Democracy? That just means being ruled by secret cliques

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

 

It is grimly funny to listen to leaders and supporters of a supposedly ‘Conservative’ party using the word ‘unelected’ as a form of abuse. I know the Chancellor is peeved that he failed in his dismally planned and badly executed attempt to make a lot of poorly paid people worse off. But I think that he and his media toadies speak from the heart when they rage against the House of Lords.

I suspect that David Cameron and George Osborne are thoughtless and fashionable republicans, who can think of no good reason to keep the Queen – though at the moment they dare not admit this. It’s not that they actively want to set up a guillotine in Trafalgar Square. It’s just that they wouldn’t waste any tears if the Crown were abolished. Knowing little and caring little about the past, they see no merit in it.

Real conservatives are in favour of all kinds of unelected power and authority.

 

As well as the Monarchy, there’s the Church, the judges, not to mention the chiefs of the Armed Forces, parents, privately owned media companies, the BBC, school heads – and the thousands of strivers who have won the freedom to hire and fire through hard work and business success.

Democracy plays little part in these things, and a good thing too. To say that you are an elected politician in modern Britain isn’t much of a boast.

It means mainly that you have been picked by a narrow selection committee of politically active careerists and fixers to stand in a safe seat. Backstairs-crawlers, flatterers and obedient conformists naturally do well in this process.

These days it also means that you have been approved by some secretive group of whisperers clustered round the party leadership, who can also remove you if you show any signs of independence.

And we see the results in the Commons every Wednesday, when the backbenchers of both main parties show all the wit and independence of football hooligans, braying mindless applause for their own leaders, and equally mindless abuse for the other side. And then they humiliate themselves by asking tame, planted questions handed to them by the whips.

These whips have power over them because they, not the voters, are their real employers. They can give them well-paid jobs if they are obedient and get them deselected if they cause too much trouble.

That is why the House of Commons was so useless over the tax-credit row, and why the Lords, for all their faults, spoke for the people. Any proper conservative would have known that all along.

 

 

No blood, no gore... but truly terrifying

So often I want to watch a film or a TV series, and hesitate to do so because of the violence. I expect I will eventually go to see the new Bond movie, though I shall hide behind something during the eyeball-squeezing bit. And I’m not sure I can face the new Jekyll And Hyde.

 

Above: Deborah Kerr in the 1961 film 'The Innocents'

 

I suspect there are millions like me, who’d watch more willingly if we were spared grisly scenes. I enjoy being frightened by films, but not by explicit gore. 

The most terrifying thing I ever saw in a cinema, thanks to the carefully built-up drama, was in the ancient black-and-white film The Innocents, based on Henry James’s The Turn Of The Screw. My skin actually crawled with horror. But it was just a woman in black, her pale face filled with despair and grief, glimpsed across a lake in broad daylight.

 

 

Fighting to get into my own country

As our population climbs towards 70 million thanks to unrestricted immigration, it gets steadily harder and nastier to get back into my own country. I sometimes think the ‘Border Force’ work on the principle that if normal British people want strict frontier controls, then they can jolly well have them, hot and strong, and serve them right.

While alleged Syrians (whose passports have somehow vanished) leap unhindered from the backs of lorries all over the Home Counties, and vanish promptly into the low-wage workforce, actual documented British citizens must queue for ages to pass through poorly manned passport control.

There, we have no more right to enter the country than a Lithuanian retired secret policeman. And we are treated with unjustified suspicion. On Thursday a ‘Border Force’ person wearing pseudo-military shoulder insignia glowered at my wholly valid passport before asking me where I had come from, which is my business, not theirs.

 

  Above, migrants moving north in Denmark

 

 

 

I have a Chinese friend who bravely resists his own country’s arrogant authorities by challenging such officiousness. And in tribute to him, I replied politely that I was not obliged to answer such questions.

My decision to behave like a free Englishman rather than a potential suspect caused a startling amount of shock, tooth-sucking and frowning, and led to the appearance of a supervisor who told me I should learn the law (as it happens, I have done, and the question was not justified). I said he could detain me if he liked, but he didn’t.

I wonder how many illegal migrants fanned out across the country while I and others were subjected to the stone-faced, suspicious inefficiency of the Border Force? Should I take my holidays by lorry in future, if I want to be treated with respect and courtesy by officials whose salaries are paid by my taxes and yours?

 

 

At last, the clocks of Britain are telling the truth again. Noon is at noon, dusk falls at the proper time and I can see my garden in daylight before I leave for work. Enjoy it while it lasts. The Eurofanatics still want us on Berlin Time all year round.

 

 

 

 

The Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Suzette Davenport, says she wouldn’t ride a bicycle in London because the roads are too dangerous

Police put us on the road to ruin

The Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Suzette Davenport, says she wouldn’t ride a bicycle in London because the roads are too dangerous.

Ms Davenport is the National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman on roads. I ride a bike in London (and in many other places, too) so I feel justified in assuring her the danger to cyclists is real, and largely the fault of the police.

My readers will know that the police long ago abandoned foot patrols (despite repeatedly claiming that this non-existent ‘beat’ is threatened by cuts). But my observations as a cyclist all over the country suggest to me that they have also stopped patrolling the roads by car. Since cameras became common, police patrols have become a rarity. The result is plain to see – much more risky driving, many more lights jumped, zebra crossings ignored, blatant speeding on suburban roads, far more generally rude and inconsiderate behaviour, and a return of the drink-driving that had been greatly reduced by the breathalyser.

It’s all made even worse by the growing number of drivers who have taken illegal drugs, whose possession Ms Davenport and her colleagues do so little to discourage.

If she and her fellow officers did their job, it would be safe for her – and millions of others – to ride a bike. And this healthy, clean and quiet form of transport would become normal, as it is in Holland, rather than the choice of eccentrics like me, or of self-righteous, lawless fanatics in Lycra.

 

Why I Can't Stand Cyclists who Overtake other Cyclists on the Inside

Wheezing slowly up a not-particularly steep hill on my far-from-lightweight bike, my backpack stuffed with books about the European Union, I heard the sound of rasping rapid breath at my left shoulder and moments later was overtaken, on the inside, by another cyclist, one of those scowling depersonalised clones in uniform Lycra and a plastic helmet, i-player buds jammed in his heedless ears,  who have multiplied in their hundreds of thousands in the past ten years. (In my view any theoretical gain from wearing the helmet is completely cancelled out by the added danger from not being able to hear what is behind you properly).

 

 Had I turned left just then, as I might well have done, there would have been a bad accident and it would have been entirely his fault.  I have to say I wish I could have caught up with him and told him a few home truths. I greatly fear him and people like him, and their irresponsible and self-righteous stupidity is a growing danger.  I have grown better at anticipating it, but I still haven’t trained myself to expect it as often as it actually happens.

 

The road was reasonably wide and not busy. He could perfectly well have overtaken me on the outside. I actually think he went on the inside deliberately, as some sort of thrill (it happens so often in irrational unjustifiable circumstances that I have been forced to this conclusion).

 

  I was a little way out in the road because, like most sensible cyclists,  I expect danger from any parked car. The most likely is that one of its doors will suddenly be flung open in my path. The other (especially in these days of near-silent electric cars, where the tell-tale plume of exhaust and mutter of engine are absent) is that the car will swing out without warning. It’s always been my rule to assume these dangers.

 

I ride, in fact,  very defensively. While riding, I adopt an attitude of total mistrust of all motor vehicles. I assume (often correctly) that their drivers may technically have seen me, but have not registered me as a significant object. Where the car has (illegal) tinted windows, I assume this twice over. When nice, kind, decent motorists offer to give way to me, I stonily ignore them, because I cannot square their (rare) behaviour with the indifferent or hostile road etiquette of the majority. I have to maintain my defensive hostility at a high pitch all the time. It's often reciprocated, and quite unprovoked. Many believe (I think they got this off a TV ‘personality’) that I am not entitled to use the road because I ‘don’t pay road tax’. Few remember anything of the Highway Code, especially about showing consideration to other road users.

 

I won’t say my ultra-defensive attitude keeps me safe. There is no safety on the road. I’d just say it has kept me safer than I would have been if I hadn’t adopted it, long ago, when I was one of the very few adult cycle commuters in London or indeed in the country, and was mocked or despised by colleagues for my eccentricity.

 

 

Since then, many aspects of cycling have got much better. Cycle lanes are a lot better than no cycle lanes, though they often turn abruptly into car parks or run out when you need them most. Brakes now work in the rain. They used not to, even the expensive leather ones which were better than nothing. Gears are simple and easy to use, quite unlike the old feeler-gauges on the frame, so placed that you had to let go of the handlebars to use them. The bikes themselves are lighter and stronger,  the tyres tougher, lights a thousand times better and more conspicuous, reflective gear far easier to obtain and inventively designed.

 

But drivers are more heedless and more hostile, and the law against driving while texting or phoning is, to all intents and purposes, dead - as it is almost never enforced. And then there are the other cyclists. They have, in recent years, made riding far, far more dangerous.

 

I am not a purist. Sometimes, at vicious junctions designed by homicidal traffic planners to force cyclists into the paths of speeding juggernauts, I will cautiously ride on the pavement, giving way to pedestrians if they appear. I’ve even been known to ride the wrong way up a brief stretch of (deserted) one-way street, rather than ride half a mile to stay legal.  At any sign of oncoming traffic, I will dismount. At some very slow-to-change traffic lights I will dismount, wheel my machine past and then remount, to show respect for the law. I might have gone through one or two as they changed from amber to red.  But I regard deliberately riding through a red light (especially on a pedestrian crossing) as a serious sin, as well as an offence.

 

There’s a simple reason for this. The law is what protects us.  Nothing else does. If you drive around in a  ton of steel and  glass, and drive through a red light, you probably won’t be badly hurt if it goes wrong. The same’s not true if you’re on a bike.  If red lights are just advisory or some sort of leftover Christmas decoration, then it won’t be the people in the cars or the lorries that have most to lose. And if the law protects you,  you should protect the law, all the time and especially when it doesn’t suit you. I simply don’t buy the claim that jumping red lights is safer. Staying ahead, where you can be clearly seen, is clearly safer than being stuck alongside a big lorry. But it’s not the only choice. If you can’t get ahead, then stay behind. There’s not that much hurry, anyway.  

 

The same is true, in a  slightly different way, about overtaking on the inside. When in motion on a two-way road, it’s almost impossible to drive or ride safely if you have to watch both sides in the mirror, or glance repeatedly over both shoulders, and keep an eye on the road ahead for crazies coming towards you in the middle of the road.  You’re not even supposed to do it on Motorways, where the head-on danger is a lot less. Any driver knows that you shouldn’t do this.

 

Cyclists do (I do) ride slowly and cautiously alongside stationary or very slow-moving cars on the inside in some circumstances, though I much prefer to pass them on the offside. This is awkward, and unlovely but there's a good reason for it. It is often essential if you are to make any progress on the jammed roads of modern Britain. It is not ideal. The fear of the suddenly opened door is even greater when you are doing this than when you are riding past parked vehicles.  In many cities there are actually cycle lanes where this is encouraged by the authorities. Urban drivers have, I think, grown accustomed to it and the risk is, in any case,  much more to the cyclist than it is to the driver.  

 

But why do cyclists (who have so much to fear from a war of all against all on the roads) repeatedly and needlessly do it to other cyclists who have left a sensible distance between themselves and parked cars? Or who are simply riding a reasonable distance out into the road to assert their freedom to be there?  I can't see what they gain. I can see it causing horrible needless accidents. I am growing used to it and am learning to expect this stupidity alongside all the others I see on the road. But it still seems to me to be irrational, verging on the spiteful. Can anyone explain?    

Billy Morris's Unstately Home

I’ve always found it funny that one of the greatest exponents of beauty and one of the greatest authors of ugliness both carried the name William Morris. It’s the second one I wish to write about today, not the hugely-bearded idealist socialist novelist, wallpaper designer and friend of pre-Raphaelites, but the tough clean-shaven backstreet bicycle repairman who became a millionaire and a great philanthropist, Britain’s miniature Henry Ford.  

 

I’ve so far failed to get inside the first Morris’s Thames-side home, Kelmscott Manor though have turned up there more than once on my bicycle, hoping to be in luck, but I am seldom free on Wednesdays and Saturdays when it is most likely to be open. It’s a lovely place in a strange and remote corner of England, and sooner or later I’ll organise myself to get there. I had similar problems with the other Morris’s equally interesting house, somehow turning up too late, or on the wrong day. But during my recent brief Spring break, I finally managed to get there.

 

If the National Trust has on its books an odder property than Nuffield Place at Huntercombe on the hills above Wallingford, I’d like to know what it is.

 

My life has been slightly haunted by its one-time owner, who I first heard of as Lord Nuffield, probably thanks to his great generosity in equipping dozens of hospitals with costly ‘Iron Lungs’, respirators which allowed the victims of Polio to keep breathing and survive. There’s one of these machines at Huntercombe, in a garden outhouse.  Like almost everything that seemed shiny, modern and sleek in my childhood, it now looks shabby, cumbersome and archaic, but the phrase itself was terribly evocative of another time.  And the name ‘Nuffield’ brought to mind another of his philanthropic gestures, the Nuffield United Services Officers’ Club in Portsmouth,  where we would stay on family visits to my father’s Pompey relatives, mainly during the years when we lived in far-off Devon. It was a child’s paradise, a huge building of many rooms (one for reading, one for writing, one for playing cards in,  a grand lounge where white-jacketed waiters served (presumably subsidised) drinks to Naval officers and their families, an (unmechanised) ten-pin bowling alley , a snack-bar and a fruit-machine from which my brother once won the jackpot, a two-minute cascade of silver sixpences. Maybe I grew older and more perceptive, and maybe the Club itself grew shabbier and less populous, but in later years the place seemed diminished, and I suppose its clientele shrank after Suez, and their tastes changed. It was, like a lot of my childhood, much more like the 1930s than the 1950s.  The building , which once seemed vast to me, is I think still there, but appeared to be closed up when I last looked.

 

I would get to know the name even better when we moved to Oxford, by then altered out of all recognition by his car factories (in those days Kingsley Amis and others were predicting that Oxford would end up as ‘the Latin Quarter of Cowley’), as the industrial sprawl to the east of the old city spread and spread, and what had been an ancient and rather obscure university and market town became a modern English manufacturing centre in the South Midlands. I sold Trotskyist newspapers outside them, gathering near the foot of the great camouflaged brick chimneys, reminders of the factories’ wartime role as a Spitfire repair shop, and meeting afterwards for the best bacon sandwiches I have ever eaten, and strong brown tea,  at Johnson’s Café, , no more than a wooden hut, now vanished. I even did a summer job cleaning one of those factories (I took part in a brief and unsuccessful strike , I confess. It seemed the thing to do. The place was always on strike the rest of the time) and lived to see them pulled down and turned into green fields, their memory preserved by an obelisk recording the rise and fall of the Morris empire. All those furious years of manufacture and invention, Bullnose Morrises, Morris Minors, the original Mini, ending in the collapse of Britain's own domestic motor industry. 'And the wind shall blow over it, and the place of it shall know it no more'. 

 

Funnily enough we spent some time at the Nuffield Club, as we called it, , between homes, when we finally left Portsmouth for Oxford in 1963 - and so we were there in the huge lounge on the day Lord Nuffield died, 22^nd August 1963. There was a large piece of black crape on top of his portrait, and a reverential end-of-an-era feeling along the shiny cork-tiled corridors and in all the comfortable, quiet public rooms.  

 

 

The house is a sort of memorial of that day. Lord and Lady Nuffield had no children, so the place was not broken up, refurbished or sold, but was left more or less untouched by Nuffield College, which inherited it. Then someone had the (in my view) brilliant idea of opening it to the public (details are on the National Trust website).  Owners of vintage Morris cars may park right outside. Those who arrive on foot or by bike (Lord Nuffield started as a bicycle repairman, remember)  get a free cup of tea in the modest but pleasant tea-room. It commemorates an era which is now as remote to most British people as the Reformation (more so, as there are no TV dramas about it, and those who lived through it are mostly out of circulation or dead) , the age of home-grown industrialists, the first excitement of the motor car, then still seen as a liberator rather than as a tyrant.

 

Nuffield was plainly a special sort of great man, with a huge will and a furious dedication to hard work, combined with a superb business sense, a lot of ambition and a hatred of idleness (there’s a wonderful tool cupboard in his bedroom, which he used to the end, sometimes resoling his own shoes). His vast philanthropy wasn’t compulsory, and he must be given credit for it, though I must confess that I’ve never really liked the sound of him (he drove Oxford’s old horse-trams off the streets by running his own bus service, and I’ve often wondered if, without him, my home city might now have a fine system of elegant electric trams, a form of transport much better suited to it than cars or motor buses).

 

But his personal modesty is appealing.  The house is really just a big two-storey suburban villa (it was built in 1914 for a shipping magnate, who later sold it to Nuffield,  and designed by an associate of Edwin Lutyens, so it sits quite unobtrusively amid lawns and woods . Nuffield’s idea of luxury is incredibly modest by the standards of today.  There’s a large garden where Morris and his wife spent many happy hours.  There are few books, but there is a large billiard table in its own billiard room, with scoreboards and the rules of snooker and billiards on the wall. There’s a tiny TV and there are a couple of wireless sets. It is all very unassuming, suitable, lower-middle-class and English, and could be the setting for the opening of a Nevil Shute novel. Margaret Thatcher would have liked it, I think.

 

 The staff know a lot about him (I think some of them may have known him). One rather touching story was told to me , that , after business trips to London, he would take the train to Henley (the nearest station) , and telephone the local pub in Nuffield, where he was well-known. He’d then ask if anyone was able to give him a lift home. He’d pay for their petrol and give them money to stand a round in the pub, but he’d also quietly pump them for news of who in the village might be in need of help of any kind, which would then be unobtrusively given.

 

The old story, that he was snobbishly refused entry to the nearby Huntercombe Golf Club, and retaliated by buying it, is apparently not true. Staff at the house say he bought it to help it through a bad patch.  The setting, by the way, is glorious – looking North-West down a steep valley towards the Wittenham Clumps and beyond for many miles into the Cotswolds. And one bizarre historical note – just along the road is HM Prison Huntercombe, whose existence on this sequestered, beautiful spot must surely have annoyed this rich and powerful man and his wife. Before becoming a prison, it was a wartime internment camp in which the mysterious Rudolf Hess was briefly held. What a strange force is history, that could bring two such men within shouting distance of each other.

The Clarkson Controversy - I reply to Peter Franklin

Peter Franklin, on 'Conservative Home' has commented on my attack on Jeremy Clarkson. You can read what he says here : 

http://www.conservativehome.com/the-deep-end/2015/03/conservatism-cars-clarkson-and-peter-hitchens.html

 

I have had some technical difficulty, no doubt my own fault, in posting a response on the site.

 

This is what I sought to post there. I think it also answers some of my petrolhead critics here. : 

 

I am perfectly well aware of the fact that motor vehicle users pay taxes which help to finance our nationalised, subsidised road network . Alas, many of them think that non-motorists do not do so, when in fact they do through income tax, VAT, council tax and the many other duties and imposts with which non-car-owners are burdened, just as much as car owners are. This belief is actively dangerous, as it sometimes leads to inconsiderate treatment of cyclists and pedestrians by drivers who have been persuaded that such people 'don't pay road tax' and so don't have as much freedom to use the roads as they do. 

I am also well aware that a country which bases its transport system, and its town and country planning on roads and cars, as we have done now for nearly 60 years, makes it very hard to avoid car ownership. I quite understand that some people are more or less compelled to use cars and have never criticised anyone for doing so because they have to. I occasionally drive myself, though I prefer not to. Truly safe and considerate driving requires a level of responsibility and self-restraint which most people (I I speak as a cyclist and pedestrian who sees a lot of other people's driving at close quarters) can't achieve. 

I do not, as it happens, live in London. I work in London but I live in Oxford, a city where it is quite possible to get about almost entirely on foot or by bicycle unless you have a heavy load to carry. I can also travel between the two cities by bicycle and train, or by bus. 

What I notice is that, even so, many young and fit people use motor transport to make short journeys within Oxford that they could easily accomplish without cars. And that streets within easy reach of the centre are crammed with cars parked so densely that they are now officially allowed to park in many places with two wheels upon the pavement. Traffic in Oxford, since I first lived there in 1963, has grown immensely. Yet the city's actual population has not grown that much, thanks to a strongly-enforced green belt. One of the main reasons for the traffic is commuting from several nearby towns, which have grown greatly partly because they have become commuter dormitories for Oxford. . In 1960, all these towns still had railway links with Oxford (Abingdon, Thame, Witney, Wallingford). Now none of them does.

Politicians must stand up and be counted - even if only on TV

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Actually it does matter that the two main party leaders are forced to face each other in televised debates, each of them alone and cut off from the aides and scriptwriters who would otherwise whisper into their ears and make them look cleverer than they are.

Such events are the last faint trace of the raucous combative debate that politics used to be in this country.

It is incredible now to recall that, 51 years ago, the skeletal, hesitant aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home braved a furious 7,000-strong audience at the Birmingham Rag Market, a traditional ordeal for party leaders that he felt honour-bound to undergo.

His Labour rival, Harold Wilson, did likewise.

But can you remember when you last saw a major politician heckled? These days, audiences are screened to prevent it and offenders are dragged from the hall by heavies, as poor old Walter Wolfgang was when he dared to shout ‘nonsense’ – quite accurately – during a speech on the Iraq War by the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

And it is nearly incredible to note that, in quite recent Election campaigns, party leaders faced daily unscripted press conferences from an unvetted crowd of uncontrollable reporters.

These events had almost vanished at the last Election (I think David Cameron gave three in the entire campaign).

Entry to them required security vetting. Most of those who attended were members of the Parliamentary Lobby, that mafia of mutual flattery in which politicians and journalists eat so many lunches together that it becomes impossible to tell them apart.

Informal questioning is also discouraged. Back in 1992, Neil Kinnock (a gentleman when all’s said and done) had to rescue me from the clutches of his aides, who fell on me in large numbers after I tried to ask him an unwelcome question on his way out of the hall.

On the final evening of the last Election, I attended a tightly controlled meeting addressed by Mr Cameron, hoping to get in a question about his astonishingly lavish parliamentary expenses, still largely unknown to the public.

As he left, I slipped alongside him to pursue the matter but was shouldered brusquely aside by his muscular police bodyguard, who knew perfectly well that I was no physical threat to the Tory leader but took it on himself to guard him from unwanted queries.

And this is how a lot of it has happened. The excuse of ‘security’ has enabled our political leaders to hide within a series of concentric screens and walls, until they see almost nobody but flatterers and toadies.

There is no real chance to make them sweat in public (the worthless exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions do not count). These debates might just be such an opportunity. 

I am sure that is why Mr Cameron has used every trick and dodge to avoid them. Far from breaching their impartiality, the broadcasting organisations are doing their most basic duty by trying to get him to agree to a proper adversarial clash.

Finally a snap that shows the real Dave

Modern political propaganda makes great use of faked-up pictures of unlovely combinations on the steps of Downing Street, or of men in other people’s pockets.

Well, here’s a genuine picture of a very unlovely combination at No 10 (sorry, Mrs Cameron, I don’t mean you, but if you will keep such company…) , which I had never seen before and which seems to me to tell an important truth.

Anthony Blair is by a long chalk the most universally despised politician in Britain, rightly in my view, and mainly because of the Iraq War.

Yet all the vituperation and spite of which the world is capable is aimed at Ed Miliband, who opposed the Iraq War, beat his Blairite brother for the Labour leadership and who is loathed by Mr Blair and his allies.

And the main beneficiary of this sliming of Mr Miliband is… David Cameron, who once called himself the ‘heir to Blair’, who speaks often to Mr Blair on the telephone and who has several times invited Mr Blair to Downing Street. My photograph shows an occasion in 2012 when ex-premiers gathered there to meet the Queen.

Mostly, these events are not photographed.

A ‘source’ told one journalist in 2013: ‘Cherie and Tony have been round there for drinks. Blair and Cameron get on and they like each other. He [the PM] doesn’t like Miliband or Brown, in a personal way. He is very admiring of Blair, whom he regards as a nice person and has conviction.’

I see in this picture the ghost of a rather horrible future – a grand coalition of Blairite Tory, Blairite Labour and Blairite Liberal-Democrat, none of whom can win the Election on their own, but who can together combine against all the normal people in the country.

Why Lefties love a Right-wing buffoon

Jeremy Clarkson is a Left-wing person’s idea of what a Right-wing person is like (I wish this was my own coinage, but I owe it to Andrew Platt, a contributor to my blog).

That is why the BBC have for so long been happy to give him large chunks of prime time, and why the publishing industry gives him so much space.

If Right-wingers are all foreigner-despising petrolheads who hate cyclists and think smoking is a demonstration of personal freedom, how easy they are to dismiss. Nigel Farage is a sort of political equivalent of Mr Clarkson. 

The idea that Clarkson is the heroic victim of politically correct commissars is ludicrous. The petition for his reinstatement is grotesque in a world where there is so much real oppression. 

If you are in the mood for signing a petition for someone who is really being persecuted, please visit change.org and sign the e-petition for the release of my friend Jason Rezaian, locked up without trial and almost incommunicado by Iran’s secret state since July last year. You can sign it here  http://chn.ge/1LCNKfO

Mind the drunk trees

What is the reason for our hatred of trees? Local councils love nothing better than murdering lovely old trees in case they fall down all of a sudden.

I now see that the French government plans to massacre thousands of roadside trees because cars often collide with them.

I assume this is because the trees get drunk, rush out into the traffic and steer themselves into the cars.

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

Political Incorrectness Gone Mad

Am I supposed to rush to the aid of Jeremy Clarkson, cruelly suspended by the left-wing politically correct BBC after a row about steak and chips?  After all, the BBC is left-wing, and it is politically correct to a fault, we are all (save vegetarians and vegans, of course)  in favour of steak and chips,  - and Mr Clarkson is….well, what is he, exactly?

 

For many people, he is the embodiment of what they think of as ‘right-wing’. He is full of machismo, he is noisily patriotic in a sort of ‘we won the war’ Dambusters way,  he smokes, he is rude about foreigners and  he goes on and on about cars and is (I believe ) responsible for the widespread, ineradicable belief that cyclists do not pay ‘road tax’ – a belief which encourages many drivers to treat cyclists as second-class citizens.  

 

He was, I am told, invited to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. He is said to be a friend of David Cameron.

 

Well, I regard him and his opinions as a grave handicap to conservatism. I have never seen any logical reason why roads, a vast nationalised state monopoly paid for out of heavy taxation,  should appeal to free market fanatics. Nor can I quite see why motor cars themselves should appeal to this sector of society. Mass-produced cars are barely profitable, the companies that make them often receive open or disguised state support. They spend most of their lives depreciating expensively at roadsides or in car parks, their costly and elaborate engines sitting idle for at least 22 hours out of every 24. It's hard to think of a better example of inefficient use of capital. 

 

They also make us utterly dependent for our main fuel on some of the most unpleasant and fanatical regimes on the planet, who get rich and powerful thanks to our car obsession. 

 

I suspect that these wasteful, ugly machines appeal to individualistic ‘libertarians’ because they enable them to express what they call their personalities, allowing them to be noisier, faster, more dangerous and more showy  than they could be if they were not sitting in the midst of a ton of steel, glass and rubber, protected from the world by heavy locked doors, airbags, antilock-brakes, side-impact-protection and seat belts.

 

Actually cars and roads destroy settled societies, wreck landscapes, divide and distort cities, by subjecting non-drivers to the needs of cars and abolishing the walkable, human spaces which existed before. Once car ownership is general, it becomes obligatory. 

 

Whatever this is,  it is not conservative, any more than expressing contempt for other particular societies is conservative.  If you respect your own culture, and expect to be left alone to enjoy it, then the least you can do is to show the same favour to other cultures. Patriotism doesn't consist of expressing contempt for other nations. 

 

I know nothing about Mr Clarkson’s steak and chips incident, and I suppose we all have moments when we get angrily frustrated at the end of a long, hard day when a hoped-for pleasure is denied us. I don’t really care whether ‘Top Gear’ is transmitted or not.

 

But I really cannot see this as the liberal PC BBC versus the free spirit of the right, Jeremy Clarkson. If he is right wing, then I am not.

Only one thing can save us from Labour: A Tory split

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The Prime Minister likes to scare us by warning ‘Go to bed with Nigel Farage, wake up with Red Ed’. But, Mr Cameron, most of us have been through a worse nightmare than that.

To use your own rather tacky imagery, they went to bed in 2010 with an apparently conservative, pro-British Tory leader – and woke up in the morning to find it was all just thick make-up, and that you were a fervent Europhile, a politically correct sexual revolutionary and a Green fanatic.

Let’s have no more mornings like that. Those Tory voters and Tory MPs who fear a Labour victory next year have a real, practical answer to both these fears. Here it is.

Ukip has shown that it can beat Labour in the North of England, where the Tories cannot. Ukip has shown it can energise patriotic, socially conservative voters in the South.

If a large number of Tory MPs now defect to Ukip – as many must be tempted to do – Ukip can be transformed in a few weeks into a real third party which can thrash Ed Miliband in seats he would otherwise win.

I believe that this could create the crisis that Nigel Farage needs and hopes for – the possibility of a workable, hard-nosed post-election pact between the Tories and Ukip, an unequivocal deal to take us out of the EU and give us back control over our borders.

Arithmetically, such an idea makes much more sense than any other strategy – if your aim is truly to stop Labour. Without a Tory split, mountains of Ukip votes would indeed be wasted.

With a Tory split, they would heap up MPs on the anti-Labour side.

Just as in the SDP breakaway in 1981, large-scale defections from the Tories could utterly change the political balance of power in modern Britain.

The alternative is that Tory MPs remain ‘loyal’ to the end, and that we are indeed guaranteed a Labour Government of some sort in May. They can sit around for the next five years moaning, ‘I told you so’, to anyone who cares to listen.

But what sort of ‘loyalty’ is this? Why should it be thought noble to try to save your party at the expense of your country?

The Tory Party (like Labour) is close to the end of its natural life anyway. It has no automatic right to survive, and its successor is currently being born in places as far apart as Greater Manchester and Essex. Voters are not the property of politicians. When they stop voting for one party, and start voting for another, why do we treat them as deserters who need to be dragged back?

If Tesco fails to attract customers and they go somewhere else, do we browbeat and threaten those customers into returning, or do we recognise that Tesco just wasn’t good enough? If you listen to the BBC and read the grand commentators of the media, you would think that Friday’s election results were bad and disturbing news.

They remind me of the East German Communists of 1953, furious and resentful that the people – in whose name they ruled – had risen against them.

The playwright Bertolt Brecht jeered sarcastically that perhaps in that case the government should dissolve the people, and elect another.

Well, I think the people are right and the Establishment wrong. These wonderful, exhilarating and truly historic votes are not bad news to me or to many others who have long warned that our country could not be run in this way much longer without being ruined and abolished.

At last, the bone-headed, complacent consensus which has done us so much damage has been challenged.

Mr Cameron would, of course, be the main casualty of the revolt I am urging, which is why he hopes that no such thing will happen.

But he is not as wonderful as he thinks he is, as I believe Her Majesty has recently pointed out to him.

Hero with a helmet camera

Good luck to cyclist Dave Sherry, who does what we should all do and tries to stop drivers using their phones, especially texting, while driving.

This amazingly stupid activity is also a crime, and many of those who do it are completely unrepentant when challenged – in fact, they are often very rude.

Yet they could easily kill or maim someone thanks to a moment’s crucial inattention. Mr Sherry records them on a helmet-mounted camera, then reports hard cases to the police via a laudable organisation called Police Witness, which passes evidence on to the authorities.

Why is this left to brave private individuals, when the police – endlessly moaning about non-existent staff shortages – have the time and manpower to monitor Twitter and Facebook?

And come to that, to dig into reporters’ phone records? 

Jamie Angus, editor of the BBC Radio 4 breakfast show Today, thinks it is losing listeners because of too much gloomy news from abroad.

He’s quite wrong. The problem is that the programme has become too feminine.

Even the male presenters, including the once-fiery John Humphrys, now pursue consensus and calm.

What we want is to hear smug public figures properly roughed up, and conventional wisdom defied. Instead, the programme is disdainful to dissenters – if it lets them on at all – and regurgitates received opinion.

It sounds as if the studio is full of scented candles. Snoring Boring. 

I wouldn't urge anyone to go to see the new film Gone Girl, so there are no spoiler warnings about what follows.

It contains several episodes of needless violence, one so bloody and lovingly dwelt upon that I had to cover my eyes for what felt like five minutes. There is also some needless explicit sex.

Twice, the female lead, Rosamund Pike, is viciously pushed into walls or furniture by her husband – yet she appears unhurt. I was warned, and I can’t complain.

Miss Pike can be a mesmerisingly good actress, and she is, in fact, superb in this film.

I wasn’t sure if the sex and violence would be too high a price to pay. The answer is that they are. The whole thing is a moral desert of deceit, mistrust, crudity and cynicism.

If this is what sells books and films now – and I think it is – we have much to fear.

Almost everything you thought you knew about the war with IS has been proved untrue by the absurd stand-off at Kobane on the Syrian-Turkish border.

Turkey isn’t our ally, even though it’s in Nato. On the contrary, it’s an increasingly Islamist state run by a dangerous demagogue who should worry us as much as IS does.

That’s why the Turkish tanks stand and watch as IS overwhelms the brave defenders of Kobane.

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Beware of the Green Rapture. It May Not Happen.

In the days when belief in God was still pretty universal, cults would arise every few decades which would predict the approaching end of the world and gather on hilltops at the appointed date, expecting to be gathered into some celestial harvest, saved by their faith.

 

Nowadays, these things still happen - but they tend to be small-scale, dispirited affairs. Their followers have to endure a good deal more abuse than they would once have got – especially when, disappointed, they turn for home after the failure of the world to end on the predicted day. 

 

One thinks of those in the (still quite religious ) USA who believe in the ‘Rapture’ , a time when the saved will be carried up to Heaven ,whatever they are doing. I believe some rude people were known to ask believers in this ‘Rapture’ ( who tended to advertise their beliefs on bumper stickers) ‘Can I have your car after you’ve gone’, and other irreverent questions.

 

Now we have the new film Noah, in which the great Ark-builder’s belief in an impending doom is rudely mocked. I believe that Noah, in the form of Russell Crowe in Biblical get-up,  is principally mocked by Ray Winstone in Bronze Age attire, which must be especially hard to take, but I am not sure I can be bothered to go the cinema to see this happen. And many are drawing parallels between Noah and today’s Climate Change zealots. They do this, of course, on the basis that Noah turned out to be right about the deluge, and the mockers wrong. But…

 

That’s the real problem. The Bible doesn’t dwell much on incorrect prophecies (except those by prophets of rival gods) and warns against disrespect to prophets. Pharaoh learned the hard way not to annoy Moses or Aaron, beginning with plagues of frogs and ending with the slaughter of the Firstborn of Egypt and the drowning of his entire army. Elijah received fire from heaven on Mount Carmel, and having thus shown the superiority of Jehovah over the non-existent Baal, promptly ordered the slaughter of 450 prophets of Baal.  The 42 children (interestingly precise number) who jeered at Elijah’s heir Elisha for being bald were torn to pieces by bears which emerged from the woods.

 

Well, these stories stick in the mind.It’s the bloodthirsty bits and the horror stories that remain in mine, especially, for some reason, Jael,  the wife of Heber, driving a tent-peg through the head of Sisera ; and also Gehazi,  Elisha’s servant, trying to profit secretly from his master’s healing powers, punished by being stricken immediately with leprosy ...’and he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow.’  They also remind me of Philip Pullman’s sound judgement that  ‘“once upon a time” is much more persuasive than “thou shalt not”’.

 

Anyway, this brings me at last to my point, which is about modern prophets, the respect they demand, predictions of the end of the world, certainty of rectitude, and the punishments which fall upon those who defy or mock them.

 

 

I personally struggle not to write about ‘climate change’, for it always causes more trouble than it is worth and is about as sensible (for those who enjoy tranquillity) as is throwing stones as a wasps’ nest. Sometimes I’ll be on some panel where the question comes up, and so I’ll be compelled to make a few diffident and cautious remarks, listening out as I do so for the peculiar mixture of howl and rumble which is the sound of the modern bigot realising he is in the presence of an unbeliever. It’s a bit like that scene at the end of the remake of ‘Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’  (the one with Mr Spock in it) where the alien replicas, realising they are in the presence of an actual unreplicated human, turn as one, point and stare and emit high-pitched screams. You know this is going to end badly. And it does, though I have yet to be torn limb from limb.

 

But sometimes it’s just essential. And today is such a time. The House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology has just issued a report called ‘Communicating Climate Science’ (you can find it here http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmsctech/254/254.pdf ). Andrew Miller, the chairman of this body, told ‘the Times’ yesterday ministers who dissent from the government line on this issue should accept collective responsibility or ‘shut up and leave’.

 

Is Mr Miller Elijah? Or Noah? Or he just a Labour MP with an exaggerated idea of his own rightness? You decide. Perhaps a bear will come out of the woods (I mean, where else would they be?) and eat me up for saying this, but I tend towards the explanation that he is just a Labour MP. And that, like most MPs, he is in the firm grip of conventional wisdom.

 

He thinks that appearances on TV by Lord Lawson of Blaby, who is sceptical of the claims of the climate change lobby, should be accompanied by ‘health warnings’ .  He told ‘The Times’ that it might be a good idea to put a caption at the bottom of the screen saying that the views of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation ‘are not accepted by 97% of scientists’.

 

Hilariously, the report says that BBC should give *less*time to those who doubt the orthodoxy about man-made climate change. They are accused of ‘giving opinions and scientific fact the same weight’.

 

But isn’t the problem here that there are so few scientific facts about the future? And that there are not very many more about determining the causes of the measurable changes in climate which have taken place. The mere fact that the climate zealots are reduced to using formulations such as ‘not accepted by 97% of scientists’ actually establishes that this is a matter of opinion.

 

Numberless scientific discoveries have been made by people prepared to defy orthodoxy, people of whom it could have been said (until they got their Nobel prizes) that ‘99.9999% of scientists did not accept their views’.

 

I suspect that many people feel , as I do, that the climate zealots would be a lot more persuasive if they were a little more modest. It is precisely their angry, bullying, majoritarian intolerance which makes me suspect that they are rather nervous about their beliefs. Their recent utterly unscientific claims that typhoons, hurricanes and wet winters are evidence of general climate change are even more inclined to make me think they are more interested in shouting people down, and stirring the mob, than they are in argument. They have a similar habit of suggesting that various islands are on the verge of being submerged thanks to climate change, when in fact there are other causes of their problems, such as a general tipping of the landmass or the constant erosion and shifting of islands in certain estuaries. Each time I see  such claims, I wonder more about the people who make them.

 

As for their use of the phrase ‘climate change denier’, that is just disreputable. The expression is doubly false. Nobody denies that the climate changes. It’s a proven fact that it has done many times. The question is whether it is changing as dramatically as the zealots predict, and whether this is caused by human activity. To be a ‘denier’ is a) to be a person who refuses to accept a proven fact, which nobody is doing and b) to be smeared by association with Holocaust deniers, who *do* deny a proven fact, and do so for disgraceful reasons. This, as John Henry Newman once said in another context, is not just the rough and tumble of robust debate. It is poisoning the wells.

 

So I’ll stick to this. I think that those who wish to command vast quantities of public money, who wish to place severe and damaging restrictions on our economy, who in many cases make a great deal of money out of ‘alternative energy’, carbon credits and similar schemes, are the ones who must bear the burden of proof. Those of us who think they may be mistaken are not merely entitled to say so without being smeared or roughly elbowed aside by or elected representatives and by the BBC we help to pay for. We should be welcomed, as being the only force capable of causing these zealots to make their case properly and scientifically. As any scientist knows, no scientific question can be decided by majority vote or popularity test. That is the whole point of science and the reason why we revere it – it seeks the truth,  though the heavens fall ( and also in the face of sneers and derision).   

 

As soon as scientists become lobbyists, politicians and shouters-down of opponents, they lose any right to assert that they have some special advantage in argument. A scientific lab-coat doesn’t make a man or woman automatically right. Political partisanship undermines scientific integrity. Just because these people are in the grip of a Green Rapture, a belief in the coming apocalypse which will punish us for our greedy ways doesn’t mean they are right. History tends to suggest that they may well not be. Though unlike them I am prepared to concede the possibility that they may be right, and to discuss defensive and preparatory measures we might take on the basis that they might be right.

 

I’d just like to add a small point,  that my views on this are influenced by nothing other than observation and judgement. I counted myself an environmentalist before the term was invented. I loathe the pollution and rape of our countryside, and indeed of much of the planet. I wince with something quite like pain whenever a tree is cut down.  I am nobody’s secret lobbyist. I ride a bicycle , and have done so since long before it was modish, because I believe motor cars to be wasteful, dirty and over-used.

Our Chief Industry is the Manufacture of Lying Statistics

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

 

Any reader of this column is usually several years ahead of the crowd. Here, we grasped from the start that the Blair creature was a menace; that the Iraq and Afghan wars were wrong; that joining the Euro would be a terrible mistake; that the Tories are both useless and doomed.

 

We already know that the return of grammar schools – once derided, now increasingly demanded – is the key to education reform.

 

But perhaps above all we understand that all important government statistics are fiddled, and  that the crime figures are so violently massaged that they bear no relation to reality at all.

 

Yet fashionable opinion has until recently denied this truth, accusing doubters of ‘moral panic’. Lofty commentators and social scientists have proclaimed a new era of social peace and order.

 

When normal people, living in the real Britain, complain that this does not seem to be true where they live, they are sneered at as if they were deluded.

 

But last week, we learned the truth. At an astonishing hearing of the House of Commons Public Administration Committee, experts and former police officers lined up to reveal the myriad methods by which the police make crime and disorder disappear from the figures.

 

At the heart of the trick is this simple aim – to pretend that large numbers of incidents which would once have been crimes, are now reclassified so that they don’t appear in the official returns as such. In short, crime has ‘fallen’ because we have now redefined millions of crimes as non-crimes.

 

You may still be attacked or robbed. But it doesn’t count. And this barely touches on another issue, which I plan to deal with shortly, of the vast amount of Internet crime which goes entirely unpunished and unrecorded.

 

The MPs were plainly astonished (for as usual they have not been paying attention). It was clear that the police are under heavy political pressure, from all major parties, to deliver lower crime figures.

 

This is one of two things our country is good at. Our most successful and fastest-growing branch of agriculture is cannabis farming. Our most successful industry is the manufacture of lying statistics, showing that everything is fine.

 

Meanwhile, half the containers leaving British ports are empty, because we make so little and the world does not want it. How long can this go on? Official figures will not be a good guide.

 

******

 

There’s only one problem with the plan for the Tories to re-name themselves the ‘National Liberal Party’. It’s that they’re not in fact ‘National’ in any way.

 

They slavishly do the bidding of the EU (while pretending to be against it). So they actively help to dismantle and dissolve our nation. And at the same time they are more or less dead in the North and in Scotland, where most people would rather Tandoori and eat their own grannies than vote Tory.

 

So why not just call themselves ‘Liberals’, and merge with the Liberal Democrats, whom they currently claim to hate and despise but who are, in fact, their friends and allies in the wrecking of this country?

 

And then the honoured name of ‘Conservative’ , might be freed from the Tory taint, and be adopted by a new party that actually does want to conserve our civilisation.

 

*******

The Disasters Emergency Committee is a fine and necessary body, because it has one simple job – to ensure our charitable donations go to those who need them, without middlemen or delay.

 

So it was dreadfully wrong for them to assert that climate change may have been to blame for the Philippines Typhoon.

 

This is not a fact, but a highly contentious opinion which many charitable people don’t share. It is a misuse of the DEC’s position. If they keep doing it, I fear they will make donors suspicious and less willing to give.

 

Charities have grown too close to government and are far too infested by political lobbyists, using the public goodwill to promote their causes. In the long term, this will undermine all charity.  I hope the Charities Commission rebukes the DEC for this.

 

****

I never wanted to have any Human Rights. But surely the planned revival of Monty Python violates every single one of them? 

 

*****

Here’s why so many cyclists are being crushed  to death on our roads. Many car, van and lorry drivers actively hate them. This is partly because of Jeremy Clarkson, who spread the dangerous falsehood that cyclists don’t pay any tax towards roads, and made ‘jokes’ about running them down for fun.

 

But it is mainly because car owners, forced to crawl along our congested roads, are furious that their shiny toys don’t zoom about as they do in the TV commercials. And the sight of cyclists, moving with comparative freedom, fills them with frustrated rage.

 

Once, you might have said I was imagining this. But we have proof in the Tweet posted by Emma Way (fined this week for her offence) ‘Definitely knocked a cyclist off his bike earlier. I have right of way – he doesn’t even pay road tax.’

 

Her victim, as it happens, survived without serious injury, though that’s no credit to Ms Way. Many enraged motorists feel and drive the same way but have more sense than to say so openly. Jeremy Clarkson should use his BBC stardom to make a full retraction. If he does, he may spare many from injury or even death. If he doesn’t, well, you work it out.

 

Meanwhile, to the other drivers, who treat cyclists with courtesy and intelligence, my profound thanks. And to the stupid cyclists who ride through red lights, or seek an early death by wearing headphones while riding, stop giving the rest of us a bad name.

*************

How can we expect to stay free if we don’t pay more attention?

 

An allegedly coke-snorting Methodist Minister and bank chief is a good story. But this week has seen two frightening developments which have attracted far too little attention:

 

There are serious plans to bring political commissars, by the dozen, into Whitehall, destroying the civil service neutrality which has helped keep us free and relatively uncorrupt for more than a century.

 

And, perhaps even worse, the Crown Prosecution Service is seeking to try two alleged terrorists in secret. The    Prosecutors want to exclude press and public from the court, conceal the identities of the defendants and even ban reporting some of the charges. Why not make the accused wear Iron Masks while they’re about it? Let us hope this sinister plea is thrown out. 

 

*****

 

 

Yes, immigrants need homes. So let's move them into Chequers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Those of us who warned for years about mass immigration can only grieve now that the things we predicted are coming true. It is starting – where else? – in the primary schools, where people are simply having to accept that many, especially in less well-off areas, will be too full from now on.

Next it will be housing, which is why Government Ministers are screeching curses at those who are trying to stop them concreting over the countryside and turning spacious suburbs into crowded urban quarters.

I can’t see why those who have saved all their lives to live in pleasant places should be forced to lose their peace and space, because cynical politicians left the nation’s door open for ten years and now can’t close it.

Let the people in charge set an example – an ‘affordable’ estate in the grounds of Chequers, and a little development next to each of the many homes of the Blair Creature would be good.

But that won’t stop the quiet spread of unofficial shanty towns in areas of high immigration. How long will councils be able to resist or police the five-to-a-room overcrowding, and the conversion of garden sheds into homes, which is the inevitable result of importing hundreds of thousands of underpaid young men?

They can only afford to accept those wages because they live at a far lower standard of living than the indigenous population.

Then it will be the NHS, if it isn’t already, with GPs and casualty departments overwhelmed by numbers, and, of course, the roads and public transport.

This is a huge change in the lives of British people, unasked for, undeclared, undiscussed. It is only just beginning.

And so the rest of us will try as best we can to live in harmony in the overcrowded, low-pay Third World economy which we have had foisted on us. We know that the migrants themselves are not to blame and are only trying to better themselves.

Those who did it, and who still will not act to stop it, are another matter. As the truth dawns I think the voters will find a way of punishing the politicians who subjected us to this. The old parties are all complicit. They all dismissed protest as ‘racism’ and refused to be honest about the matter. Why should any of them survive?

From now on, abandon them, and refuse to vote for them. Strip these unpleasant, sneering careerists of the money  and power that protects them from the consequences of their own actions. Let them find out in detail what it is they have done to the rest of us. It will be some compensation.

When you see Dave like this he's finished!

Poor old President Hollande, caught by the cameras innocently making silly faces at a primary school class. He’ll never recover. 

Ed Miliband has an even worse problem because he always looks awful on TV or  in photographs. And in modern politics, shallow and trivial as they are, that’s enough  to destroy a man.

There’s a very interesting formula which decides whether embarrassing pictures of major politicians are published. I promise you that there are many such pictures of David Cameron, far worse than the famous sunburn shots.

As long as the media are still a bit afraid of him, they won’t get out. As soon as they’re sure he’s done for, they will. Watch out for it.

How cruel to make maths dunces take the GCSE over and over again. Modern education  is torture precisely because it isn’t tough.

In my prehistoric classrooms, we sat in rows, chanted our tables, our weights and measures and our counties and capitals. 

Our teachers ranged from the terrifying to  the petrifying. They threw small objects at  us if we didn’t pay attention. They wrote rude things on bad work. They made us do it again if we got it wrong. And as a result, I, an Olympic-standard maths duffer, got an O-level in the subject, and I am still astonished by (among other things) my French vocabulary.

These days, the poor things sit listlessly in undisciplined classrooms, don’t chant their tables because it violates their human rights, and after three years of alleged French they have learned nothing beyond ‘Bonjour’.

In education, it’s kind to be cruel.

 

'Humanitarian' war doomed Libya

I am still baffled as to how bombs are a compassionate response to atrocities, or how a country that can’t police Manchester can police the Middle East. And anyway, President Obama has told Washington that his real plan in Syria is regime change.

Well, I am no supporter of the Assad  government, despite an, er, mistaken claim to this effect by the pro-bombing Tory  MP Brooks Newmark in the Commons, which he has refused to withdraw. But I am worried about who or what might replace Assad once he’s gone, which must surely be part of our calculation.

Hardly anyone pays attention to the outcome of our intervention in Libya, also allegedly humanitarian. They rejoiced  at the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. But what happened? Liberated Libya is now a failed state, actually importing oil because its own oilfields have fallen under the control of lawless militias.

These are the same ferocious Islamists who murdered the US ambassador, tried to kill the British ambassador, and who desecrated a British cemetery from the Second World War, taking special care to smash the gravestones of Jewish soldiers. We freed them with our bombs.

Job done, as Mr Blair might say.

 

Doctors are caught offering to abort baby girls because they are girls.

The Crown Prosecution Service refuses to act.

Our enlightened Director of Public Prosecutions seems  to view killing as OK if it’s politically correct.

Assisted suicide, in such people’s minds, is fine. Abortion, to them, is a liberation of modern womanhood.

Getting rid of unwanted girls – though ‘sexist’ – is multicultural. So, the PC pluses outweigh the minuses.

And crime falls,  as fewer and fewer evil acts are crimes any more.

 

Safe cars only breed stupidity

As I ride my bike through modern British traffic,  I observe the rapidly declining standards of driving.

Many drivers are increasingly heedless, selfish and unaware of the danger they run, or of the danger they are to others.

So I am completely unsurprised by the mad, violent chaos on the Isle of Sheppey bridge on Thursday, which seems to me to have been  caused almost entirely  by inconsiderate, thoughtless stupidity.

Were it not for all those safety devices (which protect car-users from their own folly but do nothing for pedestrians  or cyclists), many would have died.