It's astonishing, I know - but once, a long time ago, Oliver Letwin got something RIGHT

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Oliver Letwin doesn’t want to be defended by me. That’s why I’m doing it. How funny it is that he, of all people, should have been the target of the Leftist Thought Police last week for his 30-year-old memo about the Broadwater Farm disorders.

Giggly Mr Letwin, known among Tories for years as ‘Oliver Leftwing’, long ago embraced the ‘equality and diversity’ political correctness that now screams and howls at the slightest whisper of dissent.

He would have been quite capable of attacking his past self as a disgraceful racist, if he had been allowed to do so. Alas, he has an almost magical power to mess up anything he says or does in public, so Government spin doctors hurried him into hiding till the squall was over.

In fact, quite a lot of what he said in the memo was perfectly sensible, if it hadn’t been for the juvenile remarks about discos and drug dealers.

One part of his reviled memo has a lot of truth in it. ‘Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.’

This statement is not racially bigoted. In fact, it is the opposite. It judges people by their characters, not their skins, as Martin Luther King urged us to do. Mr Letwin’s 1985 remarks came at a time when there had been several outbreaks of disorder in areas where West Indians were concentrated. But they were not mass political uprisings. They were outbreaks of individual crime.

The great majority of West Indian migrants to this country were, are, and always have been respectable, hard-working, law-abiding and Christian in a way that sometimes shames the rest of us.

But liberal reformers, who wanted to change Britain profoundly anyway, saw these disorders as an opportunity. They ignored the truth – that the trouble came from a lawless minority in such districts, some of them white, who were disliked and feared by the majority. And, in a deeply racialist policy, they sought to treat all West Indians as if they could not be expected to behave well without special measures.

Those who wanted to live peaceful, honest lives and desired proper deterrence of crime would be abandoned.

From then on proper, old-fashioned policing (there and everywhere else) would be classified as ‘racist’ and ‘oppressive’. The first big step towards this stupid policy was Lord Scarman’s 1981 report into the Brixton ‘riots’ of April that year. The actual evidence, which few have read, suggests strongly that the conflagration was deliberately started by troublemakers who whipped up a mob against police who were trying to get an injured man to hospital. They did this by spreading false rumours of a death that hadn’t happened.

It also suggests that the disorder was not random but directed by leaders, that the supposed rioters (several of them white) rapidly took to robbery, and that petrol bombs were being systematically made, stacked and distributed. Scarman admitted that the hooligans were enjoying themselves, which anyone who has ever seen a riot will know, but which people like me get into trouble for mentioning.

Scarman, a liberal of the woolliest sort, recorded but ignored these facts. He even said that ‘street crime in Brixton was a grave matter, upon which the silent law-abiding majority of residents felt very strongly’. Yet he was against actions which had been intended to stand up for that majority.

He did at least have more sense than to swallow the ludicrous claim that the police were ‘institutionally racist’. That had to wait for Lord Macpherson’s even more liberal report into the terrible murder of Stephen Lawrence. Lord Macpherson also called – quite astonishingly – for the police to treat different ethnic groups differently. ‘ “Colour-blind” policing must be outlawed,’ he said. Yet I don’t remember anyone accusing his report of being ‘racist’. It’s odd what causes a fuss, and what doesn’t.

In Blairite Britain, the old Soviet rules apply to anyone with an independent mind: ‘Don’t think it. If you must think it, don’t say it. If you must say it, don’t write it down. If you must write it down, don’t sign it. If you must sign it, don’t be surprised.’

There are no simple answers to this misery

York is one of my favourite places in the world. I used to attend Bolshevik meetings beneath a set of buffalo horns in an upstairs room in The Lowther, the solid old pub that features in almost every picture of floods pouring through the heart of the ancient walled city.

I knew when I heard the names of streets affected by the latest inundation that something had gone extraordinarily wrong. Such places did not get flooded.

The temptation to fall in with the crowd and say ‘It must be global warming’ was strong. But I also know enough about York and its rivers to be sure that this isn’t so. I’m still talking to the Environment Agency about exactly what went wrong with the barrier that failed. But it wasn’t global warming.

There are so many reasons for what’s happening – the El Nino effect, the deforestation of much of England, which makes the earth much less absorbent, the straightening and canalising of rivers, speeding up the flow, the silting up of side channels that used to take the pressure off big rivers. Not to mention building houses on flood plains.

And then there’s just the slow decay of skills and structures which our forebears handed on to us. When a bridge collapses, after standing for centuries, isn’t it at least partly our fault for not having maintained it properly? Beware of single-cause merchants. Every crisis has many fathers, though they’re not always keen to admit it.

Ugly secret of our 'private schools'

Solid proof that there are now two kinds of privileged private education comes from Tatler, a magazine I bet Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t read. If he did, he’d find from its guide to the top state schools that quite a lot of his beloved ‘comprehensives’ are now besieged by wealthy and influential parents.

They quickly learn the complex admission rules, which religion to pretend to have got, or which tiny expensive catchment area to move into. It won’t be long before such schools – like the Grey Coat Hospital in Westminster, chosen by two Tory Cabinet Ministers – are as socially selective as Eton and Harrow, and sending their smooth products out into the world on gap yahs. Pity about the people who can’t afford the local house prices. But that’s how egalitarianism works.

It’s always nice to see my opponents tying themselves up in knots of their own devising.

Those who claim absurdly that ‘dyslexia’ is a disease rather than the result of bad teaching have now been caught by their own propaganda.

A major sperm bank has been turning away donations from alleged ‘dyslexics’ – and from supposed sufferers of that other invented complaint, ‘ADHD’, the result of bad parenting or boring schools. The simple way forward is to point out that these aren’t real diseases.

They can’t say that, because then a whole industry would collapse. But I can.

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Once Again, Are We Investigating these Mass Murders Properly?

Curious, isn’t it, how the ‘gun control’ campaign is quite incapable of paying attention to any other possibilities? And how it is immune to logic?

I criticise this incessant campaign not because I don’t share its objectives, but because it is so completely illogical, and resistant to fact.

I have no desire to own a gun (though I don’t see why, as a responsible adult,  I  shouldn’t be free to do so if I chose). On the contrary, I dislike being in the presence of guns even when I know them to be unloaded.

I understand that ‘gun control’ is the modern left’s alternative to the death penalty, which the modern left claim to have rejected because it is so ghastly and immoral, and because, well, I mean,  what if you execute the wrong person?  They haven’t, in fact rejected it at all. They are relaxed (that is to say, I have never seen a sustained liberal campaign against this)  about the growing number of extrajudicial killings by armed police (some of these must be the wrong person, no?) in the USA and – now – here. They claim to be unable see any connection between the growth of this form of law enforcement and the abolition of an effective, swift and certain death penalty.

We already know that those US cities which adopted strict gun control (especially Washington DC) actually achieved no significant consequent reduction in gun violence.

We know in ghastly detail that a country with very strict gun controls, France, can suffer the most appalling gun massacres, because it is one thing to enact gun control, and something else altogether to enforce it in a country where there are huge numbers of cheap AK-47s already circulating on the illegal market.

We know that gun ownership alone does not necessarily lead to gun violence, from the example of Switzerland. So we know that gun ownership, by itself, cannot be the cause of this problem and that therefore to concentrate upon gun ownership by the law-abiding is an illogical response.

But, after two recent horrors in the USA, President Obama and the New York Times and everyone else but me are raging either about gun control or about terrorism or about both.

The first of these horrors is the case of Robert Dear, who murdered three people and wounded nine more at a ‘Planned Parenthood’ (love that name!)  clinic in Colorado Springs.

Even the New York Times’s report here http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/us/robert-dear-suspect-in-colorado-killings-preferred-to-be-left-alone.html?_r=0

....eventually gets round to mentioning the strong suspicion that Dear (and look at his mugshots) might be a drug user and out of his mind. The evidence is circumstantial but in a state where marijuana is legal now and has been , er, lightly policed for some time, it rather has to be until someone takes  a definite interest.

You might enjoy the US Cannabis Lobby’s defence to this charge, here

http://www.thecannabist.co/2015/11/30/robert-dear-marijuana-planned-parenthood/44536/

The other is the San Bernardino shooting,  in which 14 people died and 21 were injured by a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. This event was initially reported simply as a gun massacre, but has since been ‘nationalised’, as Sir Simon Jenkins says, by being classified by President Obama as a terror outrage. Is this wise or useful?

Well, maybe. I keep an open mind on all such claims, though continue to insist on testable actual evidence of terrorist connections and motive, rather than unsourced claims and the whisperings of security men and their media patsies,  before accepting that they are in any way centrally directed. There’s also the usual talk of ‘radicalisation’, a speculation that doesn’t explain how even the wildest ideas translate themselves (as they do so rarely) into violent action.

The possibility that we may be dealing with unhinged people, not in full command of themselves, has been pushed into the background by the current preoccupation with Islamic State, which has now wholly replaced the (largely mythical) Al Qaeda, as the Official Octopus of global terror. This of course means nobody is looking into how they might have become unhinged, preferring to trawl through their travel, phone and computer records in the hope of finding some link between Raqqa and San Bernardino, just as we once sought similar links between every terror outrage in the world and an imaginary cave in Afghanistan.

 

Islamic State does certainly exist in Syria and Iraq, but I think we must be free to doubt how closely its distant franchises are linked to the central body. Also, if Islamic State wishes to strike at the USA, why would it choose to do so at a centre for the developmentally disabled in Southern California? I’ve struggled to learn much about the row Farook and Malik appear to have had with another guest at the party at the centre, before leaving to fetch their guns and bombs. Such things, surely interesting to any crime investigator searching for motive, get lost once ‘terror’ is the explanation.

Well, now look at today’s ‘Australian’  

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/san-bernardino-massacre-a-hatred-beyond-reason/news-story/5af7a1b4463bc493a852a0f634a73ab5

This opens : ‘Spilt across their cluttered kitchen counter was the last meal enjoyed by Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Farook. Along with orange juice and paratha bread were bottles of Adderall and Xanax pills, prescribed to steady the nerves.’

 

Who says they were ‘prescribed to steady the nerves’? Who knows that they were prescribed at all? Who says this was their purpose? Maybe an interview with the doctor involved was cut out at the last minute, but this seems to me like jumping to conclusions. Maybe the pills were prescribed.   But the misuse of Xanax is not exactly unknown. This amazing piece of presupposition allows the story to wander off immediately into all kinds of other directions.

What is Xanax, otherwise known as ‘alprazolam’? Why, it’s a member of the happy, happy benzodiazepine family.   Look it up.  Adverse effects include suicidal ideation, our old friend. And its ‘paradoxical reactions’ (that is, those you might not expect from a drug marketed as a tranquillizer) are aggression, rage , hostility, twitches and tremor, mania, agitation, hyperactivity and restlessness.

As for Adderall,  this is an amphetamine, of all things, mainly prescribed to children alleged to be suffering from the mythical complaint, ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ or its equally phantasmal relative ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’.  No objective diagnosis has ever been established for these complaints yet they are ‘treated’ with powerful mind-altering drugs. Amphetamines are totally banned in some countries, and heavily restricted in almost all jurisdictions. 

Malik and Farook had a six-month old baby, but even American ADHD/ADD fanatics have yet (I think)  to begin prescribing their ‘medications’ to children so young. So we have to wonder what it was doing in their home. I know there is an increasing habit of 'diagnosing' adults with ADD, the child market having become saturated, but some of these drugs leak out of the legal market

Very high doses can result in psychosis, involving delusions and paranoia. A Wikipedia article says ‘Recreational doses are generally much larger than prescribed therapeutic doses, and carry a far greater risk of serious side effects’.

Interestingly, its use is contraindicated in people suffering from severe anxiety, the same people who might be prescribed Xanax.  

I mention these things here, and place them in a proper context, for reasons well-known to regular readers. There appears to be a reliable correlation between outbreaks of homicidal violence (including violence classified as political) and the use of mind-altering drugs, whether legal or illegal. If we don’t investigate it, we will never find out of it is important.

Please don’t tell me I’m trying to excuse crimes, or take the heat of Islamist fanaticism. I am not. Not merely have I not said that I am, which ought to be enough for anyone short of the Thought Police.  I am here saying that I have no such motive. Please don’t tell me I’m offering a single cause. I am not. I just think that here, unlike the irrational emotive futility of ‘gun control’, there might possibly be a way in which we might conceivably diminish the number of these ghastly incidents. Who could possibly object to an investigation into that?

Well, who could?

Which side are we really on in this war of the awful against the evil?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I don’t think the British or American governments really want to fight the Islamic State. They just want to look as if they are doing so.

I judge these people by what they do, not by what they say. And in recent months I have noticed them doing – and not doing – some very interesting things.

The White House and Downing Street both seethe with genuine outrage about Russia’s bombing raids on Syria.

Yet the people Vladimir Putin bombed have views and aims that would get them rounded up as dangerous Islamist extremists if they turned up in Manchester. So why do British politicians call them ‘moderates’ when Russia bombs them?

It’s not as if London or Washington can claim to be squeamish about bombing as a method of war. We have done our fair share of it in Belgrade, Baghdad and Tripoli, where our bombs certainly (if unintentionally) killed innocent civilians, including small children.

Then there’s the curious case of Turkey. Rather like Russia, Turkey suddenly announced last summer that it was sending its bombers in to fight against the Islamic State.

But in fact Turkey barely bothered to attack IS at all. It has spent most of the past few months blasting the daylights out of the Kurdish militias, a policy that Turkey’s President Erdogan has selfish reasons for following.

Yet the Kurds, alongside the Syrian army, have been by far the most effective resistance to IS on the ground. Why then does a key member of the alleged anti-IS coalition go to war against them?

Turkey, a Nato member, is not criticised for this behaviour by Western politicians or by the feeble, slavish Western media. These geniuses never attack our foreign policy mistakes while we are making them. They wait until they have actually ended in disaster. Then they pretend to have been against them all along.

I’ve grown tired of people impersonating world-weary cynics by intoning the old saying ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ as if it were a new-minted witticism.

But in this case, this sensible old rule seems to have been dropped. Instead, our enemy’s enemies – in the case of the Kurds, Syria’s government and the Russians – are mysteriously our enemies too.

Meanwhile the Turkish enemies of our Kurdish friends are somehow or other still our noble allies.

Compare our weird attitude towards Syria’s horrible but anti-IS president, Bashar Assad, to Winston Churchill’s wiser view of Stalin.

Stalin became our ally when the Nazis invaded Russia. Churchill, a lifelong foe of Soviet communism, immediately grasped that times had changed. ‘If Hitler invaded Hell,’ he said ‘I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’

That is because, in body, heart and soul, sleeping and waking, with all the force and spirit he possessed, he was committed to the fight against Hitler above all things. So he would have accepted any ally against him.

Is this true of our leaders, who constantly portray Assad (and Putin) as Hitler, who imagine themselves as modern Churchills and condemn their critics as ‘appeasers’?

No. They play both ends against the middle. Their anti-extremist rhetoric, turned up full when confronting Birmingham schoolteachers or bearded preachers, drops to a whisper when they want to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, the home of Islamist fanaticism.

Things are not what they seem to be here. Russia’s action may be rash and dangerous. It may fail, especially as we are obviously trying so hard to undermine it. But at least it is honest and straightforward.

A new look set to sweep the nation

A hijab-wearing model, Mariah Idrissi, has been chosen for a new advertisement by the fashion chain H&M. 

I think we will be amazed at how quickly this becomes normal. It won’t be long before we have veiled Muslim Cabinet Ministers, TV newsreaders and judges. It is all part of a slow but unstoppable adaptation of this country to Islam. 

In my view it will eventually mean that non-Muslim women will come under pressure to conform. 

If you doubt the power of this huge change, consider this. There are archive films available showing women in Afghanistan and the Arab Middle East dressed in Western styles. It has taken only 40 years for them to disappear beneath scarves and shrouds. The process may be quicker for us. 

The hard-Left menace we ignored

The continued rage about Jeremy Corbyn’s rather dated Leftism baffles me. Most British journalists weren’t (as I was) members of the Labour Party in the 1980s. In the months before I quit, I used to be angrily called to order by the chairwoman of my local party. She was cross with me for (as she put it) provoking too much heckling from noisily pro-IRA, ban-the-bomb types.

Meanwhile, the real Left worked by stealth. That is why 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?

Well I never. Schools that introduce the Daily Mile – encouraging children to walk or run a mile during school time – report more attentive, happier pupils who look as children used to look before we locked them in cars and houses and abandoned them to TVs and computer screens.

This news will be unwelcome to the potent lobby which urges the drugging of children to make them behave in boring classrooms and exercise-free schools, a disgusting barbarity that will one day be looked on with horror. 

I’ve tried many times to set out the case against the wicked fantasy of ‘ADHD’, which usually earns me nothing but ignorant rage in return. But perhaps a rather clever new novel will succeed where I have failed. 

I do urge you to read Concentr8 by William Sutcliffe (Bloomsbury £12.99), set in the very near future in a London convulsed by riots, ruled by a fameseeking mayor with eccentric hair.

Many of the most shocking passages in it – concerning the cynicism of the drug industry and of doctors about the use of mind-altering drugs to control the young – are not fiction but researched fact. Also, you’ll be interested to find out what happens to the mayor’s hair in the end.

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At Last! Doubts about 'ADHD' go mainstream

Readers who have endured my many (rather lonely and much-abused) attempts to resist the unscientific ‘diagnosis’ of huge numbers of healthy children with the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’ may be interested by this article by William Sutcliffe(and the book to which it refers)  in the normally-conformist and conventional-wisdom-infested ‘Independent’ newspaper. Does Mr Sutcliffe know what he has let himself in for? Geysers of slime will be directed at him from the potent 'ADHD' lobby. 

 

My summary of the case against ’ADHD’ and the drugs given for it is here

 

http://dailym.ai/1aWIHmv

 

Mr Sutcliffe’s article is

 

Here

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/thousands-of-children-are-being-medicated-for-adhd--when-the-condition-may-not-even-exist-10509842.html

 

 

Think Greece is in a mess? Wait till the UK's debt mountain explodes in our face

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Would we cope with misery as well as the Greeks? If our great fat cushion of state-backed jobs, welfare payments, tax credits and easy loans were whipped away one morning, how would we get on?

I think we would do very badly. In Greece, the suddenly poor and destitute turned to their strong extended families.

And if those families had not taken them in and supported them, there would have been nothing else. Fortunately, they did.

This country doesn’t have strong extended families any more. In many cases, it doesn’t really have families at all.

In too many places, it has gangs instead. And those that survive are weakest just where they would be needed most in a crisis – among the poor.

This country lives on the edge of serious disorder. The misnamed ‘riots’ of August 2011 were nothing of the kind.

They had no political pretext, no wider aim. I suspect many thought of joining in, but didn’t quite.

They followed the realisation by a large number of people, in a period of good weather, that the forces of order were weak, absent and afraid. Many of them were laughing as they stole, wrecked and burned.

Mostly, they turned on shops rather than private homes or individuals. But this seems to have been a matter of chance.

There were one or two especially frightening moments when the lawless mob came into direct contact with the cosseted middle class, who hid from their hooded attackers under restaurant tables while the kitchen staff, ready to defend their livelihoods with force, beat off the assault with rolling pins.

And almost all of the looters got away with it. It was only the dim stragglers who were caught and whom I watched shuffling through the courts in the weeks afterwards, most of them with criminal records nearly as long as a Hilary Mantel historical novel.

They were baffled to find that, after years of cautions, unpaid fines, suspended sentences, community service and limp rebukes, something might actually now happen to them.

Actually, not much did in the end.

That’s bad enough. But what about the rest of us? Generations of all classes have been taught to expect a comfortable, well-fed existence, a reliable safety net.

How much privation would it take to turn us into beggars, then looters and food rioters? I ask this because we are much closer to a Greek-style crisis than we think.

Our debts, national and personal, are huge. We can never pay them off. Our trade imbalance is just as bad. Our recovery is based entirely on a house-price balloon that could burst in a moment.

The main effort of the Government is to avoid any shocks until the Election is over – but what then?

I feel for the Greeks. I don’t blame them for refusing to endure more collective punishment, though they were foolish – as we are now – to let politicians lead them into a swamp of debt.

But I wonder whether, not far hence, it will be the Greeks who are sympathising with us.

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The riddle behind our Gaddafi disaster

Last week, the BBC rightly but cruelly replayed David Cameron’s ludicrous words from September 2011, when he went to Tripoli to say: ‘Your city was an inspiration to the world as you overthrew a dictator and chose freedom.’

Now it’s an inspiration to nobody. He can’t go there to say so, because it’s too dangerous. Why isn’t he in more trouble over his active destruction of an entire country? It’s all very strange. 

The Gaddafi regime fell because Mr Cameron lent the RAF to various gangs of Libyan jihadis (about whom we knew nothing). 

But less than a year before, in October 2010, Henry Bellingham, a Tory Minister, was referring to Gaddafi as ‘Brother Leader’ at a summit in Tripoli.

About the same time, another Minister, Alistair Burt, told the Libyan-British Business Council that Libya had ‘turned a corner’ which ‘has paved the way for us to begin working together again’. 

What changed? Could it be the same forces which decreed that flags in Britain should fly at half-mast to mark the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? 

The Saudis always hated Libya’s dictator because he had overthrown a dynasty very like their own.

Do we still have an independent foreign policy, or is it governed by another, richer country?

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Robots are no match for the most beautiful machines of all...

Some of the best films of modern times feature lifelike robots. 

The latest, Ex Machina, starring Alicia Vikander, left, is a clever and cunning mystery story which I’ll say as little about as possible in case it spoils the ending.

But, as I discovered on a recent visit to a Tokyo robotics expert, we are far, far away from developing anything remotely like a human consciousness, let alone a human ability to move limbs and experience pain, pleasure or grief.

The real wonder in our midst is the astonishing complexity, beauty and mystery of the human body, and the insoluble puzzle of where and what consciousness is. 

We fantasise about creating human-like robots because it helps us close our minds to some of the strongest evidence for the existence of God – an idea we dislike.

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My local police force, Thames Valley, has recently admitted (thanks to a Freedom of Information request) that 54 of its officers, some of them specials, have criminal convictions, including for burglary, arson, drug possession, actual bodily harm, criminal damage and computer misuse. 

I expect other forces have similar numbers. Are the police really so short of recruits that they cannot find people without such pasts? 

Forgiving and forgetting is all very well, but these are the people who come into the homes of burglary victims, and whom we trust absolutely with highly personal details.

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Those who rely on the medical profession’s wisdom should note that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence now says 1.2 million people may have been misdiagnosed with asthma. 

I’m glad someone has noticed the absurd keenness of doctors to classify healthy children as asthmatics. 

How long before they notice that something similar may be happening with some other fashionable ailments, such as the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’? 

Or will the fact that huge drug contracts rely on these subjective diagnoses protect them from watchdogs? 

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Have you noticed that the people most excited about women bishops in the Church of England are those who don’t believe in God and never go near a church? 

Personally, I couldn’t care less what sex a bishop is. I’d like it if they believed in God, preferred poetry and beauty to banality, and didn’t mix up Christianity with socialism. 

Perhaps I should start a campaign.

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The Night a Fleet of Tory Snake-oil Tankers Sailed into Rochester...and Sank.

I wondered how our neutered,  bootlicking, pro-government media would manage to turn David Cameron’s devastating personal and political defeat in Rochester into a disaster for Red Ed.

 

Piles of money, tankers laden with snake-oil, five visits by the Prime Minister himself, even a frantic plea for Guardian readers’ votes, could not save the Tories from what I reckon was the worst  defeat in their entire history, losing a seat to a party which really believes in what the Tories pretend to believe in. 

 

Yet you’d think the main event was the sacking of a Labour nobody by another nobody for doing nothing. 

 

Here’s the supposedly big story: Emily Thornberry MP posted a Tweet in which she wrote the words “Image from Rochester” next to a picture of a house draped with football flags. Gosh.

 

Somehow this non-event has led to her sacking. Admittedly she has been sacked from a non-job. And if I were Ed Miliband I would have relished the chance to get rid of this blowhard and poser.

 

She once tried to attack me on ‘Question Time’, shrieking ‘How dare you!’ at me for making a few mild remarks about the need for welfare reform. She sought (quite wrongly) to imply that by doing so I had attacked single mothers personally. 

 

I suppose it’s fitting that someone who uses phoney outrage against others should herself be destroyed by phoney outrage. Ms Thornberry is a typical modern politician, struggling to fool her party’s remaining loyal voters into believing she is anything other than a careerist professional.

 

Like the former Tory MP and Cameron-boosting media figure Matthew Parris, who sneered at length about Clacton, Ms Thornberry was baffled and amazed when she actually visited modern England. 

 

Presumably, in her smooth daily journey from her rarefied London district to her office, she has never before seen St George’s Cross flags draped on a house. The remarkable thing is that she thought such a sight was unusual and interesting enough to Tweet.

 

But the incident is essentially trivial. Compared to the earthquake of the Rochester result, it is as weighty and significant as a seagull-dropping falling on to a politician’s greasy head.

 

What does Rochester mean? It means that a barrier to real and significant change is crumbling and may yet collapse. Seven years ago the brilliant pollster and Blairite establishment figure Peter Kellner (a longstanding Labour Party member) told me at a public debate:

 

‘I think it's really important that the Conservative Party does survive as a substantial brand, because there will always be a need for a centre-right party.’

 

Need? I wondered as he spoke, who exactly needs it? Why does a lifelong Lefty like Mr Kellner wish to save the Tories?  Mr Kellner read my mind and continued ‘If the Conservatives were to go the way that Peter expects (and I think possibly would relish) I am frightened as to what kind of right-of-centre politics would then spring up...

 

‘One of the great virtues of British politics...is that we have not had a substantial far-right nationalist xenophobic party in Britain. A substantial Conservative Party is our best bulwark against the kind of politics that I think could become very nasty.’

 

When Mr Kellner uses terms such as ‘far-right nationalist xenophobic’ he means a party that would be hostile to the European Union’s control of our government, laws and borders. The British left have for many years seen Brussels as the way to turn Britain into the sort of country they want, by the back door.

 

If you doubt the strength of this link, please note that Mr Kellner is married to Baroness Ashton of Upholland, who has just retired from the European Commission, where she was its (greatly underestimated and unfairly mocked) foreign policy chief.

 

The Tory party has helped the Left for decades. It has blocked the creation of a strong pro-British parliamentary force.

It has done so by pretending to love Britain when it doesn’t. Its every pose is a fake. All its principal figures are fakes as well. And they have got away with it.

 

For nearly eight years I have been in something close to despair  at the continued willingness of patriotic British men and women to give their votes to the Conservative Party.

 

This weekend, for the first time, I begin to have a very faint hope that they have finally seen through the Tory Fraud.  Rochester has shown that a pro-British rebellion against the Tories could, if properly handled, sweep the country, elbowing Labour aside as it does so.

 

What I hope for is what the establishment fear. That is why they hope you will be distracted by the drivelling fate of a New Labour nonentity. Do not be.   

 

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A Vital Message Hidden in a Laughable Movie

Crowds are flocking to see the laughable new film about the computer genius Alan Turing ‘The Imitation Game’. I think they are  mainly women besotted with Benedict Cumberbatch, though some men may enjoy the sight of Keira Knightley got up as a 1940s intellectual sexpot.

 

It’s the usual hopeless attempt to recreate the past by dressing the cast in acres of tweed, making them all smoke and renting some ancient cars.

 

But the ending is genuinely horrible. The homosexual Turing is shown robbed of his mental powers by hormone drugs supposedly intended to make him ‘normal’.   

 

We can all shudder at this stupid and wrong treatment.  But it is easy to condemn the follies of the past. At the time, fashionable opinion believed Turing’s ‘chemical castration’ was a humane alternative to prison.

 

What similarly stupid things do we believe today? How about this? Despite growing medical doubts (a report this week said it had more to do with drug marketing than medicine), we dope huge numbers of children with pills very similar to illegal amphetamines.

 

This mass-doping is justified by the suspect ‘diagnosis’ of an alleged complaint called ‘ADHD’. If Alan Turing were a child now, I think it pretty likely that his ‘odd’ behaviour would lead him to be drugged in this way, killing his special talents.

 

It seems to me very probable that, as you read this, some potential genius is having his life blighted, forced by smiling adults to swallow pills to make him ‘normal. We can see this was wrong in 1953. Why can’t we see it is wrong now?

 

 

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I just thought I’d note that it is now officially recognised that the police have been fiddling crime figures, a fact I was jeered at for exposing some time ago. Mind you, the authorities still can’t quite admit that the reason for this is political pressure. Of course it is.

 

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How can it possibly be balanced for the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme to run an uncritical, near-reverent commercial for cannabis, as it did on Wednesday? This is not a joke. People who take this drug can end up in locked wards for the rest of their lives. Who was responsible?

 

A Civilized Exchange

Here’s an encouraging development in the often sterile battle between sceptics, such as I, and supporters of unproven concepts such as ‘Dyslexia’ and ‘ADHD’.

 

One of my critics, Dr Harold Levinson, originally gave a wrong impression of my opinions in a blog posting. But when I challenged him, he responded in a reasonable and a civilized fashion and was creditably anxious to put the error right. This is , alas, notable mainly because it is so rare. But it is also a straightforward Good Thing, and deserves to be praised. We will never get anywhere if we cannot keep to the civilized rules of reasoned debate.

 

 You may read an account of our exchange here:

 

 

 

http://www.dyslexiaonline.com/blog/apology-peter-hitchens-dialogue-opportunity-advance/

 

Can you spot the difference between these two men? No, me neither

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Do you remember when the Blair creature was still worshipped and glorified? When he smiled his way through elections we all now know he should have lost?

I do. It was very lonely. Now that he has become a swearword, and everyone despises him, I am often tempted to remind these people how they used to fawn on him.

But why waste time on him? His life is now one of deepening sadness as he sits among his huge and useless riches and yet is despised by those whose approval he yearns for.

The important thing is to realise we are making a very similar mistake now. The same sort of people who managed the Blair fraud long ago gave up on him, and started work on the Cameron fraud instead.

These people are like advertising men stuck with a product that is no good, a car that breaks down, a soap that crumbles into powdery grease when it touches water, a foodstuff that tastes disgusting and cleaves to the tongue. Yet they have signed a contract to promote it.

At all costs they must keep the consumer from seeing the truth until after he has bought the merchandise. One way of doing this is to spread negative stories about rival products.

The shameful and childish personal abuse directed against Ed Miliband has now reached a point where honourable Conservatives must be tempted to vote Labour in protest against it.

The reason for this Stalinist destruction of personal credit  is simple. There is no political difference of any significance between the two men. So instead we are supposed to make up our minds on the basis of the size of Mr Miliband’s teeth. Heaven itself cannot help a nation which settles its future on this basis.

The utter falsity of  Mr Cameron’s recent play-acting about the EU is astounding. He is now reduced to issuing bombastic threats of future displeasure over a needless defeat which  he himself sought, to try to fool his stupider voters into thinking he is something he is not. It is we who will ‘live to regret’ taking this man seriously.

It is simply not true, as almost every media outlet obediently parroted yesterday, that Britain is now one step closer to leaving the EU. We are as trapped in it as ever. Not one molecule of David Cameron is hostile to British membership of the EU. His godfather and first political mentor was Tim Rathbone, a sopping wet Tory MP eventually expelled from the party for supporting a pro-European breakaway.

Mr Cameron’s fellow Bullingdon Club hearty, Radek Sikorski, now foreign minister of Poland, and keen on all things EU, thinks of his old friend as an enthusiast for Brussels. Tapes of Mr Sikorski’s Warsaw table talk emerged last week.

Every word of it assumes Mr Cameron is really on the side of the EU: ‘He stupidly tries to play the system… his whole strategy of feeding them scraps in order to satisfy them is just as I predicted, turning against him; he should have said, “Bleep off!” tried to convince people and isolate [the sceptics]. But he ceded the field to those that are now embarrassing him.’

He is only wrong in one thing. Mr Cameron’s critics are not turning against him. One supposedly ‘Eurosceptic’ Tory MP publicly licked the Prime Minister’s polished toecaps in the Commons only the other day.

How sad it is that, given the self-censorship  of the entire London political media, we need to turn to bootleg tapes of a Polish politician to read an honest account of Mr Cameron’s tactic – stupid propaganda, feeding his critics scraps.

Mr Cameron’s famous referendum has been set for 2017 because the premier knows he will be out of office by then. It is a post-dated cheque.

His futile battle against Jean-Claude Juncker is accompanied, again, by low personal smears – a former member of the Bullingdon isn’t well-placed to sneer at someone else’s drinking habits. And it is what is called ‘triangulation’. By appearing to fight against something the public dislike, you pretend that you share the public’s views.

David Blunkett, when Education Secretary and making schools even worse, used to do the same by getting barracked at Teachers’ Union conferences. Home Secretary Theresa May does it by rubbing the Police Federation up the wrong way.

Don’t you see the crude tricks they are playing on you? Don’t you see why they need to hire people such as Andy Coulson? Do you, as you did with Blair, have to wait once again until it is far too late, to recognise this swindle for what it is?

'Mighty' America humiliated again

The collapse of American power in the Middle East is astonishing, especially given that they fought so hard to replace us there.

The indefensible jailing, on evidence-free charges,  of three journalists in Egypt came a few hours after Washington’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, had handed the Cairo junta a huge slice of American taxpayers’ money.

This payment can only be made legal in the US by pretending that the Egyptian military putsch was not a putsch. The dictatorship’s response went beyond scorn. They took the money and jailed the journalists anyway, in spite of Mr Kerry’s personal plea to spare them.

No doubt Mr Kerry was scared that, if he refused the cash, Saudi Arabia would have stepped in with its own large chequebook.

But such weakness, and willingness to be humiliated by this appalling despotism, look especially foolish from a government, which repeatedly bombs other countries for not being democratic.

Diversity in what, exactly?

How does the BBC get away with its blatantly racialist plan to ensure that one in every seven actors or presenters is black, Asian or from an ethnic minority within three years?

When are we going to judge people not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character, as Martin Luther King said we should? Anyway, if it’s diversity the BBC wants, it could start by employing any journalists at all who aren’t fanatically Green or Left-wing.
 
Shock news! Divorce and drugs are bad
When the Pope speaks out for Christianity, it’s to be expected, and in the way of business. The statements you want to watch out for are the ones which come from people who criticise their own side.

There have been two this week – Penelope Leach, the liberals’ favourite child-care expert, says there’s no  doubt that divorce damages children. And Professor Sir Simon Wessely, the new head of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warns against the medicalisation (and drugging) of normal children. If they say so, it  must be bad.

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The Selfists Strike Back (with a damp sponge)

I was struck by the unusual poverty of the objections to the posting on the family wrecked after a child smoked cannabis, and the problem of ‘anecdotes’.

 

Take for instance the lofty contribution from Colin Walker:

 

‘Anecdotal evidence is never enough to make a case, even with a case by case analysis of anecdotes to discern patterns it would not give you any valid indications on how common, likely and severe the reactions can be.

I always find it amusing that people like Peter will give credence to negative anecdotes. They are seen to have some weight while the anecdotal evidence of millions of users indicating neutral or positive reactions is dismissed.’

 

Wouldn’t that depend on the case being made? Recall what I said ; ‘Beyond asking if any rational, responsible  person would or could  pursue cannabis legalisation or 'regulation' or 'decriminalisation' until such 'anecdotes' could be explained, I make no further comment.’

 

Surely even one such anecdote (let alone the thousands available, among the parents, friends and relatives of these victims) should give pause to anyone campaigning to remove the existing restrictions on the drug concerned?

 

I also have to point out again to those naïve enough to think that research is carried out constantly on a broad front about everything that is interesting, and is disinterestedly directed, that this is not so. I would be overjoyed if the state would pay for a full-scale research project on the effects of cannabis, especially on the young. There is no such project. One has to ask why not.  In its absence, we have to make what warnings we can, with the information we have.

 

Then there’s John Rowe, who asserts :’ I really wish Peter wouldn't bother with these kinds of posts, because they're so intellectually dishonest and have nothing to do with the real reasons he's opposed to cannabis use. It wouldn't influence his opinion one way or the other if it were proven beyond doubt that cannabis never led to mental health issues or if it always did, so there's no point trying to discuss harm issues with him.’

 

I use the arguments that come to hand. In a world that doesn’t believe in sin, let alone that it is bad,  there’s little point in telling people not to commit it. In a world given over to self-indulgence which doesn’t believe in the immortal soul, it is not going to be very effective to tell people that it is morally wrong and may have eternal consequences. It happens to be the case (and this is itself interesting) that moral wrongs pretty much invariably lead to various forms of temporal, material damage as well as to those deeper consequences. If this is what I must stress to keep people away from folly, then I will do so. Personally, I have no doubt that the ‘anecdotal’ link would, if subjected to proper research and testing, be shown to be real. As I’ve said before, it is hardly a surprise that a mind-altering drug of some power has a long-lasting effect on the brain .

 

As for ‘complete dominion’ over ‘someone’s flesh’, only one authority has that, and the user of the phrase does not, I think, accept that authority. The law, on the other hand , can – even in the secular moral system -  concern itself with actions which harm others. I have many times explained here why self-destruction is not and cannot be a victimless crime. Indeed, the post to which I linked showed quite clearly who the victims are, and how they suffer, how deeply and how long. It would take a head of concrete and a heart of plywood to fail to see this.

 

Mr Knight’s posting, incoherent, clichéd, self-serving (How does he know it hasn’t done him any harm? How can he know what he might have been and done otherwise?) and rambling as it is, undermines his own case brilliantly.

 

Then there is :’ The millions of anecdotes from addicts of various substances mean nothing to you so I assume this anecdotal evidence means nothing either. Afterall I would hate you to be inconsistent in your views Peter.’

 

That is because a moral concept cannot be transformed into a material illness (the heart of the ‘addiction’ argument)  by any number of anecdotes. It is precisely because lobbyists for ‘addiction’ make such an extravagant claim that they must be subject to such severe tests, which of course they cannot pass, but they get terribly cross when told so. They wish to use pseudoscience to shut up anyone who refuses to accept their (rather squalid) moral position. Any informed person can see that it *is* pseudoscience.

, but of course many gullible peopel are fooled by pseudoscience and Graeco-Latin expressions, , so any dissentient vocie must be furiously attacked lest the truth get out

My claim ( see above) is far more modest. There is enough anecdote to discourage any irreversible change in the laws controlling the suspect drugs, and to justify the extensive, expensive research needed to establish whether there is in fact a danger.

 

And finally, from another lobby wounded by me: ‘In response to Mr. Hitchens's piece some weeks ago on dyslexia, a significant number of people posted comments outlining their personal experiences of suffering from dyslexic symptoms despite the majority having had perfectly good educations. In the interests of consistency, is Mr. Hitchens planning to take those anecdotes on board and re-consider his view that dyslexia doesn't exist?’

 

The question with ‘dyslexia’ is not whether people have trouble with reading, which is beyond doubt, but why they do, and whether this is caused by a complaint in their physical bodies called ‘dyslexia’. Therefore a million anecdotes, or indeed a million peer-reviewed accounts of people describing their own reading problems, would not resolve the issue. What would resolve it would be controlled tests, in which those claiming to be ‘dyslexic’ were taught to read using Synthetic Phonics. When, after a few months ( as would certainly be the case) , they could all read, we could all go home, and the people in the control groups, who were being ‘treated’ for dyslexia could be given SP lessons too.

 

The question here is whether there is enough of a reason to launch a major research project into the effects of cannabis, and  enough of a reason to hesitate before irreversibly abandoning existing laws against cannabis.

 

Only a dogged, dogmatic, and unreasoning adherence to a cause could make anyone confuse the two.

 

Oddly enough, that cause is always the same, whether it be cannabis, ‘dyslexia’ , ‘addiction’ or, ‘ADHD’  - it is the cause that demands absolute personal autonomy, and the cause which denies personal responsibility for actions and failures. It is the most powerful cause in modern civilisation, and it is so intertwined with selfish personal desires that it hates with a passion any voice which suggests it may be wrong. It hates, especially, the idea that there may be a God and any absolute source of law or goodness. I call it ‘Selfism’.

 

Oh, by the way, if the incidence of the problems apparently connected with cannabis was random and unpredictable, the number of those not suffering (or claiming not to suffer) problems from using this drug would have little bearing on the question at issue, which is, simply, whether we should show natural caution and exercise natural curiosity. 

Dyslexia is not a disease. It is an excuse for bad teachers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I doubt there has ever been a society so easily fooled by pseudo-science and quackery as ours is.

Millions of healthy people take happy pills that  do them obvious harm, and are increasingly correlated with inexplicable suicide  and worse.

Legions of healthy children are drugged into numbness because they fidget during  boring lessons, and countless people are persuaded that they or their children suffer from  a supposed disease called ‘dyslexia’, even though there is no evidence at all that it exists.

A few weeks ago I rejoiced at the first major cracks in this great towering dam of lies. Dr Richard Saul brought out his courageous and overdue book, ADHD Does Not Exist.

I also urge everyone to read James Davies’s book Cracked, on the inflated claims of psychiatry since it sold its soul to the pill-makers.

Now comes The Dyslexia Debate, published yesterday, a rigorous study of this alleged ailment by two distinguished academics – Professor Julian  Elliott of Durham University, and Professor Elena Grigorenko of Yale University.

Their book makes several points. There is no clear definition of what ‘dyslexia’ is. There is no objective diagnosis of it. Nobody can agree on how many people suffer from it. The widespread belief that it is linked with high intelligence does not stand up to analysis.

And, as Parliament’s Select Committee on Science and Technology said in 2009: ‘There is no convincing evidence  that if a child with dyslexia is not labelled as dyslexic, but receives full support for his or her reading difficulty, that the child will do any worse than a child who is labelled dyslexic and then receives special help.’

 This is because both are given exactly the same treatment. But as the book’s authors say: ‘Being labelled dyslexic can be perceived as desirable for many reasons.’ These include extra resources and extra time in exams. And then there’s the hope that it will ‘reduce the shame and embarrassment that are often the consequence of literacy difficulties. It may help exculpate the child, parents and teachers from any perceived sense of responsibility’.

I think that last point is the decisive one and the reason for the beetroot-faced fury that greets any critic of ‘dyslexia’ (and will probably greet this book and article). If it’s really a disease, it’s nobody’s fault. But it is somebody’s fault. For the book also describes the furious resistance, among teachers,  to proven methods of teaching children to read. Such methods have been advocated by  experts since Rudolf Flesch wrote his devastating book Why Johnny Can’t Read almost 60 years ago.

There may well be a small number of children who have physical problems that stop them learning to read. The invention of ‘dyslexia’ does nothing to help them. It means they are uselessly lumped in with millions of others who have simply been badly taught.

It also does nothing for  that great majority of poor readers. They are robbed of one of life’s great pleasures and essential skills.

What they need, what we all need, is proper old-fashioned teaching, and who cares if the silly teachers think it is ‘authoritarian’? That’s what teaching is.

The sign of an honest butcher

I wondered when the Soppy Lobby would get  round to trying to ban butchers’ shops displaying the recognisable carcases of dead animals. The first attempt, in the Suffolk town of Sudbury, has failed. But it won’t be the last. How sad.

Now that most meat is  sold ready packaged in supermarkets, many children grow up with no idea where  it comes from. Proper butchers are rarer and rarer. My own view is that you shouldn’t eat meat if you don’t know what it is and how it came to be on your plate.

The spread of cheap, unrecognisable hypermarket meat has helped to create hideous meat factories, where animals are imprisoned and tortured in unspeakable conditions before being cruelly massacred. I’d rather eat lentils than support such methods.

Proper butchers know the names of the farms that supply them, and can tell you where the animals were humanely slaughtered. It’s the hidden cruelty we should object to, not the honesty of the remaining butchers.

Here's the real IRA scandal

What a lot of twaddle we have heard about the  dropping of the case against the alleged Hyde Park bomber, John Downey.

On page 56 of the judge’s ruling, point 32 states ‘even  if convicted of all the offences he [Downey] would, in consequence of the 1998 Act, serve no more than two years in prison’. So, even if a jury had found him guilty of that ghastly crime, two footling years would have been his lot.

The 1998 Act was part of Britain’s grovelling  surrender to the Provisional IRA, made under fierce American pressure.

I said at the time that this was a total and unmitigated defeat, but I have been told over and over again by  pious persons that it is the price of ‘peace’.

Well, we have not got peace. We have been utterly humiliated by a criminal gang, at the behest of our supposed allies in the ‘War on Terror’.

And what do you think will happen if we ever dare prosecute another IRA man, let alone put him in jail? They haven’t gone away, you know.

How’s the ‘liberation’ of Ukraine going  for you? Gullibly welcomed by 99.9 per cent of the British media, it doesn’t look quite so simple now, does it?

Beginning to have doubts about Britain taking sides? You should. Apart from all the worrying developments in Crimea, which are no surprise to any informed person, it comes to something when that old class warrior, Dennis Skinner MP, speaks for Britain.

But his brief outburst was the most telling thing anybody in Parliament has said about  this. He asked William Hague, Secretary of State for Foreign Meddling: ‘Have I got it right, or not, that a Tory Foreign Secretary has come to the House to take money out of the pockets of people in Britain – flood-ravaged and austerity-riddled Britain – to hand it over to the EU fanatics in Ukraine?’ Yes, he has got it right.

More from Mike Barton, Chief Constable of Durham and advocate of free heroin for abusers. I suggested his job was to enforce the law. He retorted: ‘When you say that my job is to enforce the law, between 18 and 22 per cent of my work is law enforcement and crime-fighting. Fifty per cent of my work is concern for safety. That’s what I’m in, so when you accuse me of being a social worker, I’m proud to be a social worker as well as a tough law enforcer.’

What odd figures, and what a strange sort of pride. And I think the people of Durham should be the judges of whether he is a ‘tough law enforcer’.

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