More sex education means more teenage pregnancies...always

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Sex education has failed. So the Establishment decrees that we must have more of it, and in fact that there shall be no escape from it. 

What I don’t grasp is why the people of this country put up with so many separate insults to their intelligence in any given week. 

And why this particular blatantly obvious sequence comes round year by year and nobody even laughs, let alone draws the correct conclusion.

Despite the casual massacre of unborn babies in the abortion mills, and the free handouts of morning-after pills (originally developed for pedigree dogs which had been consorting improperly with mongrels), and the ready issue of condoms to anyone who asks, and the prescription of contraceptive devices to young girls behind the backs of their parents by smiling advice workers, and the invasion of school classrooms by supposedly educational smut, the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy has failed, is failing and will continue to fail.

In the week that figures clearly showed that the Government’s supposed target for cutting teen pregnancy by half is never going to be reached, compulsory smut education – a key part of this ‘strategy’ – was forced on all English schools by law for the first time.

There will be no opt-outs. The new liberal gospel of ‘do what thou wilt – but wear a condom while thou doest it’ will be taught by order of the State.

Some years ago, I wrote a short history of sex education in this country. I didn’t then know about its first invention, during the Hungarian Soviet revolution of 1919, when Education Commissar George Lukacs ordered teachers to instruct children about sex in a deliberate effort to debauch Christian morality.

But what I found was this. That the people who want it are always militant Leftists who loathe conventional family life; that the pretext for it has always been the same – a supposed effort to reduce teen pregnancy and sexual disease; and that it has always been followed by the exact opposite.

It was introduced into schools against much parental resistance during the early Fifties. And, yes, the more of it there was, the more under-age and extramarital sex there seemed to be.

By 1963, in Norwich, parents were told that their young were to be instructed in sexual matters because the illegitimacy rate in that fine city had reached an alarming 7.7 per cent (compared with a national rate of 5.9 per cent). The national rate is now 46 per cent and climbing, so that was obviously a success, wasn’t it?

Well, yes it was, because the people who force these peculiar classes on our young are lying about their aims. You can see why.

Most of us, in any other circumstance, would be highly suspicious of adults who wanted to talk about sex to other people’s children.

But by this sleight of hand – that they are somehow being protected from disease and unwanted pregnancy – we are tricked into permitting it.

And our civilised society goes swirling down the plughole of moral chaos.

Nastiest of the nasty bullies? That would be you, Dave

The problem with Gordon Brown is not his character, his temper or his manners. It is his politics. If he were a good Prime Minister, we would forgive him his personal failings.

Which is why it was silly for David Cameron to call grandiosely for an inquiry into gossip about Mr Brown’s treatment of subordinates. This is not proper politics, and it demeans us.

I said on my blog on Monday that Mr Cameron had better watch out in case people started asking questions about his own actions.

And within hours, a person (whose identity I now know, though he has asked me to keep it confidential) posted the following comment: ‘Cameron is far from blameless.

I had the misfortune to work for him for a couple of months just after he was appointed to the Shadow Education brief in 2005.

‘Rudeness and inconsideration were his stock in trade with repeated attempts to humiliate me in front of others. Middle-of-the-night phone calls to pick up on adverse Press comment were not uncommon – much of it stemming from his own inability to clear a “line-to-take” in time for newspaper deadlines.

Several colleagues often asked why I put up with it. Being an ex-journalist myself, I’ve worked for some nasty types in the past . . . he was undoubtedly the nastiest.’

I think this might help us get the matter back into proportion.

* I also noted that Mr Brown was quoted as complaining that Comrade Dr John Reid, the menacing Brezhnev-era communist who somehow became a Cabinet Minister, was ‘far too Right-wing’ to be Premier. Golly. If Comrade Dr Reid was ‘too Right-wing’, where does Mr Brown think the ‘centre’ is?

The weirdo in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland gets better as you get older and understand the jokes more clearly.

With modern technology, you could actually make a film of it that was faithful to the text.

But no, we can’t have that. We live in the age of deconstruction and the post-modern, where nothing can be left as it is.

The serial weirdo Tim Burton has instead been let loose on this classic, and appears to have turned it into ‘Willy Wonka meets The Lord Of The Rings’. Who needs this? Does anyone really want to see it?

Swipe at the Tories hits right home

Stuart Wheeler, once the largest donor to the Tory Party, has been cast into outer darkness for supporting UKIP instead.

Now he has written an interesting and powerful study of the MPs’ expenses row, which among other things points out the terrifying centralised powers that party leaders now possess.

But I specially enjoyed this passage: ‘I have nothing against anyone who is fortunate enough to live in a nice house in the country. I do myself.

But I cannot for the life of me see why, were I an MP, you should have to help finance that.’

Quite so. Which rather well-off party leader could he possibly be referring to?

So where’s our De Gaulle?

Let's  stop pretending we have a ‘special relationship’ with the USA, and treat America the way France’s General de Gaulle used to.

They’ll respect us for it, as they respected him. Here’s the first thing we should do, which I am sure the great General would have done.

Washington refuses to back us against Latin America’s renewed campaign to make us hand over the Falklands and their people to the Banana Republic of Argentina.

Right then, we should immediately take all our troops and equipment out of Afghanistan, and put them on boats and planes to Port Stanley, leaving nothing behind but a few empty baked-bean tins.

Any politician willing to pledge this will win the Election, by the way. This one-sided ‘relationship’ is far more unpopular than they realise.

* Talking of Latin America, isn’t it interesting that all its leaders are willing to lecture us about the Falklands, where the people are free and happy. But most of them won’t dare criticise the disgusting prison island of Cuba, where a brave dissident, Orlando Zapata, has just died after an 86-day hunger strike.

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How to Read an Opinion Poll (revisited)

Many months ago I wrote an entry on this subject which I think can still be Googled. I'd just like to make a small comment on today's IPSOS MORI poll.

This is the third major poll in a row to show the Tory lead (already pretty feeble) shrinking - in this case to five per cent.

There can now be no doubt that this is actually happening, and that the earlier polls showing such a trend were not rogues.

Much of the polling also took place after the 'bullying' allegations against Mr Brown, which voters presumably regard as irrelevant, as I do.

Where does this interesting news appear in the loyally Conservative-supporting newspaper which expensively commissioned it? I will tell you.

It is on Page Two (known in the trade as the Elephant's Graveyard, the place where good stories go to die). 

It lacks the exciting, attention-getting coloured bar or pie charts which so often decorate poll stories, and has a strange headline 'Labour could still win most seats', which isn't really the point of it.

In fact I entirely missed it when I hunted through the paper for it on my early-morning train, though I had heard it mentioned on the radio.

I at first thought the BBC had got the wrong paper.

I keep telling you. Polls are intended, by those who commission them, to influence opinion, not to measure it.

I wonder if you can guess what might have propelled this poll on to Page One of the newspaper concerned?

That page, today, is rightly much taken up with the latest horrible child murder.

But there is space for other stories - and the other prominent spots are occupied by articles on back pain and watering the lawn.

Much more important than the coming election, eh?

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Oddities, retorts, responses and questions

What an odd week this is in the weird world of news, what is news and what isn't. Much like last week, it has no real theme to it, and what seem to me to be major stories either slip away unnoticed or are inadequately reported, while the bullying allegations (of which more later) swirl and swell. What happened, for instance, to an IMF report which appeared to suggest on Tuesday that Labour's economic policy was a wiser response to recession than the Tory one? Wasn't it true? I've begun to wonder. Or an opinion poll which showed the Tories sinking to 37 per cent, not exactly an invincible figure - and this just a couple of days after another poll had also shown a Tory weakening? Had it been the other way round, both of these narratives would have had more prominence, as indeed would Michael Heseltine's extraordinary statement that he doesn't expect the Tories to win. What if, say, Denis Healey, or Neil Kinnock popped out of retirement to say that Labour hasn't a chance? Hold the front page. And keep holding it. Why, all these pensioners might actually get on terrestrial TV again for the first time in years.

Then, amid all the palaver about Iran's slow-motion attempt to build a nuclear weapon (my experience of Iranian technology and ability to complete major projects on time suggests that they might get there somewhere around 2050, if they really, really try), there is momentous news from that far more worrying Islamist nation -Turkey.

We like to think of Turkey as being an honorary Western country. It's in NATO (whatever that is now) and it wants to be in the EU (heaven knows why). Kemal Ataturk got the Mullahs under control nearly 100 years ago. Hijabs are banned on state property. It's secular, modern, etc etc.

I don't agree. In fact I think this picture is completely out of date. My own experience of Turkey suggests that its population, including much of the new urban middle-class, are (unlike the Iranians) fervently and increasingly Islamic, and want to be more so. The country during Ramadan is enormously and enthusiastically devout. People I interviewed during the day didn't even drink water, traffic was nervous and violent (my Istanbul-bound taxi crashed 100 yards from the airport, and this was the driver's explanation) because everyone was so frazzled from fasting since first light. I just don't believe the repeated conventional wisdom that Prime Minister Erdogan and his AK Party have given up the militant Islamism they used to espouse, when he wrote 'Our minarets are our bayonets.'

Western liberals (as usual forced into folly by dogma) see Erdogan as a sort of hero, and Turkey's secular military as the villains, a 'deep state' threatening dictatorship. Well, the Turkish military certainly aren't democrats, and have intervened many times in coups d'etat to shut down governments they didn't like, including several incompetent ones and one Islamist one. But they are in the Ataturk tradition, firm secularists who don't want Turkey to be an Islamic republic. So are the liberals really sure they're less of a worry than the AK Party, in the long run? By the way, if Turkey were to go fully Islamic, it would be a majority Sunni state, unlike Iran which is Shia, and so a bit of an outcast from the rest of the Muslim world .Sunni Muslims regard Shia as heretics, and often persecute them. I'll also touch on the significance of this a little later, while discussing Afghanistan.

Turning to general comments.

Why does 'jpt' claim that he 'has' to vote for the BNP? What is forcing him? Nothing. This sort of stuff (my upbringing made me do it, I was abused as a child, I never had enough toys, I didn't get free school milk etc etc), together with the ridiculous formulation 'there is no alternative' (there's always an alternative) is always a pretence.

Like everyone else, 'jpt' has free will. If he didn't want to vote for the BNP, he wouldn't have to. The fact is he wants to indulge himself, at the expense of decency and civilisation, and in full knowledge of this organisation's unpleasant heritage and loutish present. That's why I despise his action. By the way, BNP claims that its violence is reactive, forced on it by left-wing attacks, simply don't stand up. It is violent because it chooses to be. The roughing up of a Times reporter at a BNP press conference two weeks ago (to which he had been invited) was not reactive, unless you count critical reporting as a justification for violence. It was inexcusable. It was also startlingly stupid.

Those who insist that the Taleban, or the non-existent fantasy organisation 'Al Qaeda' would be more likely to commit terrorist crimes in this country if our troops withdrew from Helmand, need to explain the logical process which leads them to this belief. What is the process by which the British military presence in this portion of Afghanistan has this effect? I cannot see it myself, but would be willing to accept it if someone would explain it to me, in short, simple steps with factual evidence to back up the argument. Assertion doesn't do it for me. And the burden of proof is on them. It's they who want others sent to die in the name of this policy. They must show us how this policy actually operates in practice.

Ronnie Clews says: ’If you can reassure me that all will be well and that we have nothing at all to fear from the likes of Osama Bin Laden and his terror network, or from their paymaster Iran and their 'peaceful' exploitation of nuclear energy - fine! I'll be the first to agree with you.’

There are two things wrong with this point. One, I offer no such reassurance. I cannot guarantee anyone that they will be safe from terror attacks. Terrorism is by its nature secret and based upon surprise. What I am saying is that the British government, also, cannot offer any such guarantee, or explain how British troops in Afghanistan make terrorist attacks in Britain more unlikely. They might as well say that our military presence made fog in Somerset more unlikely, or road accidents in Peebles less likely. There is no evidence to connect the two things. There is a rival argument (which I don't myself buy) that our presence in Afghanistan makes terror attacks on Britain more likely, and I have to say that, thin as it is, and likewise lacking evidence, it is considerably less laughable than the opposite case. I am not the one doing the pretending. Any country is at risk from terror attacks, and one of the main things we need to grasp is that the elaborate 'anti-terror' mechanisms now in place are largely useless in reducing this danger, for many reasons including human fallibility. Terrorism, by its nature, cannot be entirely prevented. Such security is a fantasy. Those who offer it are fakes.

His other error is his absurd claim that Iran is the 'paymaster' of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden is a Wahhabi Sunni Muslim, who regards Iranian Shia Muslims as dangerous heretics (the Shia minority in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia suffers severe discrimination). The Taleban loathes Iran, and it is mutual (Taleban fanatics actually crossed over into Iran to try to destroy the (astonishingly majestic) Shia shrine at Mashhad, such is their loathing of their supposed co-religionists). People who want to warn us of the terrible danger from the Islamic world really do need to know a little more about it, if they want to be taken seriously.

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Why do they need to be so rude?

The arrogant rudeness of the materialists in any discussion of Darwinism is astonishing, and indicative of a lack of confidence in their case. One cannot even see anything wrong in equating Christianity, the foundation of our civilisation, and the reasoned basis on which man has sought to understand the universe, with Holocaust denial. Really, must we sink to this level? If people don't like Christianity, then let their objections to it at least be respectable ones. If one thing has convinced me that this controversy is worth pursuing, it has been the invariable discourtesy and pride of the dogmatic Darwinists, which reminds me so strongly of my own attitude and tactics in my Trotskyist days, when I was concealing my own doubts from myself by rudeness to critics who (I secretly knew) had a point.

If they would substitute patience for impatience, and civility for petulant and superior dismissal, they might learn something from their opponents. They should ask themselves whether their lack of manners is an attempt to defend themselves against any such danger.

The self-proclaimed 'Clear-Thinking' derides as 'weak' my alleged discussion of evolutionary biology. But I don't in fact discuss it. I never have. I am not qualified to do so and cheerfully recognise that. All I discuss is the much simpler question of certainty versus uncertainty. Even the most dogmatic evolutionists concede that they have no idea how the process they believe in began, and most sensible evolutionists realise that there are problems with the later stages of the theory which are not easily solved (hence such concepts as 'punctuated equilibrium' and 'saltation'). If, as I so often say, the theory were settled and proven by its predictive ability, then it would not have at least two contending schools of thought about how the process actually takes place. It doesn't take a biologist to see that there is room for thought here, space which Mr 'Thinking' seems anxious to fill with sneers. I refer him, as I have often referred the increasingly bilious Wesley Crosland, to the recent thoughts of the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel on 'Intelligent Design'. Professor Nagel loves thought and dispute, and adheres to reason for its own sake, because he knows we're lost without it.

As for my views on the 'teaching of ID', they can be summed up thus: I can't myself see how 'ID' could be taught as such. It is the opposite of Darwinism, in that it is a sceptical current, not an overarching and unified theory of nature. I think teachers and text-books should mention that the subject remains controversial, rather than asserting falsely that it is closed, and let pupils know that there are scientists who suggest that there is evidence for some sort of design, which are available to us largely thanks to the fact that we now know so much more about biology than Darwin did. I wonder how Mr 'Thinking' would come off in a debate on the subject with Michael Behe, who unlike me is a distinguished microbiologist. But I suspect that, rather than attempt to do so, he would resort to ad hominem abuse against Dr Behe. Well, we can all draw our own conclusions from that.

Mr 'Bronstein' makes an interesting point about bookshops. I think there are versions of 'conservatism', which fit very neatly the caricature of conservatism on the Left, which bookshops are prepared to promote, especially if the author involved is a TV personality. Hence Jeremy Clarkson. I haven't seen many bookshops displaying Richard Littlejohn books. As long as 'conservative' means a celebrity petrol-head going on about 'The PC Brigade', bookshops will be willing to display it.

Mr Williamson says: ’Mr Hitchens, twice I have suggested to you that evolution is not necessarily incompatible with the concept of a deity, on both occasions you have rejected this. Unless I have missed something of great importance, I can't see that intelligent design is that different from what I suggested.’

Well, Mr Williamson, I can only point you to the rage and fury of the evolutionists against the 'Intelligent Design' movement. The idea of 'design' is repugnant to them. It is the precise point which evolutionists seek to assert - that there is no design. That is the thing of importance. Evolution seeks to exclude the possibility of a creator from human thought. That is what makes it incompatible with religion, and which makes religious attempts to compromise with evolutionists futile and rather sad. Evolution is atheist by nature. I can't see what is so difficult about it.

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Clunking fists

I don't understand the point that Kathleen Quigley seeks to make. Or rather, I do understand it, but I suspect that she does not. We know that Gordon Brown is a bad Prime Minister. But that is because of what he does, not because of who he is. If we elect a government with the same policies, nothing will be solved. Would she excuse the alleged bullying if she approved of the government, or if she believed the Prime Minister had been 'elected'? She seems to have a yearning for the 'elected' Anthony Blair, whom she describes as ‘a Prime Minister legitimately elected’.

This is constitutional and political piffle, of the sort that results from wild partisanship divorced from thought. We do not elect Prime Ministers in this country. We elect MPs, who by various means choose or accede to party leaders, who then are asked by the Queen to form governments. There is no obligation on any Prime Minister to seek 'election'. In fact, rather famously, Winston Churchill (a frightful bully, by all accounts) was Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 without ever having placed his ministry before the voters. So, should he have been forced to stand down? And Michael Howard, who became leader of the Tory Party in a putsch, and was 'unopposed' in the subsequent non-election for the leadership (his opponents were strongly advised not to stand) never attracted the sort of criticism that Mr Brown has done, for doing the same thing. I don't like Mr Brown. But who cares? The important thing is that I disagree with him, which is why I also disagree with David Cameron, whose policies are almost identical to those of Mr Brown.

I commend all readers to study my exchange with Mr 'Astonished of Gravesend', whose rush of blood to the head illustrates the unhinged nature of the anti-Brown sentiment that is now loose.

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Bombs look different when they're falling on you

I'm specially grateful for the post from Mr Liberou on the bombing issue. I will see if I can find more about Bishop Bell. I believe there is a biography, but it is hard to find. One Anglican priest of my acquaintance remembers him as an immensely impressive and rather frightening figure. There is an interesting and full Wikipedia entry on him, which seems uncontroversial at first glance.

John Davies says: ’I am worried by Mr Hitchens’ position on this, because it seems to be part of a much wider national tendency to denigrate almost every aspect of our performance in the Second World War. I know running ourselves down is a national pastime, but if all this stuff were true, one wonders how we ever managed to come out on the winning side at all.’

To which I reply that I don't see how it can be considered to be part of any such thing, given that it is the work of someone who is a British patriot and a political, social and moral conservative, and the denigration of Britain generally comes from elsewhere. If I regarded Britain (as do some correspondents, apparently) as a barbaric imperial power, then I wouldn't be shocked or dismayed that it had deliberately engaged in the slaughter of civilians in World War Two. For a hater of Britain, that would be all of a piece.

Note that several contributors have more or less argued this, saying that my characterisation of the country as 'Christian and civilised' is false. Some of the examples advanced for this, notably the concentration camps in the Boer War, miss the point. These camps were not, so far as I know, deliberately intended to have the horrendous effects that they undoubtedly did have. The bombing of Hamburg and Dresden (and of many other German cities) was deliberately intended to kill civilians. My critics would have had a better case if they had argued, as Harris did in his defence, that this was not the first such episode and that the British blockade of Germany between 1914 and 1919 was intended to starve that country into submission, and killed huge numbers of people through hunger and disease. This is comparable to the bombing in many ways, and adds to my belief that the 1914 war was unjustifiable, and disastrous for the morality and stability of Europe. But it was never, I think, defended on the grounds that it boosted domestic morale. There is, by the way, a sharply painful reflection on this blockade in the John Buchan short story 'The Loathly Opposite' about a British and a German code-breaker from the First World War, who meet by accident afterwards. It reads as if it were drawn from the life.

I am grateful for the information about civilian casualties in the Falklands War. I did not know that this had happened. I do not, however, think that these losses, though tragic, alter or undermine my case. I'm well aware of General Sherman's march to the sea (rather well described in Gone with the Wind). But I do not think that it involved the deliberate slaughter with powerful explosive ordnance of defenceless women and children, however cruel and destructive it may have been.

The question of whether it was a war for survival has been discussed elsewhere. If it was, did the bombing of German civilians actually aid our survival? I do not think this has been in any way established. I think Mr Barnes's grasp of World War Two history is extremely shaky. I must ask him to give references for his assertion that: ’The first bombs dropped on civilian targets were Polish ones on German border towns. When? Directly after our guarantee to Poland.
I believe over 200 German civilians died, thus provoking the German invasion. My contention is that the Poles were not in a position to act like this thus their bombing was a planned tactic to start the war, from Britain's orders.‘

I have never heard of any such thing, though the Germans did fake a Polish attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz, for propaganda purposes. But everyone now knows that this was done using murdered concentration camp inmates dressed up as Polish soldiers. Also, the British guarantee to Poland was given in April 1939. The war began in September.

John Davies also writes: ’We were in a war for survival against Nazism. That meant we could not afford to be squeamish or restrained.’

See above, but does he think there was any action we might have been squeamish about, or restrained about? Or that everything was justified. In which case what was the war about? He can't use this 'war against the Nazis' formulation, which suggests that we were in combat with a political system renowned for its ruthless evil, and then say that we could and should have used ruthless evil to fight it. 'Squeamishness' and 'restraint' are what politicians call morality, when it gets in their way.

In fact we were at war with Germany. Germany had been ruled by the Nazi Party for six years before that. And we had signed treaties with it, and exchanged ambassadors with it, and sent a team to the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, in full knowledge of the nature of the regime. The war, which we chose to fight, was against Germany. My view is that we chose to fight it without being equipped to do so, and so brought ourselves to the state where the only thing we could do to fight our chosen enemy (whether that choice had been wise or right or not, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Germany was ruled by Nazis) was to bomb Germany from the air. The next question is whether we had any choice as to whether we slaughtered civilians or attacked military and strategic targets. I say that we did, and made the wrong choice both morally and in terms of effectiveness. Bombing oil refineries and the like would have been both morally safer and a quicker way of defeating the enemy.

Mr Davies adds: ‘The real horror of Nazism did not emerge until after the war. But even though many of the English upper classes were happy to reach an accommodation with the Nazis, a great many ordinary people in Britain realised that Nazism was something quite out of the ordinary, and there was something very badly wrong about it.’

This is, in fact, fatuous left-wing propaganda, a ridiculous attempt by the Left to suggest that British conservatives were as enamoured of Hitler as British leftists were of Stalin, and an attempt to get themselves off this nasty hook by saying 'you did the same'. The British Labour Party opposed rearmament in 1934, when the violent, Judophobic and lawless character of the Hitler regime was quite clear from the unleashing of the SA immediately after Hitler took power. The Fulham East by-election, fought on the issue of rearmament, was lost by the pro-rearming Tory candidate thanks to Labour's championship of disarmed pacifism in the face of Hitler. It was speakers from the left who dominated the famous Oxford Union debate (again, when Hitler's rise was quite evident) which voted not to fight under any circumstances for King and Country. Chamberlain disliked and despised Hitler as an unreliable upstart. He didn't appease him because he sympathised with his domestic policy. Labour, by contrast, voted against conscription as late as 1939. Communist activists sought to undermine the British war effort in the factories throughout 1940, on the grounds that it was an 'imperialist war'. There were strikes in munitions factories during the battle of Britain. Oh, and Chamberlain's Munich deal was hugely popular among voters of all classes. There certainly were a few eccentric aristocrats who sympathised with Hitler. But their political importance was slight, and they for the most part changed their minds when push came to shove. Which is more than can be said for the Communists between 1939 and 1941.

Mr Davies continues: ’Essentially it was a deliberate return to irrationality, madness and barbarism.’ That's another argument, but I think it would be unwise to dismiss it as an inexplicable spasm. There were reasons for the rise of the Nazis, which should be learned if you want to avoid it happening again.

He adds: ‘People were pretty well-informed, too. I saw a wonderful ‘Picture Post’ feature, entitled ‘Back to the Middle Ages’, and other influential exposes were published too. So people did know what we were up against.’

Well, no, they didn't, because the extermination programme against the Jews was not conceived, as a political reality, or begun, till long after the war began. The British people were used to the existence of thuggish, Judophobic tyrannies on the continent. They had happened before. This was something new, and its full horror simply was not known till much later.

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One last raid on the bombing issue

I've been disappointed by the persistent failure of the pro-Arthur Harris contributors (and by the way, I was pleased to see the mention of his real nickname, 'Butch', or 'Butcher', and the reasons for it, namely his willingness to squander the lives of brave young men. He was the Douglas Haig of the Second War) to acknowledge or effectively to counter my central points. The first is that, quite simply, the deliberate mass-slaughter of non-combatants is self-evidently wrong and a severe blot on our national record. Before 1939, no British person would have imagined supporting such a policy, which would have been regarded as barbaric and un-Christian by politicians, military leaders and ordinary voters alike. This is easily demonstrated by reading the public statements of British national leaders in the early months of the war, before we had been militarily defeated and pushed to the fringes of the conflict. Art that stage, the idea of deliberately bombing civilians was still properly regarded with horror.

The argument of 'necessity' simply fails. The bombing of civilians did little to weaken the enemy, and far less than a targeted campaign against strategic objectives would have done. Assuming (which I do not accept, but some apparently do) that there is some kind of calculus at which the intentional dismemberment, incineration, suffocation and crushing-to-death of large numbers of women and children becomes justifiable, then the pitiful effects of area bombing on German war production don't seem to me to offer anything remotely resembling a justification.

An example: the mass-killing in Hamburg in 'Operation Gomorrah' (35,000 dead, 800,000 people made homeless) cost Germany less than two months' output of that city's major factories. So, for less than two months' industrial production in just one city, you are willing to kill thousands of women and children? I am not familiar with any moral system that can make that equation, but there is always the other solution - deliberately averting the eyes and mind from the reality of what we deliberately did. For there is no doubt, and none has been suggested, that the people who decided on this policy knew perfectly well what they were doing.

The rest of us at least have the decency to pretend we don't know. British publications remain reluctant to display pictures, or publish accounts, of the human consequences of our bombing, the baked and shrivelled corpses, including those of infants, the deranged women travelling round the country on refugee trains with the shrunken cadavers of their children in suitcases, the bluebottles feasting on the mounds of unburied dead, the satanic howling of the firestorm, ripping children from their mothers' arms, the mad, staring eyes of the women who had permanently lost their wits after undergoing such firestorms. Having seen some of the pictures and read some of the descriptions myself, I am not surprised we don't want to see or read them, much as abortion advocates balk at the showing of an abortion on mainstream TV. True knowledge of the reality would make the thing intolerable. So they avoid it, or ludicrously pretend that it 'served them right' because their tyrannous government committed horrible murders elsewhere. Self-exculpatory whining and piffle, as feeble as it is worthless.

James E. Shaw weirdly justifies his curious claim that we bombed Germany because of our experience of being bombed by calling into aid the Butt Report (already mentioned by me). But the Butt report had nothing whatever to do with German bombing of British cities. It reviewed the total failure of RAF night bombing of Germany up to that point, so leading (as I said) to the decision to give up trying to hit exact targets, and to flatten or burn houses, and kill the people inside them, instead. This, however, was not the only possible conclusion. Far from it.

Lindemann's separate assertion (which he also produces) that by bombing the Germans harder than they had bombed us we would 'break the spirit of the people' was (as I have pointed out) baseless, since British morale hadn't cracked, and so it unsurprisingly turned out to be wrong. A Canadian journalist trapped in Kosovo during the NATO bombing recounted when he eventually escaped that the main response of the human spirit to aerial bombardment is not so much demoralisation as a strange, frustrated fury against the attacker. I suspect this is universally true.

Others persist in speaking of alleged 'hindsight'. This too is absurd. Many saw at the time that this offensive was wrong, and said so even in the midst of a war of survival, and it is largely thanks to them that this country's moral nakedness and shame has a scrap of decency left to cover it. I have repeatedly drawn attention both to the public protests of major figures such as Bishop George Bell, and of the strong private doubts of civil servants and experts. They needed no hindsight. On the contrary, coming as they did from a more civilised and Christian era, they showed rather more courage in criticising living, breathing men of power than most people are prepared to show today in criticising the powerless dead.

On the issue of the diversion of resources from the Eastern Front, I personally doubt if this was decisive. But if it had been, Professor Grayling says (p.287), and I agree with him: ‘The same effect would have been achieved if, instead of indiscriminately targeting the civilian populations of cities, the bombing effort had been directed at transport links, factories, airfields, harbours, above all, coal gas and oil plants.’ He also suggests that diversion to the anti-submarine war might also have been more effective. I repeat here that the equipment and techniques needed to accomplish such bombing could and would have been developed if political leaders had desired them. We had lots of machines designed for bombing civilians in the dark because that is what we decided to do, and - by the way, the bombing offensive did not really begin to cause serious casualties until Spring 1943, well after Stalingrad, the point at which the Germans had already lost the war. In reality, they had lost it in December 1941, when Hitler declared war on the USA. Had we decided to do something more sensible (and more civilised) we would have developed the necessary machines.

I really must urge those who still support or excuse this ghastly national mistake to read Professor Grayling's book. I cannot do justice here to its clarity and power. There simply is no justification left for the Harris policy. It was absolutely wrong. We would grow up, as a people and a country, if we began to admit it.

By the way, I have looked up the fullest version I can find of George Orwell's reports from Germany, and regret to say that I was wrong in assuming his words meant he had ceased to support the policy of bombing civilians. He continued to do so. Which just goes to show that even Orwell wasn't always right.

Mr Shaw also challenges me: ‘If there has ever been a single war in which innocent people did not die I challenge you to name it.’ If by 'innocent' he simply means 'non-combatant' I should have thought the recapture of the Falklands
was one such. And I would suspect that the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and the American Civil War of 1860-65, were fought largely without civilian casualties. I'm not sure about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. But the point is not the deaths of innocent people as such, but the *deliberate* and *intended* killing of innocent people, well-known to be the purpose of this carpet bombing, by those who initiated it, and undoubtedly its effect over many long months, had anyone been in doubt. As to British morale, if it was really the case that this could only be kept up by killing German civilians, then it just goes to underline my case that Britain's ability to undertake serious warfare was far smaller than its posturing, then or since. But to admit that is to begin to grasp what a catastrophe the Second World War was for this country, a road of speculation down which it is almost sacrilege to go.

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The great clunking fist

I am surprised to see David Cameron personally getting involved in the row about whether Gordon Brown grabs people by the lapels and snarls: ‘They're trying to get me!’ (How deeply unoriginal, if so. Does anyone, even Mr Brown, actually talk like this?) Mr Cameron is calling grandly for an 'inquiry', as if Mr Brown had started a war, though he knows perfectly well that the allegations don't merit anything of the kind. He is also - as usual - calling for a general election which he knows perfectly well is already under way. What does this mean? Will we have a choice between swearing and non-swearing, lapel-grabbing and non-lapel-grabbing politicians? Does the party divide encompass this issue? When did that happen? How will it be phrased? I look forward to the paragraph in the Tory manifesto, and the instant sackings of all who breach the new code. Honestly.

What's really surprising is his direct involvement in a distinctly second-grade matter. Leaders of the Opposition usually float above cat-fights of this kind, leaving them to underlings who don't have to worry about gravitas and grandeur. What will happen if someone summons up the wit to ask Mr Cameron the following question: ‘Have you ever sworn at a subordinate? Have you ever kicked or hit the furniture in frustration?’

I imagine, even now, that someone with connections to the Labour machine is trawling among former and present colleagues for any rumours about Mr Cameron's behaviour towards underlings. Will some anti-Bullying helpline discover that it has had complaints against a senior Tory or two? It's a risk I wouldn't have taken, in his shoes - because if we're in the business of unsupported and anonymous allegations (and we are) there's no real certainty of what might now be said.

As for me, the whole thing makes me want to lie down in a darkened room with a cold compress, and weep. Is this what politics has come to? If Mr Brown were a good Prime Minister, his personal behaviour would be overlooked. If he is a bad Prime Minister, then it is his failings in the job - and the political reasons for them - that need to be discussed.

But we can't take that route because politics are dead in this country. Mr Cameron can't attack Mr Brown on any major policy, because he agrees with Mr Brown.

Worse, the public have been invited to loathe Gordon Brown, in the hope that his strong negative charisma will make up for David Cameron's lack of true star quality, and waft the Tories into office even though nobody much fancies them.

New readers should note here that I criticised Mr Brown, as a politician and as a Chancellor, when it was virtually taboo to do so, and when the (now Tory) Sun newspaper was at his feet, polishing his toecaps with its tongue. Mr Brown, apart from being rude and dismissive to me at press conferences, has never spoken to me, and I have been given good reason to believe that he is not willing to be in the same room as me. So I am not a defender of him as a politician, and I am not in any way his friend.

But I think the wave of personalised loathing directed against him is ridiculous and faintly sinister. No human being could be that bad, and my guess has always been that those who now rave and rage against him as if he were evil incarnate were those who were fooled by Mr Blair, and are now angry with themselves for being fooled. So they take it out on Mr Brown. There's another element, even more dispiriting. In this soap opera culture, there are people who would rather have a Prime Minister who can't read than a Prime Minister who can't smile. So they preferred Mr Blair to Mr Brown.

Then there's the other thing. These revelations, if they have any political effect at all, will damage Labour and help the Tories. Yet the journalist involved, Andrew Rawnsley, is famously sympathetic to New Labour. If you wanted confirmation of my contention - that David Cameron's Tories are the reincarnation of Blairism - you couldn't ask for a clearer one.

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I know you like it. You know you like it.

So here's another instalment of the evolution debate, stimulated by the forthcoming release in this country of Ben Stein's film Expelled, which argues that dissent from Darwinism in the universities of the USA is ruthlessly suppressed.

This satirical documentary has not until now been easily available in this country, unless you could play US-format NTSC DVDs, which I can't. It is now being issued here as a PAL DVD (I believe there will be some press and media showings in cinemas, but none are planned in commercial venues).

I'm cool (in the old-fashioned rather than the modern sense) about the film, which has been widely attacked for its factual accuracy, or alleged lapses from it, and for some selective quotation. Given the chance, I'd make a rather different film, though I quite enjoy many of the witty cross-cuts to old documentaries and movies, and the Berlin Wall references. The criticisms of Expelled can be explored on the web quite easily, and should be read by anyone who sees the film.

But I think it deserves to be seen, because it will explain to British viewers what the controversy actually is. British bookshops are full of works by Richard Dawkins and others, denouncing critics of evolutionary theory, but those same shops simply do not stock the works which have provoked the Dawkins counter-attack, such as Phillip E. Johnson's Darwin on Trial, Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box or Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells. Such books vary in quality and significance, which more people would know if they were more accessible. They are widely-read and known in the USA where they are or have been readily available and on display in bookshops. But a British reader will have to make a positive effort to search them out, and - if he doesn't know they exist - will not readily find out that they do exist, or know what they say. This seems quite close to censorship to me.

As George Orwell rightly said: ’Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban...At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question...Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals...If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’

I would add the bookshops to Orwell's list (by implication he is already referring to the strange unaccountable court of judgement which decides if a book gets a good or bad review or - worst of all - no review at all). Even if it is well-reviewed, a book's success and influence depend greatly on how and where bookshops display it in the crucial weeks when it is in the public eye. The difference in the influence of the book that's piled in heaps on the table at the entrance, and the book which you have to ask for, or which is concealed on a back shelf in a basement, is colossal. Yet nobody ever classifies this often completely unfair treatment as censorship or bias. It is odd how so few people are conscious of being manipulated by bookshops, whereas I think most people are aware of the way in which supermarkets try to manipulate them. And so the huge responsibility of deciding whose book gets prominent display goes unexamined. Often it's a matter of money. But I think most bookshop staffs are left-wing, in that boring default way which afflicts most graduates, and they let their prejudices govern their display. When I first published The Abolition of Britain I and my family did most of the selling to bookshops. On the rare occasions when we encountered a sympathetic bookseller, that shop then sold quite large numbers of the book. But mostly they refused to take more than a couple, and plainly made no effort to sell it. But I digress.

What I have noticed about the whole Intelligent Design debate - and the thing which first interested me about it - was the way in which it was headed off here before it even got going. Its supporters were generally crudely misrepresented in the British media. What is clear from Expelled is that many of the dissenters from Darwinian orthodoxy are themselves scientists, which conflicts with the idea widely accepted among British observers that ID is embraced mainly by bearded hillbilly patriarchs with bushy beards, shotguns and wild eyes, accompanied by about nine obedient wives dressed in identical ankle-length gingham frocks.

Something that is also missed here is the fact that ID is not identical with Biblical literalism, as is generally claimed by evolution enthusiasts. In fact it doesn't really set out a coherent theory of the origin of species, or if it has I've never seen it. It suggests that there are reasons to believe that some sort of design is, or may be involved in the natural world. It doesn't specify who or what the designer is. There is a wonderful interview with Professor Dawkins in Expelled, in which he appears to accept the possibility of design - and then gives a wonderful evolution-compatible explanation of this which gave - and gives - me great pleasure. It's worth the price of the DVD to see this and several other Dawkins moments. He has hit back at the film's makers on his website, and I don't blame him at all. They made him look silly, something he's not used to in a generally admiring world.

ID's opponents, notably in the famous Dover, Pennsylvania trial, have been more anxious to classify it as an undercover attempt to introduce God into American classrooms than to discuss its actual rather modest claims. This may seem bizarre to British readers, who are used to the presence of Christianity in state schools (though in Mr Embery's case they don't like it being there). But the American Civil Liberties Union has fought a long battle to exclude such teaching from schools in the USA, on the grounds that this is an 'establishment of religion' and so unconstitutional, which is stretching Thomas Jefferson's original meaning quite a bit (should the unambiguous references to a creator, in quotations from the great man's writings, be chiselled off the beautiful Jefferson memorial in Washington DC, on the same grounds? Does that make Jefferson - gasp - a 'creationist'? Discuss). So ID can be kept out of the classroom if it can be shown to be an attempt to smuggle God into the science curriculum.

I never tire of making the point that the famous Tennessee 'Monkey Trial', which was seriously misrepresented in the famous play (and film) 'Inherit the Wind' was an attempt by stupid religious bigots and Bible literalists to silence those who challenged them. The jackboot is now on the other foot. It is the 'liberal' and 'enlightened' evolutionists who now seek to silence their opponents. This is never a good position to be in. Those who want to shut their critics up generally do so because those critics have them worried.

But it's plainly true that ID is an attempt to smuggle religion into the classroom - or at least the religious world view. Though it might more fairly be seen as an attempt to prevent the science curriculum from making metaphysical claims which it is not actually qualified to make. For the heart of this is the claim by 'science' that by explaining the operation of the universe it has explained its origin, and that there is and can be no explanation beyond the materialist one. ID casts doubt on that rather dubious claim, and so is Theistic by implication, just as modern science teaching is Atheistic by implication.

Actually, the film's most telling moments are those where orthodox scientists are shown blustering vaguely but overconfidently about the origins of life, a thing they can't explain, have in fact failed to explain, and whose explanation is becoming more elusive, as we learn more about the astonishing complexity of the living cell. The cell is something Darwin knew very little about. Their performances strongly reinforced my own view. That is that nobody knows how the realm of nature took its present shape. I don't, they don't - and all prescriptive statements on this subject are risky, and people should be polite to each other about it when they disagree.

…which brings me to

Piltdown revisited

One of the great privileges of working for a newspaper is access to the marvellous libraries of cuttings, built up over decades, which are the indispensable record of the recent past, as it was seen by those who lived through it. I decided to look up what had been said about the alleged fossil of Piltdown man, now known to be an outrageous and blatant forgery, when it was originally discovered, and while it was still accepted as a legitimate discovery.

One of my favourite cuttings is an account from July 1938 (fifteen years before the hoax was definitively exposed) of the unveiling of a memorial, at Barkham Manor, Piltdown, to the 'discovery' of 'Piltdown Man' by a Sussex lawyer, Charles Dawson, in 1912 and 1913. Is it still there? I do so hope so.

Sir Arthur Keith - who had questioned the skull's authenticity when it was first discovered, then accepted it, and eventually lived to see it proved a hoax – pronounced: ‘Those bones gave them the entrance to a long-past world of humanity such as never had been dreamt of....Piltdown man foreshadowed some of the structural modifications found in modern races of mankind.’ Actually Sir Arthur's speech contains in it an admission of the fact that the 'discovery' had upset what was then the current theory. But it affirms that the old dispute had reached a 'happy ending'. In other words, they had wanted to believe in it so much that they had suppressed their own valid doubts.

In a 1914 cutting from the much-missed 'Morning Post', a correspondent refers to the thoughts of a 'Professor Dawkins' (surely not the same one? No, his name is Boyd Dawkins, not Richard) on the subject in a 'recent Huxley lecture'. A cutting from the 'Manchester Guardian' of 22nd November 1912 boasts of its 'exclusive announcement of 'the discovery in Sussex of the skull of a prehistoric man of great antiquity'. Column after column dwells ludicrously on the significance of the find.

By 1918 we read that: ‘At South Kensington (the Natural History Museum) the fossil parts of the skull have been put together so as to represent a being that is partly ape, partly man', and named by Dr Smith Woodward, keeper of geology in the British Museum as 'Eoanthropus Dawsonii'. Meanwhile at the Royal College of surgeons a rival reconstruction has been named 'Homo Piltdownensis'.

It adds: ‘There is fortunately no difference of opinion as regards the extreme antiquity of the Piltdown remains.’

By 1938, Sir Arthur Keith was still calling it 'one of nature's many and vain attempts to produce a new type of mankind'. But in 1949 a leading dental surgeon, Alvan Marston, concluded the jawbone was that of an ape. The news wasn't welcome. The Daily Mail reported an anthropologist's weary comment: ‘Controversy over the Piltdown Man was fought out many years ago - now it seems it is to be revived again'. He spoke truer than he knew. Within four years, the whole thing would be acknowledged as a tremendous fake. But for several decades it was discussed and referred to as if it were part of an unquestioned truth. You can either learn something from this, or not learn anything from it.

I'll be posting on the Brown bullying allegations later this afternoon.

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Another big push, another procession of coffins... another unwinnable war

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Politicians are so vain and stupid these days that they don’t know any history, let alone learn from it. But why can’t they even learn from events in their own lifetimes?

Watching this week’s vaunted big push in Afghanistan has been infuriating beyond belief, not least because of the latest procession of soldiers’ coffins, driven in the rain through sad shires, valuable and irreplaceable lives honourably lost in a rotten cause.

Gordon Brown and many senior Tories must be old enough to remember the Vietnam War, with its talk of ‘Vietnamisation’, just like today’s ‘Afghanisation’, and its bombing raids that unintentionally slaughtered civilians in pursuit of an elusive enemy. 

They might also recall its use of modern firepower to capture ground that was lost again within months to an enemy who melted away, leaving booby-traps behind, and returned when things had gone quiet again.

It even had its own fairy story about how, if we left, the communists would take over the whole of South East Asia - our equivalent is the piffle that if we pull out of Helmand - Islamist terrorists will immediately fan out across Britain.

Many of us laughed at this rubbish 40 years ago. And we were right to do so.

The war in Vietnam achieved nothing for that country or for the world. It was the cause of many terrible crimes committed by both sides.

It did lasting damage to the United States and its people.

Soldiers have to believe in what they’re doing, at least publicly, because they must stay out of politics and they are asked to do such terrifying things that they need to convince themselves they are worthwhile.

But there is no such excuse for the journalists and politicians who talk the braggart’s pseudo-masculine language of offensives and victory, in a battle that was lost before it ever started. 

We will leave Afghanistan sooner or later, no better than we found it and probably worse. 

Who will tell the families of those who die or are maimed between now and then that their sacrifice was made to save the face of a gutless Government and a useless Opposition?

* Since the politicians are so intent on ensuring that soldiers are injured in shockingly large numbers, mainly concealed from the public, might they not at least reopen the Haslar Hospital at Gosport in Hampshire?

I have a personal attachment to what was our last military hospital, since my father once worked there and I was christened in its chapel.

When its closure was announced I was sad but I never imagined it would be needed again as much as it is, since the Afghan war had not properly begun at the time.

A nation that claims to be a major military power, as we do, must surely have a dedicated military hospital - and will need one for years after this conflict is over.

Only a FULL time parent could have said No to F-word Lily 

David Cameron obviously needs to draw attention away from his policy chaos, his feeble Shadow Chancellor, his weird donors and his dictatorial grip on candidate selection, odd in a man who claims to be all for decentralisation. 

So he reveals an egalitarian taste for canned Guinness and darts (I bet the Bullingdon club were great stout drinkers, and ended every evening round a dartboard). And he invades the privacy of his daughter, Nancy.

Well, I’m against the premature, inappropriate politicisation of tots. The poor mite can’t possibly be old enough to be dragged into an Election campaign. 

And it also strikes me that if this little girl has already been exposed to the F-word screeching of Lily Allen, left, thenMr Cameron isn’t in much of a position to lecture advertisers on exploiting the young.

Someone should have protected Nancy from this aural slurry. But experience shows that only a full-time parent can be relied upon to say ‘no’ to a child’s demands.

Paid strangers will always take the easy option. 

The Camerons, being a fashionable modern couple, have no time for the cause of full-time mothers, though it’s an option they could easily afford if they wanted. That sort of thing is for dinosaurs.

Don’t let the BNP disguise its bigotry

As far as I am concerned the Equality and Human Rights Commission is the first step towards a National Thought Police, and should be shut down. 

The ‘Equality’ it pursues is the agenda of the cultural and sexual resolutions.

The ‘Rights’ it enforces are the shopping lists of politically correct lobbies.

But it is also dangerous in other ways, as it proved this week.

Patriotic conservatives such as me, who loathe the BNP and its cynical pretence that it cares about this country, used to have a killer argument.

When BNP members insisted it wasn’t racially bigoted, we could point to its constitution, which was openly racialist.

Now, thanks to the EHRC, which has forced the BNP to change its rules, we can’t.

What on earth was the point of using public money to do that?

With the exception of one or two deluded twits, such as the Sikh Rajinder Singh, non-white people do not wish to join the BNP, and if they do they will quickly realise that the party’s conversion is not a genuine one. 

If Mr Griffin’s louts and their dupes (whose violence was on display again last week) wish to have a racial clause in their constitution, they should be free to do so. 

And we should be free to despise them for it.

 

Truth is, Europe doesn’t want juries

Why do you think the official report on juries was commissioned, with its damaging claim that they don’t understand what judges tell them? I will tell you.

The British Establishment knows that, if we stay in the EU, we will sooner or later have to abolish jury trial because it does not fit in with European law and we will be forced to give it up in some sordid deal.

So it is softening us up for this moment, a potentially disastrous loss of liberty.

That is also why they have been holding the first non-jury trial in England for 400 years, on the grounds that they supposedly couldn’t prevent the jury from being nobbled.

Couldn’t be bothered to prevent this, more likely. One of the allegedly dangerous defendants in this trial was given bail and so lightly watched that he has apparently vanished during the lunch hour.

Yet he is now said to be so dangerous that we mustn’t approach him if we see him - but he was let out for lunch? Excuse me? 

I wouldn’t trust the people responsible for this to do a night’s babysitting, let alone protect a jury from tampering.

 

* As a man, and a conservative too, I’ve learned from experience that I am not allowed to have any views on rape.

My enemies will distort what I say, and pretend I have said things I haven’t. So I hereby declare that I have no thoughts on this subject any more.

But I notice that an opinion poll last week showed that quite a lot of women felt that there were circumstances in which rape victims had to accept some responsibility for what happened to them.

Getting into bed with someone was seen as one such circumstance. I couldn’t possibly comment.

 

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