Scum: Yes, it's a nasty word but Britain's a nasty place
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
When is it all right to call anybody ‘scum’? For those of us who still try not to swear, it is quite a strong word, but in an age when another much nastier s-word is allowed in Parliament, the expression ‘scum’ is hardly shocking. So when Austin Malloy, a Blackburn magistrate, used ‘scum’ in court to describe two youths who had done disgusting things in a church, nobody can really have been upset. The pair scribbled racialist and sexually abusive graffiti, including the words ‘I will kill all Jews’, in prayer books and bent a valuable cross out of shape. Christine Dean, clerk of the court, then stood and told the magistrate: ‘It is totally inappropriate and unjust for you to use the term "absolute scum" in the youth court.’ It is Christine Dean I am interested in. She doesn’t seem to be in any trouble. But Mr Malloy is. Why is that? When I used to report magistrates court cases, clerks were discreet. I never saw one dare to publicly rebuke a JP for anything. Mr Malloy, right, was obviously trying to explain to these oafs how others were genuinely distressed by this desecration. So he said: ‘This court is disgusted by the mindless destruction you have caused. Normal people would consider you absolute scum. If it was in our power, we would have you both stand in front of the congregation at 10am on Sunday and explain your words and actions to them to see if they could understand it, because we can’t.’
Ms Dean plainly thought that the politically correct establishment were behind her when she spoke. That ugly word ‘inappropriate’ is usually a sign of political correctness – because PC people can’t ever bring themselves to say the word ‘wrong’. As for ‘unjust’, I should have thought the comment entirely just.
But then I believe that wrong actions should be punished, and those who do them should be made to feel shame. This is not because I am cruel. On the contrary, I think swift, harsh punishment is kind.
It is more likely to change a bad person’s life for the better than the dreary horrors of ‘rehabilitation’, with its anger-management courses and amateur psychoanalysis. There’s also the little matter of letting the rest of us know that justice has been done, as it almost never is.
But Ms Dean, it is clear to me, speaks for the Liberal-Conservative future, and Mr Malloy speaks for the British past. And even if the publicity given to this case eventually saves Mr Malloy’s place on the bench, others will in future be afraid to speak in this way.
And the darkness will continue to fall on our civilisation.
Abortion and its repellent heroine
I say that Marie Stopes International (which receives about £25 million a year from the NHS, much of it for killing unborn babies under contract) should be allowed to advertise its repellent services on TV. But on one condition. That each advertisement is followed by both of these: film of an actual abortion of a 24-week-old baby, and a brief documentary reminding viewers that Marie Stopes sent love poems to Adolf Hitler in August 1939, advocated compulsory sterilisation for the ‘unfit’, and cut her own son out of her will because he married a girl who wore glasses.
What sort of organisation would name itself after such a monstrous woman?
Once again the supposed danger from the alleged volcanic-ash cloud has been shown to be fictional. The methods for measuring the ash in the air are largely fanciful. The science on the effects of ash on engines is surprisingly vague. The Americans, by contrast, have sensible, working and proven rules to deal with the problem, which don’t involve closing down the entire continent. Had we followed their example, we would have been spared much. Why have the British media, with a few honourable exceptions, not questioned the authorities more?
* Can’t I ever say anything nice about David Cameron? Yes, I can. I applaud his decision to dispense with the un-British motorcycle outriders that made the Premier’s convoy look like that of some Third World junta leader. The terrorist danger to Prime Ministers exists, but is greatly exaggerated, and the use of this excuse to cut politicians off from the public is a threat to liberty.
Another couple of jokers – and I can’t tell them apart either
I expect many of you were struck by the similarity between our new Olympic mascots – Hemlock and Mandible, I think they’re called – and our new Con-Dem Downing Street duo. Both pairs caper about the place in joky harmony. Both have ingratiating facial expressions. Both are faintly totalitarian in a hard-to-define way. But which is Hemlock, and which is Mandible? Which is Tory and which is Liberal? Who can tell and, increasingly, who cares?
Mr Cameron, always sensitive to criticism while wholly unprepared to take any notice of it, explained on Friday that, while his Government obviously isn’t conservative, he personally is. Is he?
But he’s certainly ruthless when dealing with people who are conservative. Good, principled MPs such as Graham Brady and Patrick Mercer are cast for ever into the outer darkness for failing to think, act and speak liberal. Polysyllable-chewing liberals such as David Willetts and Oliver Letwin, each a liability to any cause they serve, are promoted.
Yet this is nothing to the most significant political story of the week – so vital that it was relegated to page 94 in the papers and shoved way down the BBC bulletins. Mr Cameron has taken over the Tory backbench 1922 Committee. He feared it might be a base for resistance against him, and like every tyrant from Napoleon Bonaparte to Robert Mugabe, he couldn’t risk that.
Instead of being a bottom-up voice of real Tory opinion, the committee will now be a top-down machine for ensuring that dissent is crushed before it begins.
This, like the increasingly tight control of party leaders over candidate selection, is real constitutional change, in many ways far more significant in the struggle for liberty than CCTV cameras and ID cards. And this is specially so now that we really have only one political party, LabLibCon, whose three supposedly separate branches could each form a coalition with each other, without giving anything significant away.
Once again, I warn the remaining real conservatives in the Tory Party that they have not much time left to escape. Mr Cameron is swift, cunning, clever and ruthless, and if they wish to fight him, they will have to be these things as well. Split now. How you, too, can see the future I told you so. Yes I did. Here’s what I wrote on October 16, 2007: ‘The result of the next Election is already decided – the Left will be in office, either with a Labour majority, or a Lib-Lab pact, or a Lib-Con pact, or a Tory government in thrall to Left-wing ideas. No radical change, on the areas which Tory voters care about most, will take place.’ See? You can look into the future, keep reading this blog.
