accepted by all major parties, and it is left with very little to say about this, apart from making false claims that the Tories are dismantling the Heath Service and the welfare state, which fewer and fewer people believe. It has become the party of the metropolitan bohemians, but again, their sexual, social and educational politics have now been adopted by the Tories.

 

 

The same evil?

*** More or less .Increasing state funding of political parties, supported by broadcasting rules which favour existing parties and discriminate against new ones, plus the huge donations of the super-rich, have enabled both these parties to survive long after they had lost any reason to exist. They are now just career-ladders for professional politicians. If either of them tried to raise money by collecting it on the street a)they would not have enough people to do the collecting and b) nobody would give them anything. Each British election is a sort of street theatre in which the electorate are persuaded to legitimise one or other of these unrepresentative, internally dead organisations. The ballot box is one of the few sacred things left in our culture. Truly sacred things are scorned.

 

 

Is the political collapse of Britain connected to the moral one?

***In a dialectical way, they fuel each other. And don���t forget the economic collapse as well.

 

I���m asking, because you wrote ���The Abolition of Britain���, which describe moral bankruptcy of the UK. How did it come?

***You���ll have to read the book. I can���t summarise more than 300 pages here. But our lunatic entry into the First World War is probably the single greatest cause.

 

Church of England is interesting part of this story. Your church is going more and more liberal: they established priestly and episcopal ordination of women, majority of the clergy is in favour of blessing same-sex relationships or even introducing same-sex marriages. How you can connect it with your conservative views on that matters?

***I���ve no objection to female clergy, some of whom are conservative and much-valued. Same-sex marriage is a tiny non-issue, set beside the general acceptance of divorce and  of remarriage after divorce, and the almost total collapse of lifelong marriage. The church���s failure to defend marriage (described in detail in ���Abolition of Britain���) was the thing that utterly destroyed it. Penitence-free new liturgies and baby-talk Bibles, plus modern music, are awful, but they are symptoms of a deeper loss.

 

 

20 years ago, English criminal in America Nicholas Ingram was waiting for execution. Many people campaigned for clemency ��� the Bishop of Canterbury among them. You were on the other side.

***So should the Archbishop of Canterbury have been. The 39 Articles of the Church (Article 37 specifically) support the execution of heinous murderers ( as does the Roman Catholic catechism, the last time I looked) , and Ingram was a heinous and unrepentant murder, whose guilt was in no doubt at all.

 

 

 Actually, why aren���t you Catholic?

***Because I am English, and of my generation, and Roman Catholicism seems to me to be wholly foreign, also because, while I regard Roman Catholics as friends and allies in the struggle against the modern world, I personally find aspects of Roman Catholic worship and doctrine difficult to accept or support. I think the Anglican compromise between the Catholic and the Reformed versions of our faith is actually a very sensible and thoughtful one.

 

If we are talking about religion: great British writer ��� Gilbert Chesterton once said that the coming era would be a time of religious wars. Don���t we see beginnings of serious religious conflict in the Europe?

***Try as I may, I cannot become a Chesterton enthusiast. On this, as on many things, he seems to me to have been wrong. But he wrote some good poems.

 

 

Although, we hear almost every day about some incidents connected to the Muslim community, political elites seem to be not very critical of them?

***That would depend on where you were. The USA, where Muslim immigration is small, tends to have many neoconservatives who are very militant on the subject, and their allies in Europe are the same. The trouble is that neo-conservatives are also supporters of open borders and unrestricted immigration, so, in Europe but not the US, they are ensuring the growing power of Islam in formerly Christian societies. I think this may be why they are so obsessed with terrorism and the Islamic State. They can give themselves the illusion of being ���tough���, while actually supporting the very process that will (in my view) eventually make Islam supreme in much of Europe, quite peacefully and legitimately ��� the growth of the Muslim population.

 

Maybe I���m not objective, but I feel that even when someone criticize mass immigration it���s about Poles or Romanians, not Muslims. UKIP rhetoric is pretty like that. Are the European immigrants bigger problem or that���s simply kind of political correctness?

***I think British people are worried about all mass immigration. The problem is that they have understood the nature of the problem far too late. It has happened. I suspect it is easier for UKIP to talk about migrants from Europe because they can then not be accused of racial bigotry.

 

 

Thank you very much, the last word is up to you.

*** I think I���ve said quite enough, thanks.