Striving Officiously to Keep Alive?

One or two readers seized on remarks I made in a recent posting to recruit me to various views on assisted dying, etc. Mr ‘R’, for instance, wrote (first quoting me)  :’ “This, in my view , is because the NHS is a sort of Anti-Death League , which mainly intervenes in people’s bodies with scalpel or drug (or both) when they are already very ill, and is very much influenced by modern society’s unwillingness to accept that death is the natural end of life, which we must all undergo.” Which is exactly what the Liverpool Care Pathway prevents - unnecessary and invasive treatment to people who are dying. Unfortunately, this government as a result of a campaign by your sister paper is removing.’

 

I think the problem with the ‘care pathway’ is that a scheme with humane, benign intent, in the hands of a rigid, target-driven bureaucracy heavily (and terrifyingly) influenced by incentive payments,  became in practice something quite different – hence (for example) the many episodes remarked upon (I think) by Lady Neuberger in which patients were wrongly denied water, a denial which is very close to torture when applied to a conscious person. Something had gone very seriously wrong, and I think the campaign by the Mail on Sunday's  sister paper was entirely justified and will result in more kindness in the world, rather than less. This is generally a laudable objective in any moral system.

 

But I do concede that this business of keeping people alive is very complicated indeed, and I was interested to see one contributor quoting Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘The Latest Decalogue ‘ Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive officiously to keep alive’ in *support* of the idea that we might make less effort to keep the serioulsy ill from dying. I’m not at all sure that was what Clough himself  (whose ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’ is one of my favourite poems) intended us to understand, though he was writing about very different times. By the way, I’d also recommend the same author’s ‘Through a Glass darkly’ as a thoughtful examination of the problems of religious  belief.

 

The whole tone of the ‘Decalogue’ poem (there is more than one version, by the way)  is a bitterly sarcastic attack on the dubious morals of his own hypocritical late 19^th Century (Interesting question:  was that era *worse* than our own because they knew that they were being hypocrites, or *better* than our own because they knew they were being hypocrites?)  

 

One version runs

 

‘Thou shalt have one God only; who

    Would tax himself to worship two?

    God's image nowhere shalt thou see,

    Save haply in the currency:

    Swear not at all; since for thy curse

    Thine enemy is not the worse:

    At church on Sunday to attend

    Will help to keep the world thy friend:

    Honour thy parents; that is, all

    From whom promotion may befall:

    Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive

    Officiously to keep alive:

    Adultery it is not fit

    Or safe, for women, to commit:

    Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,

    When 'tis so lucrative to cheat:

    False witness not to bear be strict;

    And cautious, ere you contradict.

    Thou shalt not covet; but tradition

    Sanctions the keenest competition.’

 

Another version ends with this extra sneer:

 

‘The sum of all is, thou shalt love,

    If any body, God above:

    At any rate shall never labour

    More than thyself to love thy neighbour.’

 

So I think we should be careful about using the rather tortured Mr Clough, that High Victorian apostle of doubt and sorrow,  as a sort of scriptural warrant for switching off the life support machine. The modern problem of medicine which can keep the body alive long after it would have failed in any other age or civilisation, didn’t exist in Clough’s time, and he wasn’t referring to it.

 

The old Commandment from the original Decalogue (if you acknowledge any such) stands : ’Thou Shalt Do No Murder’ (Gospel According to St Matthew, 19^th chapter, 18^th verse, words of Christ himself, Authorised or , for Americans,  ‘King James’ Version).

 

This plainly forbids us from killing an innocent human being. What it permits us to do is open to perpetual debate, as in the limits of Just War, and the activities which can be included in such a war, bot to emntion self-defence, or the defence of another under attack, or just punishment for a heinous act. My contention is (for instance) that the execution of some heinous murderers, by performing a redemptive, just and deterrent purpose, is justified in the constant war that ordered societies fight against lawless, selfish violence.  I also think that prohibition against ‘murder’ rather than ‘killing’ leaves us with an alarming latitude.

 

What if (as happens to a character in William Boyd’s ‘The New Confessions’ ) a soldier is begged by another soldier to shoot him. In this case, the man doing the begging is drowning slowly in a shell-hole, and cannot be rescued, but similar, and worse, events are recorded in many memoirs of war. Shall we be forgiven for helping such people to a swift death? Do the morphine packs carried by soldiers in combat , perhaps, allow them to give an appallingly wounded man a dose from which he is unlikely to wake. Does this happen? I suspect so. Little good would be done by publicising these events. I am myself entirely against bereaved relatives being told that their sons, fathers, brothers or husbands have been killed in the appallingly misnamed incidents of ‘friendly fire’ that are so common in warfare. It does not do to think too much about this, nor about the modern ability to save the lives of soldiers terribly wounded on the battlefield, so allowing them to live on, terribly injured in body and sometimes mind.

 

I’ve always found it hard to be dogmatic about the hard cases which are frequently given large publicity by the BBC, in its endless campaign for weakening the laws on euthanasia.  Have they never heard the old saying that ‘Hard Cases Make Bad Law’, a maxim which seems to me to be invariably true?  Why is it that so much of the political and cultural left are so keen on weakening the laws on euthanasia? Why is this campaign so persistent and unending, if it is not intended to have a profound effect? And whose interests will it serve, if the old and ill can more easily be snuffed out without fear of investigation or prosecution?  

 

My view has tended to be that ( as in the Aleck Bourne abortion case of 1938 (discussed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/safe-legal-and-.html), if people truly think that aiding someone’s death is an act of mercy, they should be ready to stand trial for those beliefs. I think it was right that Dr Bourne was acquitted. I admire Dr Bourne greatly. Yet I also believe, with great reluctance, that what he did was in fact morally wrong.  The aborted baby had played no part in the appalling crime ( a gang rape by soldiers) which had impregnated the young woman, actually a girl of 14. The baby could have been adopted.  I am well aware of the difficulties of this position, and do not know what Dr Bourne knew about the young woman involved, which led him to conclude with absolute firmness that her life was in danger, the only defence in  law to the charge he faced. I strongly suspect that, had I been him I would have done what he did, and I don’t doubt that mercy is available in such dreadful circumstances. For what doth the Lord require of Thee but to do Justly, and to love Mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah (not Clarke), 6^th chapter, 8^th verse). But I think the existence of a firm law is crucial to protect *all* doctors from undue pressure to do things which are much, much more questionable. The abolition of such a law (as happened with the Abortion Act of 1967) has been shown in practice to lead to a general collapse of resolve. Technically, the 1967 Act contains safeguards. In fact, these safeguards are worthless in practice.

 

I am not interested in the sort of people who will seize immediately on my admission that my position has grave weaknesses. I admit them because they exist, and because moral judgment, in practice, is so often so very difficult, and because we so often fail to get it right.  They are not interested in civilised or generous debate, and I am not writing this for them.  I expose these weaknesses precisely because the problem is so difficult and often rends the heart.  But I think that Dr Bourne’s action was wholly different from that of those doctors who now provide what is in effect abortion on demand, as a form of contraception. And my best witness for that is Dr Bourne himself, who became a founding member of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, refused to perform any further abortions for the rest of his life (he was often asked)  and wrote, in 1963 : ’ Those who plead for an extensive relaxation of the law [against abortion] have no idea of the very many cases where a woman who, during the first three months, makes a most impassioned appeal for her pregnancy to be 'finished,' later, when the baby is born, is thankful indeed that it was not killed while still an embryo. During my long years in practice I have had many a letter of the deepest gratitude for refusing to accede to an early appeal.’

 

In the comparable problems of the care of the very old, or the very ill, or very badly injured,  for whom life appears not to be worth living, who are in grave pain and distress, what is murder? In my view, I am afraid murder may be involved when the person’s life is ended for the benefit of others. I don’t just mean legacies and property,  though these may be involved. I also mean when the person’s life is ended for the convenience of others.

 

Of course many difficulties are caused by the ‘advance’ of medical science. One example of this common problem is Pneumonia, which used to carry off many old people when they were ready to go, and now doesn’t because of antibiotics and other treatments. But once these treatments are available, isn’t it then a wilful act to withhold them? I think this is why the passage from Clough, about ‘officious striving’ has become so well-known, way out of its true context, in modern times.  

 

Has medicine, in fact, taken a completely wrong turning? Has it become too concerned with combating disease, in the abstract, and too little concerned with preserving the health of the actual person, and with relieving actual pain?  I was astonished, during the final illness of an elderly relative some years ago, how reluctant doctors were to allow sufficient pain relief, in one case on the grounds that the person involved, clearly dying, might become ‘addicted’.  I began to wonder whether the people I was talking to were entirely sane, but it was probably just bureaucracy at work, as usual, that dreadful inadequate substitute for experience, skill, wisdom,  initiative and thought.

 

The law, it seems to me, must remain in place. Hard cases cannot be used to abolish it. It is precisely when we are most vulnerable that we most need the law’s protection.  Those who campaign against the existing law do so, doggedly, repeatedly, determinedly,  because they wish to be free to behave differently, and they wish to free everyone else to behave differently too. Will the old be safer if they are so permitted? Of course not. I suspect that many old and ill people are already being quietly shuffled into the next world, as it is.

 

If the actions involved are genuinely selfless and compassionate, then let those who do them selflessly face the possibility of prosecution. It seems to me that if their arguments are as good as they claim, they will not face any serious risk of conviction. 

More angry people

I will turn in a moment to comments on this week’s column. But first I’d like to take up once more a discussion we had last week about ‘anger’ in debate. This arises from my appearance on Sunday on BBC1’s ‘The Big Questions’, which is still on the iPlayer if anyone wishes to watch it.

The second half of the discussion was devoted to the Israeli-Arab question. I repeated the arguments I made in my article from Gaza last autumn, which was posted here. But the Palestinian case was put mainly by a man in a chequered keffiyeh scarf and matching tie,  and by a female alleged comedian from Glasgow who made several interjections along the standard propaganda lines of the current anti-Israel campaign.

Were either or both of these people consumed with anger? Would those who make this claim about my public appearances (with the intention of invalidating my arguments) make the same claim about either of them? I would be interested to know.

My suspicion is that they would not. Most people are perfectly happy to see their own opinions forcefully and passionately expressed, and I would imagine my critics have pretty much swallowed the current anti-Israel orthodoxy of the blathering classes. Yet in one of these cases I think the speaker actually damaged his cause by being so impassioned. Nor did he have the excuse that he needed to shout to get heard. He had been given a prominent position, his own microphone and a pretty-much-guaranteed major role in the discussion.

In answer to comments, I called the author Sir Terence Pratchett because he chose to accept a knighthood. As far as I know, it was given in that form, and if it hadn’t been, it would have been absurd. The formulation ‘Sir Terry’ is ridiculous and incongruous, and if people don’t wish to be addressed by their full names they shouldn’t accept titles of honour.

I have heard the position of the new atheists well summed up elsewhere as ‘God doesn’t exist – and I hate Him!’ But I wasn’t aware that Sir Terence (whose books I have not felt compelled to finish, or explore further, after sampling one or two) had said he hated God for not existing. Both positions are of course nonsensical. Sir Terence has no idea if God exists or not, and can believe in Him tonight if he chooses to do so. You cannot hate someone who is not there.

My own view is that both believers and atheists fear that God exists, but believers also hope that he does. The passion which atheists devote the subject suggests (as such passion almost invariably does) a grave uncertainty underneath. So do the linguistic and debating tricks employed by some atheist bores (and there is no more expert and accomplished room-emptier than one of these) to strip them of any responsibility for their religious opinions, which they have somehow been ‘forced’ into.

Mr ‘Avid Fan’ tells me I am self-righteous and asks me to assert that his grandmother is better off now than if she’d committed suicide some years ago. He interprets her stated wish to join her late husband, when she was still coherent, as a desire to do so. Or so it seems to me.

I believe that the Christian religion (though not Judaism) has set its canon against self-slaughter. I am also (incidentally) haunted by a macabre Charles Williams story in which a man kills himself and finds that nothing has happened except that he is exactly where he was before, only in a perceptibly darker, more sinister version of the world he was attempting to leave, populated by others like himself, and with a rope still uncomfortably round his neck. What if suicide, far from being an escape, is a way deeper into the woe that takes us there?

For me, therefore, there is no choice in the matter. It is something I must not do, and must not aid another to do. Others are in a different position, especially if it becomes legal to assist suicide. Would I be let off if (for instance) I were in some state of unutterable despair which was not of my own making – say in the midst of being tortured slowly to death in some despot’s dungeon? I like to think so. But I don’t know.

One of the main reasons for this prohibition, though not the principal one, is (I think) the unending puzzled grief and guilt which suicide leaves behind it.

Many old and bereaved people speak longingly of their wish to rejoin their lifelong companion. Many others just speak of their wish to be dead. Yet very few of them take their own lives, even so, though they have the power to do so.

I am not sure it is self-righteous to advance the arguments I set out. Did Mr Avid Fan ever ask his grandmother if he could help her achieve this end, which would be the logical conclusion of thee view he now expresses?  I have to say that I very much doubt it, and it is easy to imagine why he didn’t. Most of us, self-righteous or no, would feel there was something grotesque and ugly about such an offer, even made out of kindness. And we might also suspect that the answer would be pretty brusque (old, ill people can be surprisingly forceful when they choose). In which case is it fair to use her statement of wistful longing as a retrospective justification for sending her into the Big Sleep now?

One of the problems with senility and dementia, as with many other states of being on the fringe of life, is that we have little or no idea of what the person is actually feeling and experiencing. My own suspicion is that the horrible mismatch between bodily decay and mental decay which makes so many final years so ghastly to behold is a consequence of our modern way of life and of modern medicine’s futile ability to prolong physical existence without being able to prolong health. But that does not permit us to look at the result and say we will deal with it with a lethal injection, a plastic bag or a dose of barbiturates.

There should be far more hospice places, far more concentration on making death more bearable for the dying and for those who love them. But modern medicine, which strives with enormous officiousness to keep people alive up to a certain point, becomes cold and dismissive once they are old. I suspect that many old people are now effectively starved and thirsted to death, while many others are connected to the morphine pump , ostensibly  to relieve their pain with no real expectation that they will ever wake up.

In answer to Mr Perrin, this country will not leave the EU until a political party committed to this object is elected with a clear majority. I have explained at length how that could be brought about. It starts with the destruction of the Tory Party.  I do not believe in referendums, and am uninterested in the futile Euro-elections to the Brussels Supreme Soviet. Why give this farce legitimacy by taking part in it?

Juries (as described at length in my ‘Abolition of Liberty’, in the chapter ‘Twelve Angry Persons’) used to be selected on the basis of a property qualification, which was in effect an age and education barrier. When this was got rid of, nothing was done to replace it because the government were afraid to do so. Anything they suggested was bound to offend someone. At the time, the minimum voting age was 21, which is bad enough. It is now 18, and may well soon be 16, which will mean 16-year-old jurors.

I was astonished at the age of the woman Fraill. But it did seem to me that a combination of age and educational qualification would be enough to rule out most such people. 

Though I am in principle a defender of juries, I sometimes think that the liberal elite has set out to make them look silly and ineffectual, as part of a long-term campaign (which is undoubted, see ‘the Abolition of Liberty’) to get rid of them altogether so that our legal system can be fully merged with that of the EU (where proper independent juries are unknown outside the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic).

A Mr ‘maccamfc’ , in a posting on the frontiers of literacy and coherence, says he ‘became’ a heroin ‘addict’ as if this was beyond his control, and he caught this affliction as one might catch flu.  I do not believe this was the case.  He started taking heroin, as all heroin abusers do, because he enjoyed it and wanted to, well knowing that it was both illegal and wrong.

No doubt I shall be accused of being callous towards this individual. I don’t think so. It is the wilful drugtaker who is callous to his family and neighbours, not the person who condemns this selfishness and seeks to deter it with punishment.

Whether I am ‘upper class’ or not ( lower upper middle class is my own self-description),  I bet his working class neighbours and family have had plenty of cause to regret his choice, even if he thinks he hasn’t. Though I doubt he would admit to that, and he writes under a pseudonym so he needn’t take full responsibility for the truth of his posting.

He also asks us to believe that while he enjoyed himself taking this very expensive drug, which tends, ah, to undermine the work ethic, he was able to support himself for many years (17 by my calculation) and not to rob anyone else. Why, in that case is he now taking methadone, paid for by me and many others out of taxes we would rather spend on something good and useful? Why didn’t he just stop taking heroin, far easier to give up than cigarettes? I have no idea if he is poor. He is certainly undeserving.

Neil Saunders should be aware of the reason why capital punishment is different from abortion and euthanasia.

To be justly executed, you have to be found guilty of a particularly heinous murder by an impartial jury, to fail in repeated appeals and to be refused a reprieve by the Home Secretary after careful individual consideration of all aspects of your case..

To be aborted or euthanised, you just have to be weak and inconvenient.

It is Mr Hentoff (whom I rather admire) who is inconsistent.

This man in black is leading us to a very dark place

This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column

There's only one suicide I would cheerfully assist. If the Tory Party wants to go to Zurich and end it all, I will accompany it, hold its hand, help it swallow a cocktail of poison, refuse its pleas for water at the last moment (for its own good, of course) and listen to its death gurgles. It would be a mercy.

But the Tory Party is just a rather slippery and dishonest organisation. There’s nothing immoral about pushing it gently but firmly through the dark door marked ‘Exit’. In fact I’d have fewer qualms about that than I would about putting down an elderly guinea pig.

Any human being, by contrast, is immensely, uniquely valuable. We cannot kill our fellow creatures, except under very special circumstances of self-defence or deterrent justice.

And yet we do. And we will do so even more quite soon. A society that baulks fussily at the death penalty for guilty murderers has become adept at excusing the convenient killing of innocents.

Using the advanced techniques of a perverted science, we hunt down imperfect babies in the womb and kill them. Or we kill perfect babies because their birth might disrupt our comfy lives. And we tell ourselves that it is all right because our victims aren’t fully human, though in our hearts we know they are.

When the law which permits this massacre was first proposed nearly 50 years ago, we were told that it would be for exceptional and very difficult cases only. I do not know if those who campaigned for the change really believed that – but their opponents warned that it would lead to abortion on demand. And that is what happened, because that is what suited the baby-boom generation to which I belong.

Now that generation and its children (the ones who weren’t aborted) have a new fear and
a new desire. And the BBC – the voice of the boomers – has begun to express their secret concern, louder and louder. The old are a burden. They must die sooner, in the interests of the State, and of the middle-aged.

Couldn’t you see the unspoken thought – that it might be more convenient for the old and ill to be hurried into the grave – lurking behind the black-clad figure of Sir Terence Pratchett as he presented his pro-death programme at the licence-payers’ expense last week?

Sir Terence is no doubt innocent of such thoughts himself, and motivated entirely by understandable fears of his own Alzheimer’s. But there must be many homes in this country where men and women are secretly hoping that their parents will die in a reasonable, timely manner – and above all that they will not consume their inheritance with endless care-home fees before they go.

Unhappily, many of those parents may also be guiltily wondering if they should hang on to life when it means that the home they have bought over many years of careful saving may have to be sold to pay for their care, instead of being passed on to their offspring.
Meanwhile, the State is consumed with a similar fear, that the NHS may fall to pieces trying to cope with the coming wave of old people living on into their 90s and demanding ever more care, space and medicine. It is this fear that lies behind the current frenzied attempts at reform. Taxation simply will not pay for it.

I predict that if assisted suicide is made available here, it will gradually become commonplace, just as abortion did. And it will not necessarily stay voluntary. In the Netherlands, that supposed paradise of liberal thought, there are about 1,000 instances every year of a patient’s life being ended by a doctor, without an explicit request. As a brilliant analysis of the issue by Professor John Keown, of Georgetown University in Washington DC, states: ‘Dutch courts have held that just as the relief of suffering can justify the termination  of patients who request euthanasia, it can equally justify
the termination of those who cannot.’

And once it is commonplace, as with abortion, those who oppose it will be a noisy but powerless minority, because so many of us will have become accomplices in kindly murder, that we will not dare to call it murder, and will get angry with those who do. But it will be murder all the same.

New signs, same lousy schools

Education Secretary Michael Gove has just declared that another batch of schools are to become ‘academies’. I’ve yet to see any proof that ‘academies’ are better than other schools, though they have nice new signboards. But at this rate, all the schools in the country will be ‘academies’ by the time Mr Gove has finished – and no doubt all the children will be above average, and all the exam results will be ‘As’ and ‘A-stars’.

And still nobody will know anything. The really sad thing about this is that Michael Gove is an intelligent man, who knows this is all rubbish and window-dressing. In fact, he is himself window-dressing for a government that couldn’t care less about the schooling of the poor.

Is it the State’s job to rob us on behalf of addicts?

Undeserving Poor Latest: Abusers of illegal drugs in this country receive something like £1.7 billion a year in benefits, from you and me. £730 million alone is squandered on giving methadone to people who have chosen to ruin their lives (and those of everyone who knows them) by taking illegal heroin.

The figures are revealed and explained by Kathy Gyngell today in a devastating pamphlet, Breaking The Habit. The logic behind this seems to be that if the State robs you on the drug-users’ behalf, they won’t need to burgle your house or mug you. Something wrong here?

************
At last the monstrous myth of ‘ADHD’ and the unspeakable drugging of healthy children is being questioned. It’s a small start, but the Association of Educational Psychologists is calling for a review into the use of Ritalin on children, many as young as five. Not a moment too soon. There are now nearly 700,000 prescriptions being handed out each year. Which Minister will risk the wrath of the mighty and spiteful Ritalin lobby by launching such an inquiry?

**************
Idiots like Joanne Fraill shouldn’t be allowed to sit on juries. Yet she did, and contacted the defendant via Facebook, the Morons’ Directory. How couldn’t she have realised this was wrong? Isn’t it time we introduced a much higher minimum age and a serious education qualification for jurors, many of whom are not fit to go out on their own, let alone decide the fate of a fellow creature?

***********
Still they won’t admit the real reason for the abolition of weekly bin collections. So I’ll say it again. It’s the European Union Landfill Directive, stupid.

The great and the good support mercy killing – that’s why I’m so worried

I am tired of being bombarded with emotional blackmail in favour of mercy killing. The opposite case is in my view better, but the emotive tragedies caused by legal euthanasia will only become obvious when it is too late, as happened with abortion.

There now seems to be a near-unanimous belief across the media that the need for a law allowing the tactful killing of the decrepit, the miserably sick and the terribly injured is beyond question.

People have always suffered injury and disease in great pain, in ways that appear quite unbearable. Yet suddenly they have become a major feature of the courts and big news. Why?

Every time one of these gruelling cases is dragged through the justice system, sometimes with the stricken central character on display with wheelchair and respirator, our reasoning minds are overwhelmed by pity.

And the half-spoken assumption is encouraged, that the existing law is cold and cruel and inflexible and must be changed. Where does this propaganda come from?

Are there pressure groups that seek changes in the law? There are. Are they superb at publicity? They are. Do they have allies in the Establishment? I think they do. Are they right? No they are not.

I am not going to go into any of the recent cases in detail because it would take pages to do so and also because the campaigners for aborting adults (which is what they are) would immediately portray me as callous and unfeeling.

Maybe I am. Maybe only the callous and unfeeling can see through the propaganda and glimpse the sour truth, that the large-scale lawful killing of the old, sick and disabled is likely to become general in this country if we are not careful.

I am very struck by the way in which the case against Kay Gilderdale was brought – by Keir Starmer, a Director of Public Prosecutions who is known to favour weakening the law on assisted suicide.

She had pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. Why then would the CPS – known for its reluctance to risk acquittals – press the matter? Did Mr Starmer in fact intend this prosecution to end in failure and amid complaints that Mrs Gilderdale had been cruelly handled?

I am reminded of the famous Chatterley trial, which led directly to the permanent fiesta of pornography and bad language we now suffer. The myth of the Chatterley affair is that the wicked Establishment sought to suppress a wonderful work of art, and was rebuffed by an enlightened jury.

The truth is that the prosecution called no major witnesses and made no serious case, while the defence of this rather bad book (which anyone could get hold of if they really wanted it) was supported by a phalanx of fashionable bishops, authors and academics – just the same sort of people who think the sanctity of human life is an outdated notion, wrong then, wrong now, wrong always.

We’ll be sorry if we fall for this. Some of us will be terrifyingly sorry, but don’t know it yet. The existing law is based on a knowledge of human wickedness and selfishness, things that never go away.

Slithery Blair, and a flash of real integrity

Compare the magnificent Elizabeth Wilmshurst with the slithery Anthony Blair.

Ms Wilmshurst, whose resignation from the Foreign Office was a rare flash of honour and integrity in the Iraq affair, gave her evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry with clarity and honesty.

She epitomises the Establishment we used to have, properly educated, principled, wholly committed to the rule of law. When will someone give this excellent woman a gong?

Mr Blair, questioned in a feeble and disorganised way, talked himself out of trouble by answering questions he hadn’t been asked and not answering the ones he was asked.

His interrogators mostly didn’t notice this simple trick, which dishonest people instinctively use. He reminded me, at least, of the national shame we underwent when such a person became Prime Minister.

Only once did he say anything interesting, moaning that he had been under pressure to go to war from the Tories. This is quite true. The Opposition’s failure to question this birdbrained adventure should not be forgotten and at least one senior Tory should be invited before the inquiry to explain it.

This might make them wonder about their current support for the mistake we are now making, the bloody and futile Afghan war, whose purpose nobody can explain.

But only if the media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who seems to have bought David Cameron wholesale, actually allows them to think about this.

Brainwashing’s no way to stop school bullies

As compulsory sex education draws closer, the leader of the Conservative Party says that teaching homosexual equality and the benefits of civil partnerships should be ‘embedded’ in British schools.

He claims, absurdly, that this will help stop the bullying of homosexuals. In fact, as most people with any experience of schools know, the establishment’s obsession with homosexuality has turned the word ‘gay’ into a general playground insult.

Bullying of all kinds can and should be stopped without the need for indoctrination.

Wakefield’s only crime was to put patients first

The Establishment spite against Andrew Wakefield is extraordinary. You would think that he had killed at least 150 patients, and tortured several more, to judge from the righteous condemnation issued against him.

I’ve been back to his original Lancet article and am struck by how modest and cautious it is – and also by the weight it rightly gives to the sincere fears of parents.

Some of those parents still harbour reasonable fears about the MMR jab, and I urge any pro-MMR fanatic to spend an afternoon with the fantastically stoical Heather Edwards and her terribly damaged son Josh and see if they stay as certain as they are now.

Anthony Blair – who haughtily refused to say if his own child had been given the MMR – did far more to reduce take-up of this injection than Dr Wakefield.

Dr Wakefield’s crime was to put patients first, and bureaucracy second.

* Do Left-wing governments change public opinion for the worse? I think the Social Trends survey shows that they do. The collapse of support for strong, lasting two-parent families has been brought about by decades of deliberate propaganda in schools and on the BBC. Comprehensive schools – as they were meant to do – have undermined Christianity, social conservatism and patriotism. But all is not lost.
You can hit back. The growing doubts of the British people about cannabis show that where conservatives actually fight, they can win.

* The Himalayan glaciers won’t disappear by 2035. Recent bad weather isn’t caused by global warming. Those polar bears weren’t drowning. And so on, one after another, almost every day. The sneaky dishonesty of climate-change fanatics is more and more evident in the affair of the leaked emails and the attempt to evade Freedom of Information laws. The least we can ask now is that those with doubts about this cult should in future be treated with more civility.

Will Keir Starmer still think like this when HE’S old and gaga?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

We seldom know exactly when we cross the border between good and evil. Normal, gentle, kindly people discover too late that they have become collaborators with wickedness, and dare not condemn crimes they have themselves committed.

This is the reason for the hatchet-faced defence of abortion by the liberal elite. They took part in the massacre of the unborn in large numbers before mass immigration provided them with legions of cheap live-in nannies and so made parenthood compatible with the two-career lifestyle.

Very often we start to do dreadful things because we are convinced that they are in fact good. Everyone now recoils in disgust from the German National Socialist eugenics and euthanasia programmes.

Hitler, being composed of almost pure evil, simply took the filthy idea to its logical conclusion. Non-German supporters of eugenics – like the contraception fanatic Marie Stopes – were embarrassed into silence by finding themselves in company with such monsters.

But the problem has not gone away. The killing of the inconvenient is always attractive to some, either because they think they can make a perfect world, or because the old, the demented and incontinent are expensive and unproductive. Not one of us, if we are honest, is safe from this temptation.

There is only one reliable barrier to getting rid of them – an unalterable moral law which says such things are always wrong and a criminal law which takes the same view.

Without that, we slither into mass murder. I will predict it for you. Within a few years of the law’s relaxation, we will all – doctors and relatives alike – slip across the boundary.

Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, gave it all away when he said that as a society we had ‘moved on’ since the days when it was a crime to assist a suicide. Indeed we have, just as we have ‘moved on’ from the days when most people could read and write, mobs were not allowed to persecute people to death, and Saturday night streets were not full of drunks and puke.

By the time Keir Starmer is old, and his children are wondering what to do with him, we may have ‘moved on’ further still, largely thanks to his extra-parliamentary law-making. But will it be in the right direction? And if by then he has a different opinion on the subject, will anyone listen to his feeble whispers of protest?

Spot on Colonel, the UN is useless

Colonel Gaddafi’s comical rage at the United Nations ought to remind us that the UN is obliged to take unhinged despots of this kind seriously, and provides them with a surprising amount of power and influence. This is one of many reasons why the UN should be swiftly wound up.

Then again, we might recall how the fatuous supporters of the Iraq War (some still exist, amazingly) claimed that his decision to abandon his completely non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction showed that toppling Saddam had put the fear of Uncle Sam into the hearts of all Islamic tyrants.

The same people now rave in a lunatic way about attacking Iran and Pakistan, countries which actually learned the opposite lesson – that Washington will leave you alone only if you have the Bomb.

Then there’s the ridiculous claim America is somehow angry with us for letting Abdelbaset Al Megrahi (who plainly had nothing to do with the Lockerbie outrage) out of jail. This is supposed to be behind Barack Obama’s unwillingness to meet Gordon Brown for more than five minutes.

If this were true, it would be monstrous. Those who are desperate to blame every bad thing in the world on Gordon Brown seem to have let political partisanship cancel out patriotism. How dare Mr Obama snub us over the release of one innocent man – when more than 200 of our soldiers have died fighting America’s war in Afghanistan?

Actually, that’s the real problem.

Mr Obama snubbed Britain, not Mr Brown. To him, we are an unimportant European country which has nothing to offer him. He’s probably forgotten we even have troops in Afghanistan – another reason we should pull them out.

Czechs know all about Tory piffle, Dave

Davd Cameron is said to be encouraging the Czech President Vaclav Klaus to hold out against signing the EU Constitution (alias the Lisbon Treaty) if the Irish vote for it this week. Apparently Mr Cameron has let Mr Klaus know that Britain will stand by him if the going gets rough.

Oh, really? How can anyone be fooled by this piffle? First, I should have thought Mr Cameron wants
a referendum on Lisbon about as much as he wants a bout of malaria or a broken nose. If Britain then votes ‘No’, what will he do?

The EU would make us vote again and say ‘Yes’. Or we would leave the EU. Mr Cameron is clearly in favour of staying in the EU. In that case, he ought to be honest and admit it and – along with many other Tories – stop pretending to oppose something he in fact supports.

As for the heroic President Klaus, I suggest he recalls a previous occasion when a British Conservative leader promised to help the Czechs against a continental empire. Chap with a moustache and an umbrella. Neville something. Didn’t work out.

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Dispersing the migrant camps at Calais will do nothing to stem the problem. Our daft laws and benefits system are magnets for alleged refugees, and our frontiers are half-open. Many of them will get here in the end.

But this is nothing to what is coming. Far too few of us are aware of the revolution which has swept the European continent in the past few years. I know because I frequently travel across European borders, and I can tell you that they no longer exist. Recently, I travelled from Berlin to Vienna via Prague by train – a journey that would once have required two visas and five passport inspections. Now there is nothing at all.

From the old Russian frontier fortress of Brest, all the way to Calais, there are no frontiers. Even Switzerland and Norway, non-EU members, have been strong-armed into abolishing their border posts in a devastating assault on sovereignty.

Sooner or later – I give it five years – Britain will be compelled to submit as well. And then the camps at Calais will disappear because their inhabitants will all be here.


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Nine-year-old Steven Cheek didn’t know what ‘racism’ was until he was reprimanded for playing soldiers. Now he knows it’s a word used by the ignorant and conformist to control thought and speech. Some dimwit teacher knew nothing about history and even less about boys, and so concluded that for Steven to say

‘We’ve got to shoot the German army’ to a Polish boy was ‘inappropriate’. Why? I imagine such thoughts are often expressed in Polish schools, most of which had to be rebuilt after the German army passed by in 1939.