An article on 'First Things'

Some readers may be willing to pay the (modest) fee to read this article by me on the American Christian website 'First Things'. Some may not

 

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/a-church-that-was

 

 

We aren't fighting a 'war' - they're just a bunch of doped-up losers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Here we go again, politicians and media hand in hand, doing the work of the terrorists. They are called terrorists because their aim is to scare us into doing their will. Those who help them scare us, by exaggerating their power and importance, are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is stupid, and they should stop.

Supposed ‘experts’ speak in grave tones about ‘security’, an area about which you can say anything at all because nobody ever confirms or denies anything. The ‘security services’, costly and ineffectual as they are, are pleased to be given an importance they have not earned.

And they will be along in a minute demanding more powers to snoop into the lives of the innocent while continuing to fail to spot the guilty. Like anyone who is allowed to claim expenses while not being required to give details of how he spends the money, these people live by boasting and exaggeration, plus a bit of angry pomposity if anyone questions their real worth.

I especially dislike all this lofty stuff about how bad the Belgians are at tracking terrorists. Are we so much better? How will all this look if – and in truth we have no realistic way of predicting or preventing it – it is London next?

The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, says ludicrously that this is a ‘war’ and others bloviate and splutter along the same lines, instantly winning themselves starring roles on the 24-hour news feeds.

What nonsense. How the sordid criminals of the Brussels suburbs, who are common murderers of low morals and low intelligence, must grin like dogs and rejoice to be paid such a fat compliment.

Let Monsieur Valls visit a real war zone and see what modern munitions can do to a big city, such as Baghdad, where the shockwaves from bombs falling a mile away made the hospitals tremble so violently that women gave birth prematurely.

Let him see the enormous craters, the concrete buildings with their floors collapsed like a pile of pancakes, the general chaos. Let him observe how normal life ends, schools close, money loses its value, the shops empty as supplies dry up and the economy ceases to function.

If we were at war, life as we know it would come to a stop, and we would be set back decades, living in ruins without electricity.

That is war. They know all about it in Iraq, Syria, Libya and the other places we have ‘liberated’ recently. What we face is crime – stupid, vicious, cruel, but crime, actions which don’t deserve to be dignified or pumped up beyond their real significance.

When we have eventually found all there is to be known about the culprits, I predict that they will turn out to be very like the drug-addled petty crooks and lowlifes who killed Lee Rigby, who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo and who murdered more defenceless people in Paris last November.

Read this report from the BBC’s Secunder Kermani, which brilliantly describes the reality, quite different from our fictional picture of Wahhabi puritans directed from a bunker in Arabia: ‘One friend of the [Abdeslam] brothers who used to hang out there told me he would regularly see Brahim Abdeslam “watching IS videos, with a joint in one hand, and a beer in another”. He said Brahim would spout off radical statements but that no one took him seriously.

‘Another friend showed me a video from a Brussels nightclub of the two Abdeslam brothers on a night out with girls, drinking and dancing – this was February 2015, just months before they started to plan the attacks in Paris.

‘The network that the Abdeslam brothers had around them – based as much on personal loyalty, disenchantment and petty crime as radical ideology – would be key in helping Salah [the other brother] escape after the Paris attacks.’

This is not war. It is the action of deranged nobodies, trying to give their dead-end lives meaning with a grandiose cause.

If you want to know where to find them, just follow the smell of marijuana, the supposedly harmless drug which rots the reasoning powers of its users and which, when combined with radical Islam, explodes into red ruin.

The Big Dope Lobby and its many suckers and dupes constantly attack me for pointing out the dangers of the drug they want to legalise. They claim I blame everything on it. But what can I do?

This week I ask your pardon for referring to this drug twice in one column. For it is not just associated with Islamic terror. It is also linked with the most callous and cruel non-political crime.

The dreadful death of PC David Phillips was caused by Clayton Williams, a youth who smokes the drug so much that his Facebook picture showed him with a cannabis joint in his mouth.

Williams had been smoking this supposedly ‘soft’ drug on the evening he mowed down PC Phillips, the father of a young family – a horror Williams’s doped mind still seems unable to understand.

When will the twin lies, that there is a ‘war on drugs’ and that taking cannabis is a harmless, peaceable recreation, be exposed for the dangerous falsehoods they are?

Though I dislike most of his views, I have always been rather impressed by Barack Obama, a thoughtful and interesting man. He has also been dead right about Cuba, realising that the best way to finish the Castro nightmare is to end the US blockade and make it clear that island’s misery is the fault of its communist despots. He should do something similar in North Korea. A picture of him standing alongside Kim Jong Un might cancel out the embarrassing memory of his plainly unwanted surprise grapple with tango dancer Mora Godoy in Buenos Aires (right).

 

Once again you will have woken this morning to find that the clocks have been shoved forward by an hour. For me, and for many other early risers, this means weeks of something rather like jet-lag. But what’s it for? Why do we do it? Nobody actually knows. We just do it because we have done it for years. There’s no solid objective evidence that it does any good at all.

Wait a few weeks and the evenings will get lighter all by themselves. Yet we’re told absurdly that it provides more light. It doesn’t.

A Cherokee elder, baffled by the paleface habit of messing around with clocks, once asked: ‘What sort of person thinks that by cutting a foot off one end of a blanket, and then sewing it on to the other end, he gets a longer blanket?’

You won’t be surprised to learn that I am more interested by the gloomy bit of Easter – the betrayal by the secret police spy, the show trial, the cowardice of the government in the face of the mob, executing the innocent and releasing the murderer – than in the happy part. The really great myths, so-called, are not about something which once happened. They are about something that goes on happening all the time, and is happening now.

An interview with Andrew West of the ABC

Some of you may be interested by this interview I gave recently to Andrew West, the Australian broadcaster on the recent so-called 'Commission' on religious belief. 

 

https://radio.abc.net.au/programitem/pgZ961M3m6?play=true

Some of you may not be. 

The Big Questions on Migration, Forgiveness and The Sabbath

Some of you may be interested in this edition of BBC TV’s ‘The Big Questions’, broadcast from Southampton on Sunday 7^th February, in which I play a  small part.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b070nm4w

Some of you may not

Go ahead and vote Out... but we'll NEVER leave the EU

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Referendums are held for the benefit of politicians, not for the good of the country. Like the super-oily Harold Wilson 40 years ago, the eel-like David Cameron is trying to slither out of an internal party crisis.

He hopes to neutralise for ever the annoying faction of Tory MPs called 'Eurosceptics'. I personally don't know why he bothers.

If these people haven't the guts to leave the Tory Party, the most pro-EU organisation in Britain, then why should we believe that they have the guts to leave the EU itself? Yappity-yap, they have gone for years, occasionally sinking their boneless gums harmlessly into the trousers of one Tory leader or another.

But Mr Cameron likes a tight ship – that is one in which nobody disagrees with him or criticises him. It's what he's like, and he's in charge.

So it's gallons of liquid engineering all round, as he tries to slide out of the ancient problem: the Tory Party loves the EU and wants to stay in it. Most Tory voters hate the EU and wish we weren't in it.

One way to solve this would be for the Tory voters to stop voting Tory and to find another party. But, for reasons which Einstein and Freud themselves probably couldn't fathom, they won't do this. 

They prefer voting for people whose views they don't like, and who despise them back. This is, after all, England, where logic isn't rated highly.

So every few years we have a Tory Eurocrisis, and here's the latest one. You can count me out of it.

I'll be amazed if it results in a vote to leave. I'll be utterly astonished if we actually do leave. The best we can hope for is another round of 'negotiations', followed by a second vote in which we will be expected to come up with the right answer.

Ask the Irish, who were silly enough to reject the Lisbon Treaty. They were told they hadn't understood the question and made to vote again.

If this sort of thing goes on much longer, I might stop being so sweetly trusting of those who rule us, and turn cynical.

At least Dad Dave got something right 

Actually, I think the Prime Minister genuinely hoped to send all his children to a comprehensive state secondary school, at least for a while. I think it was a key part of his reinvention of himself as the New Blair, and I even think I know which school he had in mind.

But I think he lost his nerve, and I don't blame him. The school concerned was run by a superb head, who left, which is always a worry. And I'm also not sure that Mrs Cameron was as keen on the experiment as her husband.

So instead they sent their daughter to a very different state secondary, a wholly untypical girls-only school very similar to the grammars which both parties have more or less stamped out.

And now the Camerons are looking at a private school for their son. Good for them. They can afford it, and by doing so they free a place in a good state school for a poorer family. In this the Premier is commendably unlike the egalitarian fanatic Jeremy Corbyn, who split up with an earlier wife because she wanted their child to go to a grammar school and he didn't.

Mr Cameron wouldn't sacrifice his child for his politics, and quite right too.

But shouldn't he then sacrifice his politics for his child?

If the head of the Government cannot find a state secondary good enough for his son in all of Central London, then what about the rest of us?

Since the Thatcher era, governments have been trying to fix the comprehensive school system without addressing its real problem – which is that comprehensive schools don't work.

They never will. Charismatic heads, piles of cash, freedom from local authority control, every one of these panaceas fails to deal with the problem that selection by ability is best.

The private school system, to which the Camerons have reasonably turned, works entirely on this principle and succeeds for that reason.

So let's bring it back to the state sector, where it worked brilliantly. Did you know that new grammar schools are actually illegal? This must end.

There's nothing wrong with going private – if you can. It's denying to others what you seek for yourself that's wrong.

Don't moan, 50s women were happy with their lot

I quite enjoy these programmes – such as the new series called Back In Time For The Weekend – where families are introduced to the food, clothes and customs of another era.

But the first episode – about the 1950s – annoyed me because the wife and mother moaned so much about having to grapple (briefly) with the housework and about going to church. 

Look, if you can't take a joke you shouldn't have joined. Women really did live like this and were often (oddly enough) happy and contented. 

They might not have liked spending their days as wage-slaves in offices. They weren't like us. And our grandchildren may not be like us either. 

Try to understand that the past is a foreign country, and so is the future.

Lord Bramall's defiance over 'absurd' child abuse allegations

Good luck to Lord Bramall, who is giving the police a good biffing for their absurd, credulous treatment of child abuse allegations against him. It's their job to investigate, not prosecute or persecute.

But things have been even harder on another man of courage, the late Bishop George Bell, condemned by many media (with police assistance) following a solitary uncorroborated claim of child abuse first made nearly 45 years after the offence allegedly took place, and 37 years after the Bishop's death. 

Many journalists shamefully reported this allegation as if it were proven fact.

Well, an astonishing admission in the House of Lords by Paul Butler, the Bishop of Durham, shows that they shouldn't have done. He told fellow peers that the Church was by no means sure of Bishop Bell's guilt.

'If noble Lords read very carefully the statements that have been put out, they will see that there has been no declaration that we are convinced that this took place.'

If they're not sure, how can the media be?

Smoking in Hollywood films gives free advertising to Big Tobacco

I completely agree with moves to stop people smoking in Hollywood films. It is worth billions in free advertising to Big Tobacco. 

It's all very well going on about how stylish the stars of yesteryear looked as they inhaled clouds of burning paper and vegetable smoke. 

But people died (horribly) from doing just that. Humphrey Bogart was one of them (his ravaged body weighed less than 6st at the end). And the link between cigarettes and glamour is a big reason for keeping this disastrous habit popular among the young.

Yes, we do sometimes have to save people from themselves. It's not their own business. If they hurt or kill themselves, their families suffer terribly.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

An Appearance on Eric Metaxas's New York radio programme

Some of you may recall an interview which I posted here recently, in which I discussed many issues with the American commentator and author Eric Metaxas, biographer of the German Protestant Pastor murdered by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Eric was dismayed to hear of the smearing of Bishop George Bell, a close friend and collaborator of Bonhoeffer, whose international reputation is now perhaps greater than his reputation in England,  and kindly offered me airtime to discuss the Bell case.

 

Here is the resulting programme 

https://soundcloud.com/the-eric-metaxas-show/peter-hitchens

 

 

 

A Debate at Trinity College, Dublin, on the Validity of Theism

I spent a very enjoyable and sociable Monday evening in Dublin debating the validity of Theism at the Metafizz, a fine society at Trinity College in that city, one of the loveliest in these islands.

Here you may watch the discussion (which ended in a vote so narrow that it really counts as a draw)

http://www.michaelnugent.com/2016/01/19/theism-debate-peter-hitchens/?utm_content=buffer5d568&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Here is an observer's account of the evening

http://randompublicjournal.com/2016/01/18/why-theism-isnt-a-reasonable-philosophical-stance/

And here, for those of you found it captivating and brilliant, as I did,  but thought it slipped by too quickly, and wished to revisit it, is the text of Patrick Masterson’s contribution, which I asked him to send me afterwards. This, in my view, is the sort of thing which Universities are really for, the soft, alluring glint in the darkness of real, profound knowledge, lightly worn and elegantly expressed, enough to attract even lightweights such as me towards thought and study:

‘PHILOSOPHICAL REASONABLENESS OF THEISM

Chairperson, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Thank you for inviting me to address your renowned Metaphysical Society. As I am in my 80th year it is very courageous of your auditor to invite me to address you on the reasonableness of anything especially the reasonableness of Theism. However, I will try.

  Until the 17th century there was no great problem about the reasonableness of Theism. The affirmation of God was pretty universally accepted. It was the fool who said in his heart there is no God.

   Two great intellectual movements of the 17th century changed this. These were the modern scientific revolution and the modern philosophical revolution inaugurated by Descartes. The one concentrated on explaining everything in terms of mathematically modelled experimentally verifiable hypotheses, the other on grounding all meaning and value exclusively in human terms. These two viewpoints have generated influential philosophical objections to the reasonableness of Theism. I will offer a few critical words about each of them and then a few positive remarks about the philosophical reasonableness of Theism.

   Scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton inaugurated a new conception of scientific knowledge --- a less speculative and more practical experimental one. It sought an intrinsic understanding of the material world in terms of itself rather than an extrinsic one in terms of a Creator. The 19th century Darwinian theory of evolution greatly reinforced this approach.

   When such empirical science is adopted as the ultimate and exclusive form of genuinely scientific knowledge it becomes a philosophy or ideology. As an ideology its form of argument is essentially reductionist. What occurs later in time and is more complex is to be explained in terms of what is prior in time and is physically more basic. Ultimately all explanation, particularly of biological and mental phenomena, is to be provided in terms of basic, mathematically formulated, laws of physics and chemistry.

    This is fundamentally a form of reductionist materialism. It rejects the philosophical reasonableness of Theism.

   However, I do not believe that such reductionism is the ultimate and exclusive model of explanation. It assumes that any entity is no more than the sum of its physical parts operating basically according to universal physical laws of motion ---whether the entity considered is the solar system, a flower blossoming, an animal fleeing, or Socrates deciding to remain in prison.

  Such a view overlooks the undeniable fact that conscious subjects and their mental lives constitute a distinctive order of reality not adequately describable by physics and chemistry. They are emergent novel realities. They have their own distinctive laws and forms of activity which are neither reducible to nor deducible from the physical properties of the entities in which they subsist and from which they are emergent. They exercise causality by generating meaning as well as by physical motion.

   The question inevitably arises ‘How must reality be understood and evaluated if it cannot be understood exclusively in terms of mathematically formulated scientific materialism.  Einstein had framed on a wall in his study: ‘Not everything that can be counted matters and not everything that matters can be counted.’  

  The other and contrary, modern challenge to the philosophical reasonableness of Theism is the radical humanism deriving from the Cartesian turn inwards to human subjectivity rather than outwards to a divine Creator for the source of all meaning and value. This approach was   significantly developed in the 18th century by the philosophy of Kant. He maintained that we know things only as they appear to us and never as they are in themselves and that we ourselves rather than God invent the moral code which we adopt.

This radical humanism finds contemporary expression in forms of Existentialism, Phenomenology and Linguistic Philosophy. The only world which we know, it is claimed, is one totally correlative to our conscious subjectivity and language. Nothing can exist as objectively knowable apart from its correlation to our consciousness. The only absolute is human consciousness to which everything we know is correlative in one manner or another. To claim to know about anything as it exists independently of our consciousness of it is an illusion. ‘Consciousness and language enclose the world within ourselves … We are in consciousness or language as in a transparent cage. Everything appears to be outside yet it is impossible to get out.’ (Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude,p.6).

 This radical humanism which interprets all objective meaning and value as strictly correlative to human subjectivity clearly poses a fundamental objection to the reasonableness of theism. For theism affirms that God exists independently of any relation to human consciousness.

   However, I believe such humanism is not ultimately sustainable. For the phenomena of which we are aware in experience disclose more than a human viewpoint or appearance. What we know is the intrinsic intelligibility of independently existing things even if only inadequately. Our knowledge of reality is discovered not simply invented. To be and be intelligible is to be more than a correlate of human consciousness. Paradoxically, an effective objection to such absolute humanism is provided by the other mainspring of modern thought namely empirical science. For empirical science provides us with knowledge of reality which cannot be simply a correlate of human consciousness. For it provides knowledge of the physical universe as it was prior to the existence of any human life or human consciousness.

  Thus I think that neither of the two main philosophical objections to the reasonableness of Theism constitutes a conclusive objection since they each leave fundamental features of reality unaddressed.

  Finally, a few words in positive support of the philosophical reasonableness of Theism.

  Undoubtedly most people affirm the existence of God on the basis of personal religious faith. Their religious affirmation of God is not the conclusion of a rational argument. However, reason too can lead us towards this affirmation. 

    I think we sometimes get into muddles about reason because we adopt too restrictive a view of it. We tend to think of rationality primarily as a matter of drawing irresistible conclusions from self-evident propositions. We have mathematics in mind as the model of rationality. On this narrow view of reason neither the existence of God nor indeed his non-existence can be established.

   A more adequate view of reason is one which sees it as a liberating capacity which enables me to live in a specifically human way as a communicating openness --- to the world --- to other people --- and to myself.

   The light of reason opens me out beyond my bodily limitation to participate in a life of scientific enquiry and cultural achievement. I can progress from knowing particular truths to knowledge of scientific laws and theories and finally to marvel and wonder at the intelligibility and truthfulness of reality which grounds my scientific endeavor. It is indeed remarkable that through us the material universe comes to know itself, discovers the world of values, and can ponder its own ultimate meaning and value.

     Likewise, in the practical sphere, reason enables me to develop from mere self-interest, through mild benevolence, to ethical acknowledgement of the absolute moral demands which another person can make upon me. I can even come to love another person selflessly through loving her intrinsic, more than physical, goodness.

  Again, I can marvel at the various levels of rational questions I can put to myself in seeking to understand myself. As Kant observed, reason enables me to ask; ‘What can I know? ‘What must I do? and ‘For what may I hope?’--- each level involving its own type of rational discourse.

  In a word, through the life of reason we can come to live under the authority of truth, beauty, justice and love. I believe that both theists and atheists can agree about this conception of an authentic human life governed by these requirements of reason. They can co-operate in promoting it, whatever its ultimate significance.

   However, it seems to me that the affirmation of God as a personal creative principle of unrestricted truth, beauty, justice and love makes ultimate and dependable sense of this conception of the life of reason in a way that atheism does not. For it grounds and validates as most ultimately real and dependable these values which are the life-blood of reason.

    Atheism on the other hand is committed, I think, to viewing these values, however heroically, as encompassed fundamentally within a context of contingent inexplicable fact. They are disclosed as in no way necessary or ultimately vindicated. They just happen to have occurred or evolved accidentally and seem destined, as empirical science predicts, to peter out in a silent inanimate universe. As Bertrand Russell put it: ‘All the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system.’ If human intelligence owes its ultimate origin either to mindless matter or an intelligent Creator it seems odd to use this same intelligence to choose the former as a more reasonable explanation of itself than the latter.

  The affirmation of God as an infinite personal centre of dependable meaning and value does not dispel the mysteriousness of being. Indeed it even deepens it and accentuates agonizing issues such as suffering and evil. It is a profoundly self-involving affirmation unlike the impersonal deliverance of mathematics or physics. It expresses a hopeful validation of a rational concern for meaning and value and a repudiation of the despairing suggestion that the life of reason originated mindlessly and is destined to perish in post-human oblivion.

  It is along these lines that I think rational space can be created for the philosophical reasonableness of Theism. Such philosophical affirmation of God, as even Kant enthusiastically argued, can be reliably affirmed as a personal and genuinely rational hope in the assured ultimate significance, of meaningful enquiry, moral endeavor, and unselfish love.

   This rational expectation is not logically inescapable. But neither is it just an exercise in self- delusion. It is a genuinely rational interpretation of the ultimate significance of reality in general and of human existence in particular. It affirms the real coincidence of what is inherently valuable with how things ultimately and fundamentally are. It maintains that reality is intrinsically valuable, ultimately characterized by values such as truth, goodness and love rather than by contingent inexplicable occurrences. As Wittgenstein observed ‘If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being so.’

   Such an interpretation of the ultimate significance of reality is one to which each person is challenged to respond in their individual circumstance. Thus it can make sense of enigmatic utterances such as ‘love is stronger than death’ when, for example, one finds it hard to accept that the intrinsic goodness of a deceased beloved partner is reduced without residue to a handful of ashes. Such intimation of the intrinsic more than physical goodness of a beloved is an existential sign or cipher of the more than transitory reality of truth, goodness and love. I believe that the affirmation of God as infinite, creative, personal love deciphers and vindicates rationally such finite existential ciphers of the ultimate and dependable reality of these values which are the lifeblood of reason. So at least I have found to be the case.’

 

The bearded pacifists are right...Trident IS a waste of money

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Trident may seem to David Cameron to be a very useful weapon for attacking Jeremy Corbyn. But does it keep Britain safe?
Actually, no. There is a good, hard, patriotic argument for getting rid of this unusable, American-controlled monstrosity before it bankrupts us and destroys our real defences. And lazy, cheap politics shouldn’t blind us to these facts. I write as someone who has nothing against nuclear weapons. I used to deliberately wreck the meetings of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s, by standing up at the back and asking awkward questions.
I was howled down at my local Labour Party (to which I then belonged) for supporting the deterrent against the Corbyn types (he may even have been there) who wanted us naked in the face of Soviet power.
When I went to work as a reporter in the Soviet empire, I was greatly amused by a visit to Kurchatovsk, HQ of Stalin’s nuclear bomb laboratories. All along the main street were witty banners jeering at the folly of giving up your weapons when your enemy kept his.
How I wished I could have shown them to British ban- the-bombers who (though they were shifty about this) always had a sneaking sympathy for the Soviet Union – as it then was – and scorn for the USA. In those days, vast concentrations of Soviet troops, tanks and planes sat in Germany ready to move westwards. I went to look at them. They were no myth.
Our nuclear bombs neutralised this incessant blackmailing threat. They made sure that if those armies moved one inch beyond their territory, it would end in Armageddon. So they never did move, and the threat was empty. It worked.
Then the facts changed. And, as that clever man John Maynard Keynes once drily remarked: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’
The Soviet Union collapsed. I watched it happen, before my eyes. Its armies and navies melted away and its empire dissolved. Modern Russia, for all the silly nonsense about a ‘New Cold War’, would be our friend if we let her be, and has no interest in attacking us or any conceivable reason for doing so.
The USA, meanwhile, has ceased to be the arsenal of freedom and has become instead the headquarters of a bumbling neo-liberal policy whose main achievement has been to turn the Middle East into a war zone, which we could easily stay out of if we wanted to.
The principal threat to this country’s prosperity, liberty and independence has been, for many years, the European Union, whose agents work tirelessly inside our borders to subjugate us, our laws, economy, trade and territorial seas, to foreign governance. Trident is useless against this, just as it is against the mass migration now transforming our continent, and against the terrorism of the IRA (to whom we surrendered, despite being a nuclear power) and Islamic State.
WE do not even control Trident, relying on the USA for so much of its technology and maintenance that we could never use it without American approval. How independent is that?
Meanwhile the Army is visibly shrivelling, demoralised, ill-equipped, historic regiments hollowed out and merged, experienced officers and NCOs leaving. Something similar is happening to the Navy, saddled with two vast joke aircraft carriers whose purpose is uncertain, even if they ever get any aircraft to carry. The RAF is a little better off, but not much.
This is caused mainly by the giant bill for renewing Trident, which will probably end up more than £100 billion, at a time when we are heavily in debt already. If there were any obvious or even remote use for it, then maybe this could be justified. But there isn’t. We could easily maintain a small arsenal of H-bombs or nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, just in case, for far less.
It is not just bearded pacifists who doubt its use. Senior civil servants, serious military experts, senior officers in all branches, privately and in some cases publicly reckon it is simply not worth the money. Even if we decide to go ahead with it, I confidently predict we will have to cancel it (at great cost) when the long-awaited economic crisis finally strikes.
It would be a great shame if we failed to have a proper debate about this, just because it was easier to take cheap shots at the Labour Party. A grown-up country, and a grown-up government, would address it now.

The strangely bewitching face and voice of Jennifer Lawrence, with her cat-like presence, make her new film Joy well worth seeing. But seldom has a film been so wrongly named. In the end, it’s more or less a traditional Hollywood story of a lone individual’s triumph over adversity. But there’s little joyous about the portrayal of a bitterly broken family and devious business partners.

 

Only a society that had lost all sense of taste and proportion would mark the death of David Bowie as if some great light had gone out. He wasn’t Beethoven or Shakespeare. He wasn’t even Elvis. And it’s interesting that the Cultural Elite so easily forgave him for openly and explicitly praising the Nazis.
In general, I find, they’ll forgive everything provided you’re in favour of promiscuous sex and lots of illegal drugs. I was also fascinated to see Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, joining in the Bowie-mania and talking of ‘relishing what he was, what he did’.
Does that include the drugs and the sex? This odd praise came from the leader of a church that has recently been trashing the reputation of the late Bishop George Bell, a truly distinguished man of huge integrity and courage, by needlessly publicising an unproven allegation of child abuse against him.

How I shall miss Alan Rickman, his beautiful command of English and a voice he played like a musical instrument.
But how is it that this fine Shakespearean actor could have come from a council estate in Acton, son of a factory worker? It wouldn’t happen now. In those days we still had Direct Grant schools, alongside grammar schools, the great open staircase by which talented children could and did go all the way to the top. When he was at Latymer Upper School, 80 per cent of the boys at this superb establishment were from poor homes. Now it’s mostly fee-paying, but still tries hard to find places for the less well-off.
Direct Grants, private schools which took huge numbers of state pupils, involved effective co-operation between state and private sectors – a thing all modern governments claim they want.
So why were they abolished? And why aren’t they now restored?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

An interview of P.H. by Eric Metaxas

Here is the video version of an interview I gave last summer (in St Aldate's Church*, Oxford) to the American author Eric Metaxas, who has published a powerful biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Protestant leader and opponent of Hitler, murdered by the Nazis. Bonhoeffer, incidentally,was a close friend of the late Bishop George Bell of Chichester, whose reputation I am currently trying to defend, after the Church of England publicised anonymous allegations of child abuse made against him many years after his death. The interview is mainly, but by no means entirely, devoted to topics linked to religion. 

 

http://socratesinthecity.com/

 

 

*St Aldate must be the most obscure saint in the calendar. Almost nothing is known of him. His name now dignifies an Oxford street, the main southern route into the heart of Oxford,  formerly known as Fish Street - a name probably not grand enough for Christ Church, the grand and wealthy college which dominates it. TV dramas abnout Oxford usually mistakenly refer to it as 'St Aldgate's. 

Notes on Vigilance. Should we be more worried about Saudi, and less worried about ISIS?

My trains returned to ‘normal’ this morning, which means that the ‘train manager’ now once again urges us commuters twice daily to ‘report suspicious behaviour’ . Apart from telling us (after it’s too late to get off if you’re on the wrong train) where we are going in tedious detail, or shouting at us about ticket restrictions, they love this stuff about ‘suspicious behaviour’.

Of course, there never is any. Then only thing that would make regular passengers suspicious on my line would be a train that arrived on time, and didn’t stop in Reading so long that the becalmed passengers became liable for council tax.

Fat businessmen who *don’t* shout into their mobile phones, and football fans who *don’t* sing loudly and tunelessly and laugh mirthlessly on Saturday evenings would also be suspicious.   

But I digress.

The reason I am annoyed by this appeal for vigilance is that I think it is propaganda, designed, by constant repetition,  to make us think we live in dangerous times (sometimes the warning is prefaced by the words ‘in view of recent heightened security alerts’ ). No doubt there is a possibility of terrorism. Who can deny it?  

 

And I think a certain level of vigilance is always reasonable. I have done since the days when IRA bombs in London were quite common (one, in Harrods,  killed a colleague of mine on the old ‘Daily Express’, mainly because he bravely did his job and went towards the danger to see what was going on).

 

From time to time one would hear the detonations, and worry about everyone one knew and cared about, until one knew they were safe.  That’s why I recently chided an idiot for leaving his tatty unlabelled backpack unattended for long minutes in a station concourse while he went outside to smoke. I’d asked everyone nearby if the thing was theirs and nobody had claimed it. If he hadn’t turned up at that minute I would have ‘alerted the authorities’ as asked.  

But in truth the danger is pretty small. And I am tired of it being exaggerated to get us to give up our freedoms, and to submit to searches, surveillance and bureaucracy.

I’m also tired of the way so many of my colleagues fail to see that terrorism is called terrorism for a reason. The whole point of it is to make  us frightened of a force that actually isn’t that powerful.  Simon Jenkins is quite right to refer to our ‘nationalising’ of episodes of murder which – horrible as they are  - don’t threaten our national existence, our general security or our economy. This is exactly what the perpetrators wish us to do, to treat their wretched, shameful crimes as military actions and dignify them as if they were major strategic blows. We can mourn the deaths of their victims perfectly well without doing this.

 

We also elevate the standing and importance of these petty crooks by going on and on about how these crude killers are ‘trained’. What training, precisely, does it take, to murder unarmed civilians in a concert hall or on a beach or in a restaurant, when you have a sub-machine gun and they have nothing? And in answer to Douglas Murray’s claim that the Charlie Hebdo killers showed evidence of training by the way they bypassed the magazine’s building security, even bank-robbers, often not the brightest of people, know how to do this sort of thing. They don't need to be trained in Syria. 

These terrorists can be relied upon not to attack actual soldiers on duty or military installations, for they know that if they did they would be cut to pieces.

The main characteristic that these people need is not 'training' but a total lack of normal human kindness and mercy.

This is why it is so significant and worthy of inquiry that those involved (as I have repeatedly shown here with incontrovertible facts) are almost always long term drug abusers, out of their minds on potent psychotropics (I have heard it suggested that the ISIS killers in the Middle East are also drugged, and find it easy to believe,  but I have yet to see hard evidence of this).

But rather than examine this, we use the activities of these people as a pretext for ‘security’ measures and irrelevant military adventures in the Middle East, whose main purpose seems to be to entangle us in permanent conflict.

But with whom and for whom? We rightly gag with disgust and shout in horror at the beheadings and other murders of ISIS, but the behaviour of the British government after Saudi Arabia’s mass executions at the weekend has been nearly as muted as our demands for law and freedom in China.

 

Many British media outlets initially and understandably concentrated on the fact that one of the 47 executed was Adel al-Dhubaiti, the murderer of a BBC cameramen Simon Cumbers and would-be murderer of the reporter Frank Gardner. This is an important story, especially since Mr Gardner has declined invitations to forgive the wholly unrepentant al-Dhubaiti.

I think he is quite right to take this view. I am amazed at the current view that Christianity requires unconditional forgiveness of those who trespass against us, even if they show no sign of remorse. I don’t believe anyone living at the time of the Gospels would have even imagined forgiveness without repentance, any more than they could have imagined dawn without the sunrise.  

I would not expect to be forgiven by anyone for something I hadn’t repented of, and I expect the same.

And The Gospel according to St Luke  (Chapter 17, verses three and four) seems to support me. Christ says : ‘Take heed to yourselves: if thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him and *if he repent* forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a  day, *and seven times in a day turn again to thee saying ‘I repent’*, thou shalt forgive him’. (emphases, of course, my own)

But again, I digress.

It’s an interesting part of the story, but I suspect that the great majority of those shot or beheaded by the Saudi state on Saturday were not unrepentant murders. And the execution by Riyadh of a government opponent and Shia Cleric (in a very Sunni country),  Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a blatantly political execution, seems to have been much more typical of this mass slaughter. It has provoked fury in Iran, led to a breach in diplomatic relations between Tehran and Riyadh,  and brought the region closer to open international conflict than it has been for years.  Who knows how it will end?

Shouldn’t we be much, much more interested in this than in the headline-seeking ISIS film?

Shouldn’t be we, in general, be much more interested in and perturbed by Saudi Arabia than we are? And perhaps a bit less focussed on Islamic State, whose power and wealth are so much less? Oddly, ISIS wants our attention. Saudi Arabia, normally closed to western media and so uncommunicative it makes the Sphinx look garrulous, definitely does not.  Shouldn’t this make us wonder whether we are getting this right?

The initial reaction of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was very telling. Its press office issued a ‘line’ on Saturday stating that  

‘The UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and in every country.  The death penalty undermines human dignity and there is no evidence that it works as a deterrent.

‘The Foreign Secretary regularly raises human rights issues with his counterparts in countries of concern, including Saudi Arabia. We seek to build strong and mature relationships so that we can be candid with each other about those areas on which we do not agree, including on human rights.’

Apart from its generally limited and understated nature, and its obvious desire not to single out Saudi Arabia for particular criticism, nature, this is an astonishing thing to have said.

There have, it is true,  been subsequent, fuller statements* as the inadequacy of this response has become more and more obvious. But this was the first reaction of the government department charged with Britain’s standing abroad.

I am seeking clarification, but this ‘line’ appears to mean that the FCO  is equally exercised about the execution after due process in a free country with separation of powers, invigilated by a free press, of a convicted murderer in, say, Texas as it is by the political snuffing out of a government critic in a despotic unfree monarchy, Saudi Arabia. Can this really be true? But what else does the very categorical statement, with its use of 'all' and 'every', otherwise mean? 

*A junior and obscure foreign Office Minister, Tobias Ellwood, was produced on Sunday to say  

‘I am deeply disturbed by the escalation in tensions in the last 24 hours in the Middle East.

The UK is firmly opposed to the death penalty. We have stressed this to the Saudi authorities and also expressed our disappointment at the mass executions.

We have discussed with the authorities in Riyadh, and expect that Ali Al-Nimr and others who were convicted as juveniles will not be executed. The UK will continue to raise these cases with the Saudi authorities.

We are deeply concerned to hear of the attack yesterday on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. It is essential that diplomatic missions are properly protected and respected.

There are those who will wish to exploit the situation and raise sectarian tensions higher. This would be against the wishes of the vast majority of those in the region. I urge all parties in the region to show restraint and responsibility.’

The coverage of the Islamic State video on Sunday night and Monday morning must have delighted the cynics who made it. And while we let these not-very-clever manipulators make our flesh creep with their filmed murders of helpless prisoners, and their vague threats, we ( as a nation and a government) seem utterly unable to make sense of our national relationship with Saudi Arabia. It's time this became important.