Think Dave's won? I bet you believe in flying saucers too!

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

David Cameron is now paying the price for making a promise he thought he wouldn’t have to keep. Sure that he wouldn’t get a majority last May, and genuinely afraid of losing office, he promised a referendum to try to win back votes from Ukip.

It didn’t turn out like that. The cheque he dashed off for a bet he was sure he’d win has now been presented at the bank, and he lacks the money to pay for it.

And so the Prime Minister has been forced into mounting a ridiculous pretence of real negotiations.

David Cameron (pictured in Brussels on Friday) made promises to the electorate in order to win office that he simply cannot keep and has been forced into the ridiculous pretence of real negotiations on Europe

First, he tried to look as if he wanted something he doesn’t want. Now he has to look as if he has won concessions he hasn’t won.

Anyone who genuinely thinks that this is an important change in Britain’s relationship with the EU probably believes in flying saucers as well.

But I can understand how many people will pretend to be convinced, because they are afraid of the alternative.

It was fear of shrivelling into nothingness on the edge of Europe that got us into the European Union and I suspect fear of leaving will keep us there.

Quite how we will be able to keep up a fake debate about the subject till late June, I have no idea.

 

I long ago concluded that I would rather leave, whatever the economic and political cost. I think most of this country’s unique laws and liberty grew up after our break with the Continent under Henry VIII nearly 600 years ago. I think they are worth preserving at practically any cost and, given the chance, I can probably get quite tearful about it.

You cannot expect the Tories to do anything about this. They have never recovered from the day they destroyed us as a great nation by mounting their mad, futile attack on Egypt in 1956.

That was when they decided we couldn’t manage on our own any more, and started whimpering to be let into the then Common Market.

By far the best, wisest and most far-sighted warning against the European project came from Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell in October 1962, not long before his untimely death.

In a speech that still stands up well more than five decades later, he rightly said two things that should be carved in stone in the heart of our capital.

The first was: ‘Of course, the Tories have been indulging in their usual double-talk. When they go to Brussels they show the greatest enthusiasm for political union.

‘When they speak in the House of Commons they are most anxious to aver that there is no commitment whatever to any political union.’

And the second was: ‘We must be clear about this: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it.

‘It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say, “Let it end” but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought.’

For much of my life, I have watched his prophecy come true around me. And I have watched a heedless people accept a slow, salami-sliced subjugation they would never have borne if it had been imposed by force of arms.

Do we really, really have the guts to leave now?

A friend of mine who bravely goes to terrifying war zones, but has a lot of common sense even so, is amused by the Western media’s continued belief (encouraged by David Cameron) in ‘moderate’ Muslim groups supposedly fighting against Syria’s President Assad.

My friend asks: ‘If these journalists really believe these people are moderate, why do they not go into the zones they control and report from there?’

And he answers his own question with a wry smile: ‘Because they know perfectly well that within ten minutes of arriving, they’d be trussed up in a car boot and well on their way to the badlands of Syria or Iraq, never to be seen again.’

Even menacing Maria can't shine a light on this mad, bad world

Communist East Germany was so mad and odd that I was always afraid that future generations would refuse to believe the truth about it – such as that its policies on education and women were almost identical to David Cameron’s.

That’s why I thought the Disney company should have bought the whole country and kept it going as a theme park – and as a lasting warning of what human beings can do, given the chance.

Alas, as the disappointing Channel 4 thriller Deutschland 83 has shown, even Germans are forgetting what it was like.

Despite featuring Maria Schrader as the best female villain since Cruella de Vil, the series simply failed to recreate the sheer hopeless, baggy dinginess of the German Democratic Republic – every curtain yellow, every wall and ceiling stained, nothing repainted since about 1942, even the air full of coal dust and rasping fumes.

And without that, it couldn’t really recreate the menace of it, either.

This matters. As we forget it, I begin to see much of it being resurrected all around us.

Even menacing Maria can’t shine a light on this mad, bad world.

Remember we were told that the great Kiev ‘spontaneous’ protests of two years ago were all about ending corruption? Well, corruption in chaotic Ukraine is now so bad that the economy minister, brought in from abroad to combat dishonesty, has just resigned in frustration. The International Monetary Fund is threatening to cut lending unless more is done to fight corruption. Fat chance. Ukraine is corrupt, much as the Atlantic Ocean is wet. The 2014 outbreak was a putsch and its real target Russia. Now it’s gone wrong, coverage in the West has virtually stopped.

Now we’re addicted to stupidity

Can nobody think any more? The word ‘addiction’ is plainly meaningless, as supposed ‘addicts’ so often give up the things they are said to be enslaved by, using willpower.

And it is surely obvious that when someone says he is a ‘gambling addict’, there is no possible chemical or biological explanation for his behaviour. He’s just looking for an excuse for his selfishness and greed. So what ninny decided it was a good use of our money to prescribe such people a pill – Naltrexone – which is normally given to drug abusers and heavy drinkers?

People who do bad things are not ill, and should not be treated.

They are wicked and should be punished.

As I travel home by train on Saturday evenings, my heart often sinks at a major junction when I hear the aggressive shouts of football fans. Imagine my surprise the other day when the shouts turned out to be coming from uniformed police officers, all got up with clubs and baseball caps, who seemed to be nerving themselves up for some sort of combat.

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

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least Dad Dave got something right 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smoking in Hollywood films gives free advertising to Big Tobacco

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

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

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

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

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You need Dinosaurs to Defend the freedoms liberals love

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Every educated and intelligent person glories in the freedom of women in Western societies to exercise their talents to the full, and their freedom to walk safely in the streets of our great cities.

So what are the enlightened minds of the Left to do when news comes of revolting assaults on women in front of Cologne Cathedral, one of the jewels of European Christian culture in one of Germany's proudest cities? And how are they to react when growing evidence suggests that at least some of the culprits are newly arrived migrants from the Muslim world?

With mumbled embarrassment and nasty jibes against those who have long opposed uncontrolled mass migration, that's how.

 

 

Police drive back right-wing demonstrators with a water cannon in Cologne in the wake of the sexual assaults around Cologne's main station on New Year's Eve

As an illustration, I had a radio clash with the Guardian writer Gaby Hinsliff on Friday (details here http://dailym.ai/1K6xp0W )

 

after she admitted that 'liberals like me are reluctant to talk about it'. While rightly chiding her own side, she couldn't resist dismissing opponents of mass migration as dinosaurs and their views as 'frothing rage'. Here is the news, Ms Hinsliff. Those who for many years warned against non-selective mass immigration (and were dismissed as bigoted dinosaurs by people like her) were concerned about just this sort of problem.

If migrants from other cultures arrive too fast and in numbers too great for society to absorb and integrate them, they begin to impose those cultures on the host country. Germany is witnessing this now, and so are we. 

The louder our governments shout about their dedication to fighting Islamist extremism, the readier they are to Islamise our own society. The sheer size of the Muslim population compels them to do so.

 

 

 

 

 

That is why exams in England are to be moved to accommodate Muslim pupils taking part in the Ramadan fast. And it is why the Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, reacted to the first reports of women being molested in her city by advising them: 'It is always possible to keep a certain distance that is longer than an arm's length.'

Of course she has now been mocked so much that she has backtracked. But the point is that it was her first instinct, and what she really felt.

Radical multicultural types will in the end destroy the things they claim to like, because they don't understand that liberty and reasonable equality are features of stable, free, conservative societies based on Christian ideas, which guard their borders and are proud of their civilisation.

The people who really want to defend our enlightened society, in the end, are dinosaurs like me.

****

 

Where's the fury about these beheadings?

I have endured endless pious lectures about the wickedness of Vladimir Putin and Syria's President Assad from supporters of the Government's wild and ignorant foreign policy.

So how startling it was to see the same people mute themselves when Saudi Arabia, now seemingly Britain's closest ally, killed 47 people on one day, many by beheading.

Some of these victims were no doubt real criminals, though the expression 'Saudi justice system' is a grim and bloodstained joke, so we cannot be sure of the guilt of the condemned. But some were political dissenters.

Yet a government that squawks mightily over every Islamic State death video was strangely measured over these very similar events, which incidentally menace the peace of the Middle East.

I took a careful look at Government statements. They all had the same odd, weak theme. We condemn the death penalty, whoever carries it out.

David Cameron said: 'We condemn and do not support the death penalty in any circumstances and that includes Saudi Arabia.'

The Foreign Office said: 'The UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and in every country.'

So, as far as Mr Cameron and the Foreign Office are concerned, the beheading of a political opponent after a jury-less, unfair trial in a country with no free press is just the same as the execution in Texas of a bloody murderer convicted after due process by an independent jury of free men and women under the scrutiny of a free press. And we condemn them both equally. And that's all we're going to say. Now, would you like to buy some aeroplanes?

Well, they don't speak for me. I'd much rather hang convicted heinous killers than bomb foreign countries (there's less chance of killing innocent people).

I have used the word 'feeble' so many times to describe this Government that the poor thing is quite exhausted and I have had to send it on holiday.

 

 

Dave and the invisible Tory disaster

Both our big political parties are badly divided, but somehow or other David Cameron's splitting pains get much less attention than Jeremy Corbyn's.

For instance, a BBC News programme last week arranged for some Blairite nobody to resign from his non-job, live on air. This event, plainly aimed at damaging Mr Corbyn, hardly fits in with the Corporation's duty to be impartial.

The fact that most Labour MPs can't stand Mr Corbyn isn't news. Next they'll be revealing to us that Ted Heath couldn't abide Margaret Thatcher. We know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr Cameron is an EU-loving, pro-immigration, anti-grammar-school, politically correct social and economic liberal

What seemed like a century of speculation on whether Dave Who had been sacked to make way for Fred Whatsit wasn't really justified. But of course the BBC isn't impartial and its idea of what is news is tinged with pink. It's crammed with shameless Leftists from cellar to chimney. So if the BBC is actively helping the Tories, which it does these days, then that must mean the Tories are now the main party of the Left.

And that's Mr Cameron's problem. He's an EU-loving, pro-immigration, anti-grammar-school, politically correct social and economic liberal.

His MPs are mostly the same, though they do a bit of pseudo-conservative braying at elections. But his voters and his remaining party members are patriotic real conservatives. He hoped to bandage this rupture by promising the EU referendum. But now he has actually been forced to keep this promise, it isn't helping much.

If he does let Ministers campaign on both sides, it will quickly be clear that hardly any of the Tory top brass, and not many of the bottom brass, genuinely want to leave the EU. They don't mind criticising it a bit, but they won't quit, and they won't fight to do so.

Most of them would rather be gagged, so they can pretend to be straining against the leash. How long can the Tory Party stay in one piece, when its leadership and its core vote are so utterly divided?

 

New Labour Insider Confirms it: Blairism Far More Revolutionary Than Corbyn

I have often said that knowing anything about politics is a grave disadvantage if you want to set up as a pundit, especially (but not exclusively) when the Labour Party is under discussion.  Most political reporters think and thought that Michael Howard, an incorrigible liberal, and the man who did more than anyone else to turn the Tories into a Blairite faction, was a hardline right-winger.

They think Blairism was Toryism. They thought Neil Kinnock’s attack on Militant was a right-wing purge of the party. Etc etc.

Alas, as a result, many of their readers, listeners and  viewers also end up thinking these daft and untrue things, and are, as a result, quite unable to understand what is going on. It was to put this right that I wrote my book ‘The Broken Compass’, later re-engineered as ‘The Cameron Delusion’.  The effect has been minimal.

Now the conventionally wise all think that Jeremy Corbyn is a wild leftist, steering a moderate and conservative Blairite Labour Party away from the safe centre.  The way in which he is pilloried for his dealings with Irish Republicans is especially funny, given the Blair creature’s direct role in arranging a humiliating and wholly unnecessary national surrender to the IRA, who, having won almost all their demands, were allowed to keep all their guns and bombs, and exonerated for any atrocities which might happen after the surrender was signed,  to make sure that they would be able to squeeze the rest out of us in due time. By their deeds shall ye know them.

I have to point out that I’m not a supporter of Mr Corbyn. He and I don’t agree about much, except the serial stupidity of our military interventions. This is not because we have a meeting of minds. We don’t. Mr Corbyn’s old-fashioned 1930s leftist attitude to war (learned from his old-fashioned leftist parents)  accidentally coincides with my wholly different Christian view of it.

Modern leftists (which Mr Corbyn isn’t, but my late brother was, and which the Blairites are) love interventionist war as a means of imposing utopia. For them, the might of the liberal democratist USA, bringing ‘democracy’ to the world by bomb and missile,  has replaced the vanished might of the USSR, and they worship it in the same way.

Mr Corbyn is old enough to recall the days when the left mistrusted the USA, and a kind of inertia keeps him thinking this way. At his age, he doesn’t want to reconstruct his entire philosophy.

There’s a lot of this sort of inertia about, on the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ .  For example, as I make my way in and out of Paddington station, I often have jolly encounters with railway trade unionists, who are friendly towards me largely because of my attitude to Russia, though they also like my support for renationalisation of the railways, and my pluralist belief in union freedoms.

I feel it would be unkind and ungenerous of me to pick a quarrel with these pleasant people over the Russia issue, but I suspect they (just like the ‘New Cold War’ merchants) still cannot really separate Russia and the USSR in their minds (as I can, having seen the USSR collapse, close to) , nor do they distinguish between the USA of the Cold War and the very different post-Clinton USA of liberal intervention. They think my defence of Russia’s behaviour is a continuation of the Cold War. They don’t grasp that I defend Russia precisely because it is *not* the USSR any more, and criticise the modern USA precisely because it is no longer the arsenal of conservative liberty, and has turned instead into a globalist, ultra-liberal ideological state.

Anyway, all this is a preliminary to pointing out that my view of New Labour(and its Cameroon clones in the Tory Party) has been spectacularly vindicated by a Deep Throat from the heart if Blairism.

To the mockery of the conventionally wise, I wrote in the MoS on 9t^h August

‘Today's Tory Party is indistinguishable from Blairite New Labour, and is probably more Marxist in practice than Jeremy Corbyn is in theory.’

And I then wrote on 4^th October, to yet more derision from the massed bands of received opinion: ‘Our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left wing than Jeremy Corbyn. The Blair faction's ideas came from a communist magazine called Marxism Today. The magazine, in turn, got the ideas from a clever Italian revolutionary called Antonio Gramsci. He wanted a cultural revolution, a Leftist takeover of schools, universities, media, police and courts (and of conservative political parties too). That is exactly what New Labour did.

An astonishing number of senior New Labour people, from Peter Mandelson to Alan Milburn, are former Marxist comrades who have never been subjected to the sort of in-depth digging into their pasts that Jeremy Corbyn faces. Why is this? Is one kind of Marxism OK, and the other sort not? Or is it just that most political writers are clueless about politics?’

Ha! Sunday’s ‘Observer’ published the following article by Peter Hyman, a close associate of the Blair creature at the height of his popularity

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/20/labour-party-directionless-political-future?CMP=share_btn_tw

This is the key passage:

'The [New Labour]“project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters'

The context is below.

I think it entirely vindicates what I have now been saying for nearly 20 years, and makes nonsense of the idea that Blairism was a form of Toryism.

‘New Labour was not intended merely as a short-term electoral fix after 18 years out of power and four crushing election defeats (though that would not have been a terrible thing), but as a radical new force in British politics. The “project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters. The idea of New Labour was not to be a good opposition party, to protest loudly or have an “influence” over events, but, rather, to take and hold on to the levers of power. New Labour sought political hegemony: winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st century was a Labour century with Labour values in contrast to a Tory-dominated 20th century.

‘The scale of that ambition, in a country dominated by a stridently rightwing press and the quiet conservatism of large swaths of the British people, was breathtaking. If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.

‘The project worked at a number of levels. We told a story about Britain that was optimistic, tapped into people’s aspirations, stressed our tradition as a pioneering nation and showed how once again, through knowledge, know-how, new technology and networking, our creativity could help shape the prosperity and success of Britain in the future. We championed a society in which community and solidarity played a more important role – “giving” as well as “taking”.

‘We put forward a practical programme for government and new delivery mechanisms to ensure that policies were actually working on the ground. A plan to get the young unemployed back to work. A plan to end rough sleeping on our streets (now sadly back in big numbers). A radical plan to end child poverty in a generation. A plan to cut huge waiting times in the NHS both for routine operations and in A&E departments. A plan to get the trains to run on time. Through massive new investment and judicious reform, the infrastructure of Britain and the life chances of the poorest families improved dramatically. The case for an active, empowering state was being made. There was a moral imperative too: to rebuild the public realm, to shape a more tolerant, kinder society and to devolve power to the nations of Britain.

‘There were many mistakes, many messy compromises. To those who want to compare this imperfect Labour government with some Aaron Sorkin-scripted, West Wing-style fantasy, it was doomed to come up short. But the real comparison should always have been between an imperfect Labour government and a Tory government. For if Labour holds out for something pure and untainted by reality, if we pretend that there are black-and-white answers to complicated situations, then, as we are finding out now, the left is ruined.

It’s too easy to forget what life was like under the pre-New Labour Tory government or what it would have been like if they had continued in power. It was illegal to talk about gay relationships in schools; pupils still used outside lavatories in crumbling buildings; free-market Tories were urging the end of the NHS; while the government defended apartheid, foxhunting and the massive, unregulated profits of privatised utilities.

It’s also easy to forget just how much the centre of gravity of British politics has moved to the left as a result of New Labour.’

Dave's quest for an EU deal is like Lord Of The Rings - with no elves

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

It is now quite plain that David Cameron neither expected nor wanted to win an overall majority at the General Election. He promised the EU referendum in the belief and hope that he would never have to redeem his pledge.

He has no idea what to do. The concessions he claims he will win aren’t available, and he wouldn’t want them if he could get them, as he’s rather keen on having the country run by foreigners.

Remember the wild haste with which he rushed us back into the European Arrest Warrant, a gross interference with our laws and freedom?

I bet he gulped, rather than whooped, when news was brought to him that he was going to have a majority big enough to allow (or rather force) him to do as he had said he would. He’s still hoping nobody has read the wild Election manifesto he issued, when he was sublimely confident that he would be heading another coalition.

His never-ending journey round European capitals, in search of an unattainable deal, is the most desperate quest since The Lord Of The Rings.

And he is not going to be rescued by any wizards, elves, walking forests, giant eagles or ghost armies.

Only one thing will save him, the ghastly flitting grey shapes of the politically undead, John Major, Michael Heseltine and the rest of the Europhile Black Riders, screeching and wailing (quite untruly) that Britain cannot survive outside the EU.

As long as he can persuade the Blair creature to stay silent, such a campaign of fear may just work. Millions of British people have never lived in an independent country and are scared of trying to do so, like infants who have never ridden a bicycle without stabilisers.

And when they are not scared, they are bored by the subject, or put off it by the blazer-and-cravat bangers-on, who can speak of nothing else.

It’s a pity really, that it should come to this, that a country created by repeated episodes of dangerous valour and solitary endeavour should come to an end because its voters are frightened of letting go of Nurse Angela Merkel, or think they can’t manage on their own in the world without Jean-Claude Juncker to wipe their noses for them. But, after the failure of Mr Cameron’s latest scrabble for unavailable concessions, I suspect that’s the way it will go.

Fear conquers all.

You'll envy these lesbians - for their cheap flats

I have now seen my first Hollywood Lesbian Romance, the much-hyped Carol starring Cate Blanchett with co-star Rooney Mara and have to tell you that it was extraordinarily dull.

Spoiler warning here, but the solitary gun doesn’t even go off, which about sums up the action. By contrast, the careful re-creation of early 1950s New York, just before Christmas, was wonderful.

The most astonishing thing was that a young person on a small wage was still able, in those times, to afford a chilly but perfectly habitable flat in the centre of a big city while he or she started out on a career.

This aspect of life is more far-fetched now to us than lesbian marriage would have seemed to the New Yorkers of 1952.

Secrets are safe with Charles

Why is anyone shocked that the heir to the throne, who will one day be head of state, is allowed to see Cabinet papers? I’m more shocked by the idea that quite a few senior modern politicians, unrepentant communist hacks, fantasists, drunkards, tax-dodgers, etc, have had such access.

If ever I have a moment’s doubt about the Monarchy, it is dispelled when I look at those who hate it. Why do they loathe it so? It has no power as such.

But, like the king on a chessboard, it prevents others from occupying the space where it stands.

Politicians long to be the ones being cheered, they long to have mounted guards of honour and anthems played when they enter the room. They want their own aeroplanes. They want the Armed Forces to be their personal toys. They dream of requiring us to be loyal to them.

It creeps up on them. Cherie Blair (having failed to get elected as an MP) once acted as hostess aboard the Royal Train, and her husband loved posing with soldiers. Lady Thatcher started turning up at the scenes of national disasters.

David Cameron claimed to be speaking ‘on behalf of everyone in Britain’ when he wished astronaut Tim Peake luck on Tuesday. No he wasn’t.

He’s a divisive politician and he doesn’t speak on my behalf (or on the behalves of quite a few others) about anything. It was the Queen’s job, and she duly did it.

One day, God willing, Charles should do it. Reading the papers that reveal the miserable deals and compromises of government should help him keep his poise when he grants audiences to the trivial, unmemorable men and women who secretly think they’re more important than the Crown of England.

Mother of all bias

The current Radio Times, previewing a documentary on The Golden Age Of Children’s TV (BBC4, 9pm Monday), refers to ‘the inherent wrongness of Watch With Mother’. The writer doesn’t feel any need to explain what was ‘inherently wrong’ with this innocent programme. Given the magazine’s BBC origins, we can guess. The Corporation’s ‘Producers’ Guidelines’ used to say that categorising women as housewives was like categorising black people as criminals. So you can imagine what they think of the idea that mothers might actually stay at home to raise their own children. It doesn’t cross such minds that anyone might disagree.

The French Tory party and the French Labour party have just publicly combined to defeat the National Front, which has nasty leaders and a nasty past, but which many mistreated Frenchmen and Frenchwomen have turned to in despair at their existing elite.

This cynical alliance just confirms that these parties are two faces of the same worthless coin. Doesn’t it make you pleased that, thanks to Jeremy Corbyn, this country now once again has two parties which actually disagree on major issues? Sinister movements flourish when real politics dies. Yet the Blairites in politics and the media continue to spit rage at Mr Corbyn simply for existing. Even his Christmas card is analysed for signs of Marxism.

Do grow up. In an adult country, it is possible for people to disagree, and for all to recognise that nobody (especially George Osborne) is right all the time.

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Here We Are Again on the Way to War - and All Anyone Can Talk About is the Labour Whip

Often in the past few days, BBC listeners and viewers, and readers of the unpopular newspapers, might have had the impression that Britain is discussing the pros and cons of an intervention in the Labour Party, rather than of an intervention in Syria.

 

As I read the papers and listened to BBC Radio 4 on Friday morning last week, I was baffled to find that the main item was not the plan for war, but the divisions on this subject within the Labour Party.

 

As it happens, the Tory party is also divided on the issue, as is the Tory press My newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, cautiously favoured bombing yesterday (Advent Sunday, 29^th November). By contrast, our stablemate, the Daily Mail, said on Saturday 28^th November that Mr Cameron had not made the case for war. Sir Max Hastings says he finds it hard to accept that bombing Syria will ‘bring us any closer to a happy ending’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3335744/MAX-HASTINGS-die-cast-going-join-bombing-Islamic-State-Syria.html. Matthew Parris, generally sympathetic to Mr Cameron, wrote in the Times on Saturday (behind a paywall) that Jeremy Corbyn was right on this issue. Careful readers of the London press will no doubt have found many other reservations about bombing among normally pro-Government publications.

 

 

And Mr Cameron is extremely nervous of risking a Parliamentary defeat, as this might severely weaken and even destroy his position. I asked a 'Whitehall source' on Monday morning if there was any word about how the government planned to whip its MPs. There was (then) none. 

 

I might add that, until the Daily Mirror obliged on Saturday morning, showing that there was no absolute majority for bombing, but that pro-bombers were close to 50% of voters and considerably more numerous than anti-bombers (normal at the start of any conflict, alas) I’d seen no attempt to discover the state of public opinion on the matter.

 

I woke on Friday expecting a variety of opinion and some through coverage of the Commons debate, mentioning the strong doubts about intervention voiced by MPs from all sides.

 

But that morning, all four major unpopular daily papers chose virtually identical headlines, and identical angles on identical stories.

 

As I noted in my Sunday MoS column:

 

‘All the four main unpopular newspapers had virtually the same page one headline on Friday morning: The Times: ‘Labour at war over vote to bomb Isis’, The Telegraph:  ‘Labour at war over Syria air strikes’; The Guardian: ‘Labour in Syria Turmoil as PM makes the case for war’; ‘The Independent’ : ‘Labour at war over air strikes in Syria’. The BBC’s headlines were very similar.

 

 

‘None of these stories contained any clear facts, just anonymous briefings. If it had been a plane crash, or a verdict in a major court case, this sort of unanimity in supposedly competing media would have been normal. But in this case it looks much more as if we have a controlled press.’

 

And, I might have added, a controlled BBC, which from the beginning of the destabilisation of Syria has reported the government line (a noble and spontaneous rising by liberal-minded democrats against the uniquely evil tyrant Assad)  without qualification or scepticism, rarely giving time to doubters.

 

By the way, I am grateful to Edmund Adamus for reminding me, on Twitter,  of the extraordinary interview with Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, normally a part of the interventionist establishment, on the  Radio 4‘Today’ programme, here

(about 1 hr 30 mins in, but (it's interrupted by a conversation with Jeremy Bowen, for some reason)  especially at 1 hour 38 mins):

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06r8rx3

 

Lord Ashdown’s suggestions of reluctance by the Gulf States to take part in the war against ISIS, and of closeness between sections of the Tory Party and rich Arab individuals,  are quite astonishing and in my view worthy of more attention than the internal struggles of the Labour Party – where Jeremy Corbyn’s bad relations with his Blairite MPs are about as surprising and newsworthy as a scowling match between Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath.

 

The incessant concentration, especially by the BBC in almost every bulletin I heard over the weekend, night and day, on the Labour Party’s internal strife, seems to me to be a failure of impartiality.  Little of substance happened to justify the intensity and sustained continuity of this coverage. It almost all stood upon unattributable briefings received by the reporter involved. Few of these stories (in one I heard it suggested that Jeremy Corbyn might ‘force’ his MPs to vote against bombing, something he has no power to do) rose above the level of speculation.

 

I tried to explain, in my 2004 book ‘The Broken Compass’, later re-engineered as ‘The Cameron Delusion’,  the extraordinary power which the political lobby has over the coverage of politics in this country, and of how its own interests and fixed ideas (few of them are interested in politics in the way that I am. They function much more like show business or sports reporters, whose careers are hitched to the stars they write about) ensure that some things are lavishly, intensively covered and others (often much more important) never covered at all, or barely mentioned. I explained that this was not done in ‘conspiracies’ but at lunches and dinners where people privately agreed to pursue a common interest without appearing to do so. Which sounds so much nicer and more normal than a ‘conspiracy’ but is in fact exactly the same thing.

 

Nobody read it, and it made no difference, as usual. And so here we are again, on the way to war, and all anyone can talk about is the Labour Whip.

This isn't a just war - it's 'recreational bombing' by our Churchill wannabe

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Once again, as a patriotic Englishman from a Naval family, I stand amazed to find myself so lonely in my doubts about a foolish war.

I am no pacifist. I supported the retaking of the Falklands, national territory illegally seized by foreign invaders. I was thrilled to see that the Royal Navy could still do the hard tasks for which it is paid too little. Could it now?

Yet, on the basis of an emotional spasm and a speech that was illogical and factually weak, we are rushing towards yet another swamp, from which we will struggle to extract ourselves and where we can do no conceivable good.

Heaven forbid that it will lead (as other such adventures have) to more melancholy processions, bearing flag-wrapped coffins, from RAF Brize Norton; or to quieter convoys, carrying terribly injured men to special hospitals. Why must good, brave, dutiful men and women die or be maimed for life because our politicians are vain and ignorant?

But there is no knowing the end of this, especially given the Prime Minister’s absurd belief that we have 70,000 ‘moderate’ allies just waiting to help us in Syria. Among these scattered ‘moderates’ are those who last week murdered a Russian pilot as he parachuted to earth, and mauled his corpse.

When this phantom army turns out to be non-existent, or hostile, how long will it take Mr Cameron to return to the House of Commons, pleading oh-so-reasonably for ground troops to follow?

It is all such rubbish. I have yet to see conclusive evidence that the Paris murders were organised by or in Islamic State. France has plenty of home-grown hatred and (despite strict gun laws) is awash with illegal Kalashnikovs and ammunition.

Nor can I see why bombing Raqqa will defend us or anyone against such murders.

France’s President Hollande, a failed politician in bad domestic trouble, mired his own country in Syria months ago. I can’t see what good reason we have to follow him there. It will not help to bind up the wounds of the people of France.

Only three weeks back, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee advised, in a carefully argued report, that intervention in Syria is not a good idea. The pathetic cave-in of that committee’s chairman, Crispin Blunt, who now supports Mr Cameron’s latest war, merely makes Mr Blunt look irrational, weak-minded and easily led.

The UN Security Council resolution (of which Mr Cameron makes so much) actually offers no legal basis for military action. Nor does it cite Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which authorises the use of force.

David Cameron is already suffering from galloping Churchill syndrome (the patient growls, denounces his critics as appeasers, and starts wars). Now he seems to have contracted Blair’s disorder, an irresistible desire to pose alongside military hardware. On Monday he managed to have his portrait taken next to a very macho-looking Typhoon fighter jet at Northolt RAF base on his way back from Paris. Odd, that. Typhoons are not normally stationed at Northolt, and I haven’t been able to get a coherent explanation of what military reason it had to be there, so convenient for a photo-opportunity.

The Prime Minister might have been better employed looking up Syria on a map, reading the relevant documents, or consulting with our former ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford – who energetically opposes what he denounces as ‘recreational bombing’.

In all these modern wars real experts are impatiently pushed aside, while flatterers and yes-men take over. But it’s not decided yet. There’s still just time to write to your MP, if you agree with me that this is folly. I beg you to do so.

Reaping a feminist whirlwind

On Thursday night I witnessed the ugliness of the new student intolerance at the Oxford Union, where I was taking part in a debate on marriage (I was in favour). I had never before seen burly security men stationed around the hall, or had to watch as screeching hecklers – having ignored pleas to put questions in a civilised way – were hauled from the room.

It was Germaine Greer they were mainly after (though they handed out leaflets at the gate slandering me, too). I like Germaine, as it happens, and think she is often a lot more sensible than people think she is. But does she ever wonder if the militant feminism she launched has some responsibility for the new generation of self-righteous would-be censors who would rather silence an opponent than listen to her?

 

****

I travel a lot by train, and have begun to notice that the ride is getting much rougher. On a recent journey from London to Edinburgh I had to move seats because I was over the wheels and being jolted about so much. It reminded me of the Mandalay-Rangoon express (though in its grimy way that’s more comfortable than Virgin).

The worrying thing is that I noticed a similar worsening in the track at the end of the 1990s, just before a terrible series of crashes caused by track failure. Is Network Rail maintaining our lines properly?

 

****

The turmoil of the past two weeks has buried two pieces of bad news which the Government really doesn’t want you to know.

The first was Thursday’s record net immigration figures, showing that Mr Cameron has completely lost control of our borders.

The other was a huge and unexpected increase in Government borrowing in October, when it was supposed to have fallen. This passed almost entirely unnoticed.

No wonder the Chancellor seems to have put the economy in the hands of Doctor Who. The mythical £27 billion that he miraculously discovered in time for his Autumn Statement is even more non-existent than the Prime Minister’s imaginary army of 70,000 Syrian moderates.

Doctor Who will be needed to get hold of this money, since it does not yet exist, and is to be found (if at all) only in the future, and then in small annual dribs and drabs.

If George Osborne were a company, he would be heading for bankruptcy. As it is, I confidently predict very severe tax rises within three years. Perhaps Doctor Who will by then have replaced Mr Osborne at No 11 and will be able to escape the voters’ wrath in his Tardis.

*******

 

 

 

All the four main unpopular newspapers had virtually the same page one headline on Friday morning: The Times’: ‘Labour at war over vote to bomb Isis’, The Telegraph:  ‘Labour at war over Syria air strikes’; ‘The Guardian: ‘Labour in Syria Turmoil as PM makes the case for war’; ‘The Independent’ : ‘Labour at war over air strikes in Syria’. The BBC’s headlines were very similar.

 

 

 

None of these stories contained any clear facts, just anonymous briefings. If it had been a plane crash, or a verdict in a major court case, this sort of unanimity in supposedly competing media would have been normal. But in this case it looks much more as if we have a controlled press.

 

(This last item was accidentally omitted when the column was first posted)

 

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An interview on the Syria War panic, on LBC

This morning I was interviewed by James O' Brien on LBC about the rush to war. Some of you may like to listen to it

 

https://audioboom.com/boos/3859052-peter-hitchens-on-cameron-s-delusional-case-for-war?utm_campaign=embed&utm_content=retweet&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

 

 

 

Snake oil and billionaires... Now I KNOW Blair's taken over the Tories

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

The really big political changes in this country take place inside the major parties, not at general elections. Think of the Heseltine putsch against Mrs Thatcher, or the cruel overthrow of Iain Duncan Smith, or the recent desperate recapture of the Labour Party (whatever next?) by socialists.

And last week the Tory Party finally transformed itself into New Labour.

There are a few finishing touches to be added between now and 2020. But after much writhing and struggling, the chrysalis finally burst open to reveal the Heir to Blairism, glistening with snake oil and hair oil and surrounded by trilling choirs of happy billionaires, just as in the old days of Lord Cashpoint and bombing Iraq.

The process will only be complete when Lord Mandelson himself accepts that his life’s work is now being done by David Cameron and George Osborne, who is even starting to look like the Blair era’s Sinister Minister. Perhaps it’s time for a moustache.

The Tories also yearn for the open endorsement of Alan Milburn, whom they already employ as Commissar for Equality.

For the moment, they will have to content themselves with the embrace of Lord Adonis, more Blairite than Blair, who is in charge of concreting over what remains of the English countryside, a long-term New Labour obsession.

Privately, they are on good terms with the Blair creature himself, whose advice is always welcome in Downing Street. He is known there as ‘The Master’ and, with a few very minor changes (mainly the replacement of the word ‘Conservative’ with ‘New Labour’), he could have delivered the Prime Minister’s Manchester speech on Wednesday.

Who said (I have removed any mention of the party name): ‘It wasn’t just me who put social justice, equality for gay people, tackling climate change, and helping the world’s poorest at the centre of our mission – we all did’?

Honestly, could you tell? Where now are all those who thought David Cameron would unleash his inner Tory when freed from the embrace of Nick Clegg? Mr Cameron doesn’t have an inner Tory, and Wednesday’s performance suggests that Mr Clegg is actually the more conservative of the two.

Even the slightly embarrassing off-colour joke about sex, astonishing in the mouth of a serious politician, was the sort of thing that Mr Blair likes to do, along with the mention of ‘the kids’, the tinny business-school English, and the use of terrorism as an excuse for dubious actions.

Though I doubt whether Mr Blair would have had the nerve to make the deeply dishonest misrepresentation of Jeremy Corbyn’s perfectly reasonable and civilised objections to the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden.

The false and cheap suggestion that Mr Corbyn does not regard the events of September 11, 2001 as a tragedy – when he specifically said that he did – was a disgrace for which Mr Cameron should quickly make amends.

This is the thing that is most wrong with Blairism – its instinct is to lie. It is at bottom a nasty mix of greed, Leninist party discipline, advertising slickness and ruthless, intolerant political correctness. It attracts and promotes power-worshippers.

To survive and prosper, it must always pretend to be something else.

And as long as it succeeds in doing so, we are stuck with it.

Finally, a movie that's right to use the awful F-word

I don't generally approve of the F-word, but I must admit that the opening scene of the new film The Martian, about a US astronaut stranded on the red planet, provides a rare example of the wholly justified use of this powerful expletive.

Even I might be tempted to mutter it, under the circumstances.
There are many interesting things about this drama, one of them being that we never see the marooned spaceman’s family, whose powerless pain would normally feature largely in such a story.

But perhaps the most fascinating of all is its oozy, flattering attitude towards China, shown as a noble ally and as a highly advanced country, with no attention paid to its repressive, nasty features.

It’s all rather different to the way the equally despotic Soviet Union used to be dealt with in the movies, when it was America’s chief rival.

Still, at least there isn’t a Russian villain. I suspect they’ll start featuring in Hollywood productions soon.

The face of a REAL politician 

For those who think that Jeremy Corbyn is a threat to national security, how about this fellow, who appeared before the Labour conference in military uniform, denouncing the upper classes of every nation as ‘selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent’, and promising they would be dealt with shortly by the coming ‘socialist revolution’ (by which he meant the arrival of Russian tanks).

It was the 1945 Labour conference. And it was Denis Healey, who died last weekend, full of years and honour, having been one of the best Defence Secretaries in modern times, and a reasonably competent Chancellor. Healey was in fact a terrible old Stalinist, an actual member of the Communist Party in the worst gulag days, who may just possibly have stayed sympathetic to Moscow for rather longer than he later admitted.

Yet when it came to it, he showed undoubted courage on the field of battle in his country’s service, and later proved a wise and competent Minister, ending his life fiercely opposed to the succession of stupid wars into which lesser men dragged us.

Proper countries are full of awkward, discontented people who may in fact turn out to be better patriots than the more obvious and noisy flag-wavers. Bear it in mind.

Is there a worse thing than having your child wrongfully snatched away from you by the State, which cannot be bothered to wait to see if charges against you are proven? Are we truly free if such a thing can be done, irrevocably?

The case of Karrissa Cox and Richard Carter is a grotesque injustice. No court should have been able to hand over their child for adoption until the charges of abuse against them had been heard and proved beyond reasonable doubt. In fact, the charges collapsed.

The presumption of innocence is all that stands between us and tyranny, and I hope that some wise judge acts swiftly to restore the lost child to its parents. This isn’t a free country if this doesn’t happen.

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I don't Believe the 'Pig's Head' Story - but Anyway Cameron's Libya Mistake is Far More Imporrant

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

If you know something damaging about a major political figure, then, in a democracy, it is surely your duty to tell the voters before they go to the polls.

 

So I am puzzled by Lord Ashcroft’s motives for emptying a huge bucket of slurry over David Cameron’s head just after the Prime Minister has safely survived a fiercely-contested general election.

 

I have met Lord Ashcroft briefly a couple of times. He gives off an enjoyably sinister whiff of brimstone. He has a smile like the winter sun glinting on a coffin-plate. You wouldn’t be surprised to find he had steel teeth. 

 

He was known in his years of influence as ‘The Man Who Bought the Tory Party’, or alternatively as ‘Blofeld’, and I don’t imagine he minded.  I was never sure what he wanted in return for all his money.

 

Was it just a ministerial red box? Well, he didn’t get it and now he’s annoyed, and who can blame him? If they hadn’t planned to give him anything in return, the Tories shouldn’t have taken his cash. The same applies to those who bankrolled their 2015 victory.

 

 

I wrongly thought the Tory Party was impossible to save, a task as hopeless and morally wrong as reviving the popularity of Capstan Full Strength cigarettes. I still think we’d all be better off if it collapsed and died.

 

But money and lies eventually revived the ghastly old monster. Alas for Lord Ashcroft, it was somebody else’s money. He’d been five years too soon.

 

So what good came of his expensively-compiled book in the end? I’ve never doubted that Mr Cameron, like most of his generation, was disastrously soft on drug abusers, but that’s true of all the major parties, the media, the legal profession and the police, and he took this view openly. I don’t believe the story about the pig.

 

One important thing remains. Mr Cameron is not fit to be in charge of our foreign policy. His performance over Libya and Syria, the two biggest reasons for the mass migration crisis now menacing all Europe, was historically, politically and militarily illiterate. In a serious country he should resign and vanish into obscurity.

 

Yet he survives undamaged, which is the true scandal, that is never pursued and will never be punished.

 

********

 

I don’t at all mind George Osborne sucking up to the ghastly old waxworks who run the increasingly aggressive and sensitive Chinese police state.

 

And it is a police state. Peaceable professors, such as Ilham Tohti, are locked up and mistreated after lawless show trials. 

 

Communist activists have recently torn the crosses from 1,200 churches across the People’s Republic, claiming with cynical grins that they are acting to preserve ‘safety and beauty’.  People disappear into the night and fog of a vast Gulag. Human rights lawyers are arrested for defending dissidents.  

 

I don’t mind us canoodling with this awful regime because I can’t afford to.  Thanks to the batty self-defeating foreign policy we have followed since 1914, we are a minor debtor nation in danger of turning into a beggar nation.

 

Well, this is the sort of country we are now. It’s a shame, and a warning against joining wars when you don’t need to, the root of our fall from power and wealth to our current status.

 

Talking of which, let us examine anew Mr Osborne’s righteous wrath against the Assad government in Syria. Recently Mr Osborne said Parliament had been wrong to veto the planned attack on Syria two years ago. He seems to want to try again.

 

This can only mean that he still thinks we should have bombed President Assad’s forces in 2013, an action which would have hugely bolstered the factions which soon afterwards became the Islamic State. Given our furious hostility to IS, this seems to me to be very nearly clinically mad.

 

Indeed, the Cameron-Osborne policy towards Assad has from the start been based on a righteous condemnation of that regime. How can these two men spend so much time seeking favour from the cruel, intolerant despots of China, and imagine that they have any moral right of any kind to condemn Syria? It is a nonsense, and they should grow out of it. We certainly aren’t the world’s policeman any more, and we’re not the world’s vicar either.

 

********

 

Do good books die when nobody can understand them any more? Today’s children would never stand for most of the Victorian and Edwardian books I loved (and still love). The world in which they were written has gone forever.

 

But how strange to see this happening to a 20th century classic, ‘The Go-Between’. I was amazed by the favourable reviews of a dreadful BBC TV adaptation of this bitter, brilliant little book. I don’t think the makers or the reviewers can properly have understood it at all.

 

Apart from the silly, cheap decision to portray one of the main characters naked (when the book makes it quite clear he wasn’t),the main problem was (as it so often is) the faces.

 

The two lovers looked like models, aching for their smartphones, with nothing going on behind their eyes. It was impossible to see these people as the Victorians they were supposed to be.

 

Instead, they were modernised. A needless bit of class-war resentment (about a handkerchief!) was inserted. And the child at the centre of the drama, son of a bank manager and book-collector from Wiltshire, was given a northern accent and asked ‘can I get a cup of tea’, as he would never have done.

 

Look, people, manners, customs, belief and language were all different then. Which bit of ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ don’t you understand?

 

***********

I don’t normally mention my daily struggles with the railways, as most train commuters have it far worse than I do. But I did laugh when the company which tows me back and forth each day, ‘First Great Western’, tired of being called (with much justice)  ‘Worst Late Western’ and grandiosely changed its name to ‘Great Western Railway’, after Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s matchless enterprise of superb engineering and inventiveness.

 

On the very day of the fanfared change, I was of course held up for ages behind a ‘broken down train’ (You never actually see these, but like ‘signal failures’ and ‘track circuit failures’ you are told about them a lot. Great Western indeed.