A short gap

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

I shall be travelling during the next two weeks, and so will not be posting a mid-week commentary. But I hope to read and respond to comments on the Sunday columns as usual.

Not even Kim Jong Il could live down a visit from Mandy

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

So here we see our new, one-party elite in all its lack of glory, interchangeable careerists from fake ‘Tory’ and fake ‘Labour’ front benches, floating around in lukewarm seas of money with Russian oligarchs, hedge-fund millionaires, foreign media magnates and who knows what else?

This, the Corfu set, is your choice at the next Election. You can have one thing, or you can have the same thing. If you want anything else, you can get stuffed. These individuals have no interest in you, or in this country, nor much idea of how the rest of us live. It is centuries since Britain was ruled by a set of people who have so little in common with those they govern.

What they’re really embarrassed about this week is that you might realise that this is what they are like. Peter Mandelson is less troubled than George Osborne because nobody would be surprised by anything he did, or anyone he met. If Peter turned up in North Korea having cocktails with Kim
Jong Il, it would be Kim’s reputation that got damaged.

But it is much worse for the Tories. They have spent millions (raised how, exactly?) on buying themselves a nice new image. Now they fear that the whole lot has gone down the plumbing.

They tried so hard to avoid this. David Cameron even had a pseudo-holiday in Cornwall, where he posed for pictures, before heading off for his real holiday in Yachtworld, where he wasn’t so keen to be seen.

How it makes me yearn for the much-mocked old days of the grouse moors, and even Harold Wilson’s expeditions to the Scilly Isles. Our political leaders may not have been much good but at least they were ours, not the trashy flotsam of the global elite.

Who doctored the toffs?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I bring you the Mystery of the Missing Toff. Who is doctoring pictures of the Bullingdon Club?

And why?

By a mysterious process, almost all photographs of this unlovely society for rich, young drunkards have now been suppressed, which suits David Cameron very well, since he is in so many of them, looking so very rich and arrogant. I have seen them.

But last week a new study of the lads appeared, featuring George Osborne and his (now former) friend Nat Rothschild.

To the left of the middle, there’s a mysterious gap where somebody ought to be standing but isn’t. Odder still, there’s a patch of shirt-front and waistcoat there, with no person attached.

Odder yet, Mr Rothschild’s right trouser leg has a white lapel, not usual even under the bizarre dress code of the Bullingdon.

On close examination, the three seated figures at the front appear to have been stuck in place after being moved from somewhere else.

If you know what’s going on, please let me know.

State groomers are as bad as paedophiles

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

If a man in your street started trying to talk to your small children about their genitals, you’d call the police and he’d be in the segregation wing in prison and on the sex offenders’ register before you could say ‘paedophile’.

But if the Government say they want to talk dirty to primary school pupils and groom the young for sex, this is praised as enlightened social policy. Look, there’s nobody in this country over 11 who doesn’t know how babies are made (and therefore how to avoid making them if you don’t want one). What’s more, the human race managed to reproduce without any difficulty long before there was any sex education at all.

Since ‘sex education’ began, the things it claims to discourage – unwanted pregnancy, sexual diseases etc – have increased like anything.

So why, as a people, are we so lacking in natural suspicion when the sex-education and family-planning lobby come knocking? These people have failed in their alleged purpose, because it’s a fake. Really, they wish to do several fishy things.

They wish to destroy childhood innocence and smash the remaining influence of religion. They wish to alienate children from their parents.

They wish to spread the idea that under-age sex, sex outside marriage and many other things are ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ and inevitable.

They wish to destroy any lingering belief that marriage is usual or to be expected.

I can’t help you if you want to let this happen. I am baffled that parents and decent teachers do not fight it.

If there were any conservative MPs, I’d be puzzled by their inaction and complacency too, but there aren’t.

How can we get so worked up about individual paedophile grooming and so uninterested when it’s done by the State in schools we’re forced to pay for?

As for the Scouts bringing in ‘sex education’, what is this organisation for, any more?
If they can’t stand against the sordid modern world, who can or will?

Madness of President George

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Four years too late, Hollywood weighs in with a movie charting the mad story of George W. Bush,
Oliver Stone’s W. There are some fine performances, not least Josh Brolin as the catastrophic President and James Cromwell as his baffled father.

But it doesn’t explain how someone so unqualified for high office could be elected – and then re-elected.
He’s finished now, but all the processes of democracy and a free Press failed either to warn America he
was coming, or get rid of him legally when there was a chance
to do so.

********************************
It is now nine years since I published a book called The Abolition Of Britain, which Andrew Marr, who ought to know, was kind enough to describe as ‘the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works’. Polly Toynbee, who also ought to know (since she’s on the other side), said it drew up ‘the true battle lines of politics’. It was incredibly hard to get it published, and to get it into bookshops. I reread it recently and felt that the things it warns against are still happening, with all the parties ranged shamelessly on the Left as they weren’t in 1999. So I am pleased to say it is once again available, for those who want to know how we got into this mess. The resistance starts here.

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Here's why assisted suicide must remain illegal, along with euthanasia. If there is no serious danger of prosecution, then those who have a material interest in the death of the person involved may influence him in his decision or improperly conspire to remove him from this life under the guise of mercy. Think
of the care-home bills you could avoid. Those who say they believe they were right, either to assist a suicide or perform a mercy killing, shouldn’t object to having to explain themselves to a jury. We kill a lot more babies than anyone ever thought we would since abortion was legalised. Feeble excuses are readily accepted. Let’s not start on the old or ill. It could be you.

Get out of Afghanistan

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

David Davis publishes a deeply pessimistic account of the corruption and failure of the Afghan government we prop up, and  report after report, from journalists with the troops, from intelligence agencies,  underscores the military truth, that this is a war in which there can be no victory, and in which brave soldiers are dying at a frightening rate. A British aid worker is murdered by Islamist fanatics in Kabul.

Yet still politicians, including Mr Davis, and leading soldiers, who should stay out of politics,  continue to write and speak as if the thing can be rescued and our bloody, costly, futile intervention in Afghanistan can have any happy ending except a withdrawal. It cannot be. There are no circumstances which can be envisaged in which we could claim to have won this conflict.

In Britain's case we still don't really know what we are supposed to be doing there. I have pointed out many times that, as we grow opium poppies commercially in Oxfordshire, we are badly placed to lecture the Afghans about doing more or less the same thing.  Also, we really shouldn't blame Afghan peasants and gangsters for supplying the opium, when we do nothing to prosecute or punish those in this country who buy the end-product. We treat these criminals as victims. If we don't disapprove of Heroin enough to lock up those who break the law by using it, why should they disapprove of it enough to sacrifice their livelihoods?

Yet many British people still believe that the poppy fields are the reason for our troops being there. Given the absence of any other coherent justification, I suppose that isn't surprising.  But it's rubbish, even so.

The war's original purpose, supposedly to chase the culprits of 11th September to their base,  was almost certainly false or mistaken - and in any case the terrorist headquarters have long ago moved to the safety of Pakistan's badlands.

Warmongering neo-conservatives, plus the supposedly peaceable Barack Obama, have now begun to speak about extending the war into Pakistan, a step so terrifying in its implications that it is hard to believe one's ears. Do these people have any conception of what they are proposing?  Do they know anything at all about Pakistan? About as much as they knew about Iraq in the days when it was going to be a 'cakewalk' , I suspect. I am reminded painfully of the days when the Vietnam war was going to be won by extending the fighting into Cambodia.  Ah, yes, that turned out well, didn't it?

So let me say as clearly as I can that the only honest and practical thing to do is to leave, and leave soon. This vain and silly war was wrong from the start. It is now unwinnable even on its own confused terms.  Only now, after years of needless casualties, are we beginning to provide equipment that might make our soldiers safer. Even then, they are by no means safe enough. Who dares send another mother's son to die in a war that is already lost? Enthusiasts for this battle are welcome to sign up for an international brigade, if they are so sure it is worth doing.

Have you got your sex education badge?

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

I was never in the Scouts. For some lost reason, the headmaster of my Devon prep school disapproved of them. Instead we belonged to the school's own version of the Baden Powell movement, which in those forgotten years certainly didn't have any sex education.

Our school youth organisation was, rather hilariously, called 'the Pioneers'. Did my headmaster know this was what the Communist version of scouting was called in the USSR?  He must have done, though I'm sure we didn't at the time, and I have only since thought how funny it is that I can claim to have belonged to the Young Pioneers. I'm not too sorry to have missed the Scouts. I'm not wild about youth movements, even independent ones. They give off an odour of regimentation and enforced jollity that I don't much like. But if we have to have them, then independent ones are the only sort to have.

I suspect the head just didn't want anyone else interfering in his school. Youth movements are sensitive things. They get direct access to young minds.  That is why the great totalitarian leaders all banned or took over the international, vaguely British Boy Scouts and replaced them with their own state-controlled movements, mainly designed to alienate the young from their parents - always a totalitarian aim.

So it is only natural that our new soft totalitarians should want to get their clammy hands on what is left of the Scouts and the Guides. These organisations, with their religious and monarchist origins, have been under a quiet, sustained assault for years, as they don't conform to multiculturalism. Now they have caved in to the sex education fanatics, simpering ingratiatingly as they mouth the standard excuses. Here is the Chief Scout, Mr Peter Duncan,  :""We must be realistic and accept that around a third of young people are sexually active before 16 and many more start relationships at 16 and 17." 

I can't see that old Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts,  would have thought much of that. His cure for sexual urges was, famously, a cold shower.  It is hard to imagine him handing out condoms to his young charges. I think he would have viewed this "realistic" stuff as defeatism. He would no more have agreed that it was necessary to accept this sad fact as inevitable than he would have surrendered Mafeking to the besieging Boers (look it up).

And once, any leader of the British Scout movement would have shared that view and insisted on his independence from the politically correct state.. But now all the alleged defenders of conservative ideas and institutions have stopped standing up for what they are supposed to value. They are all 'realistic' like Mr Duncan - because the alternative is a hard fight against the enemy's ideas, and that would never do. If people are doing things they oughtn't to do, then we decide that the best course of action is to tell them how to do those things safely. This is called 'Harm Reduction'. Except that there is no safe way of risking moral hazard, or, for that matter, of taking dangerous drugs. How very sad it all is, and how very harmful.

A few replies to comments on older threads

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

I am often disappointed by the way in which contributors only argue about one item in my column, leaving the others untouched. And I'm puzzled by their choices. I was particularly baffled by the extraordinary storm of disagreement stirred up by my suggestion that people who consciously drive in a homicidal way, and then kill, ought to face execution.  It seems to me that the law simply hasn't begun to cope with the effect of mass car ownership, and that our society is grossly complacent about the growing irresponsibility of drivers.

It was a casual aside, though one I am happy to justify and defend if required. I really don't want to raise the death penalty argument again. I believe the subject to have been thoroughly discussed on this site, and for both sides to be quite familiar with each other;s arguments - the pro-execution side being fact-based, rational and moral, the anti-execution side being emotional, illogical, uninterested in facts and sentimental. That is why there's no meeting point between them.

But we did get one thing clear. The claim that execution is unChristian or anti-Christian was thoroughly demolished. There is no scriptural warrant for this claim, and quite a lot of scriptural warrant for the opposite. I don't think Christians are obliged to favour the death penalty. But they are certainly not debarred from supporting it.  Those who wish to use Christianity as an argument against capital punishment cannot honestly do so, and it was noticeable than none of those who tried to do answered repeated requests to justify their case with facts.

I am sick of trying to persuade Gabriel Manuela Scherer to limit the number and length of her increasingly mawkish ( smiling face!)  (nauseated expression!) ( sick bag!)  contributions here. But her sheer bad manners last week impel me to beg her once again to ration her postings in length and frequency, or perhaps set up her own blog somewhere else. I promise not to come calling.('sarcastic grin!')   

Another contributor eloquently explained why Miss Scherer's suggestion (simultaneously frivolous and  crass) that I should become a Muslim broke so many of the rules of civilised discourse. I would add that, when I say that other people do not understand what litres are ( as is evident at any British petrol station, where since the abolition of gallons most people have bought petrol by the Pound Sterling) I do not say that I personally do not understand them. Thus I am in no need of patronising lectures about wine-bottles (see below).

I am entirely familiar with metric measurements and lived for some years in a (totalitarian) country where they were the sole scale available. I bought my bluish collective milk by the litre and hunks of unidentifiable flesh by the kilo, and the rusting concentration camp fences, and the mass graves,  were measured in metres and the prisoners' gruel had been doled out  in grammes ( whereas man went to the Moon in miles, feet and inches, and Europe was liberated from tyranny yard by yard and mile by mile, by soldiers who got their rations in pounds and ounces).

I can usually convert metric to customary measurement by mental arithmetic, and I know my customary scales - ounces, pounds, stones, hundredweights;  feet, yards, chains, furlongs;  gills, pints, quarts, gallons, by heart as well. That is one of the reasons why I do not like metric measurements,  and do not want them imposed on this country by force of law. This simple point, that we should be allowed to choose, seems entirely to have eluded all the glinting, efficient metrophiles who piled in with the usual stuff about standardisation and convenience and simplicity. Please, have your litres and metres and kilos if you want them and good luck to you.  Just don't make me have them.

By the way, some contributors attacked my suggestion that British schools should once again teach British customary measures as if I had said ( which I most certainly didn't) that they should cease to teach the dreary toe-counting metric equivalents.  There's not much to teach, really - ten of those and ten of those, and ten of those, and so ad infinitum. I remember being introduced to them, aged about 11, and being disappointed by their regimented dullness compared with the evocative and ancient names, and intricate (but easily mastered) mental arithmetic, of our system.

I am perfectly happy for these foreign measures to be taught.  I am in favour of it. I am not, like my metrofanatic opponents, an intolerant suppressor and censor. People will need these things when they travel - though they'll find that ( just as the USA's use of customary measures differs from ours) different metric countries use these measures in different ways too, presumably for historic reasons. Switzerland, for instance, uses decilitres to measure beer and wine. Whereas in France a 'demi' (half) of draught beer means a quarter of a litre (so what is it half of?) and centilitres are more commonly used. Only in Germany do you ever see beer served in litre glasses.

And, something the metrophiles have never explained,  good wine is never sold in litre bottles, even in the country where the litre was invented. Why not? Obviously because the litre is an unnatural measurement, based on a (bungled) measurement of the earth's circumference,  not on human use. And the sensible French, in two centuries of metrication, have never adopted litre bottles, except for weapons-grade plonk.

Until standardisation forced the measure up to 75 centilitres, good French wine was old sold in 72 centilitre measures, equivalent to the old English wine measure known conveniently as a 'bottle'.  In Austria they have a thing called a 'Zoll' which is actually an inch. School rulers in metric countries, of course, come in lengths of 30 centimetres, which is almost exactly a foot. If the metre is so useful, why don't they come in metres?

A brief note on American measures. The American pint is in fact the old English pint ( and those who have drunk pints of beer in American bars may agree with me that it is a more human measure, better suited to bladder and stomach than our larger one). The English pint was altered and enlarged in the 19th century, I believe this was part of some effort to make it more comparable to the litre.

I was amused by the suggestion from "Eric D" that I am trying to bring back East Germany, what with the death penalty and underpowered cars. It's true that the old DDR, which I visited as often as I could,  holds a special place in my heart,  and I often wish it could be brought back.  But that is so that people like 'Eric D' could go and see what 'real, existing socialism' was actually like. They would find that the slow cars and the death penalty (which, unmoderated by jury trial and the presumption of innocence, was not the kind I support) were not really the most important features of that society. Here are some that were more important: a 'Parliament' where all the political parties (yes, they had 'Conservatives' and 'Liberals' too)  agreed, incessant state interference in family life, universal comprehensive education, discrimination against the middle class in university admission,  identity cards, unceasing surveillance of private individuals and of internal journeys. I could go on. Now, where does this remind me of?

A few final points in answer to Paul Jones, who argues seriously and persistently, yet misses the point. Asked for a principle which prevents us from taking life, he responds  not with a principle (which would have to have universal application) but  with a cloud of sentimentality designed to make decisive action impossible by fogging the mind.

A prisoner may indeed be 'helpless' when he has been chased after and caught, but how helpless would he be if he were allowed to go free again? He is helpless only because he has forfeited his freedom. When he wasn't helpless, he destroyed another's life.  It is circular to say that, once we have disarmed him, wiped the mess off him,  put him in a suit and given him a fair trial, it would then be unfair to do justice on him because he cannot run away.   By this logic, as I think I have suggested before, we should let him go and give him five minutes' start, and perhaps give him a  gun of his own,  before hunting him down with shotguns. This would at least satisfy Mr Jones's worries about helplessness. But what if he managed to kill someone else before we got him?

Forgiveness is not incompatible with execution. You cannot forgive your own murderer, because you are dead. Even a deathbed pardon is dubious. Until you know what it is like being dead, how can you be so sure that you have forgiven the person who rendered you dead? It is all very well to forgive the person who bumps into you in the street and says sorry, but much harder when you find out later that he has also taken your wallet, has not said sorry, and is not available to be forgiven for that. And it is presumptuous of us to forgive him on your behalf. Pope John Paul II is a poor example in this dispute, as he survived Agca's attack, and in any case it took place in a country without a death penalty. Had Agca killed him, in a  country which did have the death penalty, who would have been doing the forgiving?

If I am asked to love my neighbour as myself, I am happy to do so. That is, not to love him too much to be blind to his faults, or forgiving of unexpiated crimes.  And if I ask to be forgiven , as I  forgive them that trespass against me, then I am perfectly happy with an arrangement that says I don't get forgiven until I have shown genuine repentance for, and understanding of my wrong deeds. I can guarantee I won't forgive anyone who trespasses against me until he has shown repentance.

In any case, justice is not a private transaction between victim and assailant. It is the law that decides if the killer should be executed, not the victim (who, I must keep stressing,  is dead) or the victim's family.  They might forgive their relative's killer, which would be nice of them, but the law would still be entitled to execute him whatever they thought, and quite right too, acting on behalf of the victim (opinions unavailable) and of justice, which in civilised countries specifies a special penalty for the deliberate taking of life, not out of revenge,  as the abolitionists falsely claim, but out of the need for law.

As for repentance, you'll have to judge whether these various murderers in American jails are the penitent paragons they say they are. Perhaps so. How could one prove it? They gain so much from these performances that there is more than one explanation for their behaviour.  But when it comes to repentance, I am with Samuel Johnson - who remarked that the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight concentrates a man's mind wonderfully well. Penitence under those conditions is more likely to be the real thing.

We’re getting pounds and ounces back: Oh, and pigs might fly ...

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

So sorry but I don’t believe for a moment that the furious, spiteful campaign against British customary weights and measures is over.

Just because some powerless ‘Minister’ issues a few guidelines to town halls, do you really think that you will be getting your pounds and ounces, pints and gallons back? Not a chance.

Even an intervention by a senior member of our real government, the EU, has made no difference. European Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said last September that the British Press had ‘invented’ the idea that selling by the pound was illegal. Brussels had no desire to ban it.

Two days later the little Stalins of Hackney Council (aided by our police force, always zealously available when political correctness must be served) descended on Janet Devers, a market trader, and began to prosecute her for doing exactly what Mr Verheugen had said she was allowed to do.
She now has a criminal record. Some invention, Commissioner Verheugen.

Nothing has really changed. It’s just New Labour trying desperately to get votes wherever it can by pretending to care what we think. The Useless Tories will probably join in. You’ll see more of this, as the Election nears. But it is a fake.

Schools – even monstrously expensive private ones where parents are supposed to be more important than the State – will continue to suppress our customary measures and refuse to teach them, even though anyone travelling or working in the USA needs to know them.

The BBC will continue to use metres and (mispronounced) kilometres aggressively in all
its news bulletins, nature programmes and soap operas, signs on motorways will increasingly be in
kilometres, fuel will gush out of pumps in litres that almost nobody understands.

Our official classes hate our ancient, polished-in-use, human measures precisely because they are ours and because they are British.

Like the Common Law, jury trial and constitutional monarchy, we fashioned them here during a thousand years of freedom and independence.

And they have all got to go because that freedom and independence are rapidly coming to an end. We live in the afterglow of our dying liberty. From now on it’s top-down, do-as-you’re-told standardised, globalised, bland, inhuman and ugly, like it or not.

Those who think this is just a quirky side issue are mistaken. Once the State has the power to force its way into private transactions between individuals, you are no longer free.

How on earth did the head of the NSPCC forget THIS?

Should a major charity take sides in a bitter political debate? I don’t think so. But charities, while they do much good, are increasingly willing to become lobbies for fashionably Leftist causes. Here is a worrying account of how the NSPCC (does this now stand for National Society for Politically Correct Campaigns?) allowed itself to be used by the Labour Government.

Last December, the NSPCC issued a Press statement which, in the name of the chief executive, Dame Mary Marsh, welcomed the signing of the Lisbon Treaty (alias the European Constitution) and called for ‘a speedy ratification in all EU member states’.

The NSPCC now admit that this statement should never have been made by a supposedly non-political charity. It was later used by the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, to persuade Labour MPs to vote for ratification, in an official party briefing paper. Above it was the legend: ‘Their words, not ours.’

That’s the point. Endorsement from such a respected, independent body is priceless. Now, the NSPCC tell me they withdrew the statement when they realised it had gone too far. But they can’t say when it was withdrawn or if anyone was disciplined for issuing it in the first place.

Bad enough. But wait for it. Last Monday Dame Mary Marsh told me she had no recollection of ever having made or authorised the statement issued in her name. The most contentious and partisan political statement ever issued by the NSPCC, and she can’t remember making it.

I sought an explanation of this strange fact. So the NSPCC’s chairman, Sir Christopher Kelly, came on the phone. Sir Christopher used to be a very grand civil servant and is now Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life.

He assured me that records – which he has not seen and would not let me see – showed that Dame Mary had authorised the statement. What? But she couldn’t recall having done so. When I asked what would have happened to any Whitehall subordinate of his who had issued such an important statement and couldn’t recall doing so, he would only say this had never happened to him. I should think not.

Sir Christopher also refused to say if anyone had been disciplined as a result of this inexcusable mess. So there you have it. The NSPCC’s chief executive wrongly endorsed the EU constitution, something many of its supporters abhor, apparently without knowing she had done so.

Her statement, though known to be a serious error, was allowed to remain on the record for months while it was used to influence the outcome of a Parliamentary vote.

And the NSPCC, which survives on public and official donations, did nothing to correct what it well knew had been a serious mistake. Just thought you’d like to know.

Witch turns Carla from First to the Worst Lady

Beautiful Carla Bruni may not seem so lovely in future. She has abused her position as French First Lady to rescue a grisly terrorist witch, Marina Petrella, from justice.

The revolting Petrella is  a convicted murderer, kidnapper and armed robber, a one-time member of Italy’s Red Brigades, who has been skulking in France avoiding justice.

She’s said to be ill, but this appears to be because she has (in a typical terrorist trick) gone on hunger strike. I am sure she will soon be sitting up and eating again now that Carla has saved her.

Compare and contrast this grotesque piece of Continental lawlessness with this country’s boot-faced obedience to the European Arrest Warrant.

* From what I could tell from a recent interview, Gordon Brown is rapidly going blind in his remaining eye, and quite reasonably fears this. I am puzzled that this immensely significant fact has aroused so little interest. It is not a question of sympathy or pity, which I am sure he would despise anyway. It is just important.

* Hero-worshippers of Boris Johnson need to know that he appears to be turning into Ken Livingstone.
In an interview with the Muslim News, Mr Johnson disowns the Islamo-sceptic views of his own senior aide, Anthony Browne. Mr Johnson reveals that he is learning Arabic, and to prove it recites the Muslim declaration of faith to his Muslim interviewer, in Arabic. ‘There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger.’ Does this mean he’s now a Muslim? I’m not sure. He should check – because once in, you can’t leave. The Tory Party will do practically anything to suck up to liberal beliefs, so as to win office. The trouble is that it then doesn’t have the power to do anything conservative if it gets into office.

Why driving drunk is equivalent to premeditated murder

Read Peter Hitchens only in the Mail on Sunday

What's wrong with you? What an extraordinary number of pious postings there were about my suggestion that the footballer Luke McCormick should have been hanged for causing the deaths of two small boys.  From the outrage, anyone would think I had personally hanged him in Trafalgar Square,  whereas he will in fact be a free man in a very short time, walking around among us and - before all that long - no doubt driving again too. This seems to me to be a much more outrageous thing than my suggestion.

One contributor objected to the idea that we should execute heinous killers as an example.  Why? The criminal justice system is intended to provide examples of bad deeds being punished in fearsome ways. We cannot hope to punish every crime, and would be foolish to wait for people to commit crimes if we can think of ways of putting them off.  This is called deterrence.

A tiny bit of this survives even in our pitiful cardboard justice system. We don't (if we know much about the world) hope to achieve much by imprisoning Burglar Bill for burglary. Long ago you might have frightened him into not doing it again, but that was when prisons were punitive, austere, harsh and run by the authorities.

Nowadays you just warehouse Burglar Bill with his mates, a TV set and his drugs of choice until it is time to let him go ( quite soon, usually) and do it again. Prison doesn't "work", because it doesn't punish, so doesn't deter reoffending, and because you can't lock all criminals up all the time. It just keeps a small proportion of criminals off the streets at any given time, and hopes to fool the public into imagining that something is actually being done about crime.

Rehabilitation is a vacuous liberal myth, though punishment can be quite effective. The reoffending rate is high because most prisoners are incorrigible by the time they actually get sent to prison. This is because they have been neither deterred nor punished during all their previous criminal careers, and by the time the system finally decides to send them to prison, they are confirmed in their criminal habits. They eventually give up crime because they get too old for it, not because their characters have been improved by the ministrations of social workers .

But we still hope to persuade others not to follow Burglar Bill's  bad example. And some people are still afraid enough of prison to steer clear of crime. Though that number drops all the time, which is why the prisons are bursting.

To climb into a powerful car, when you have been drinking beer and Sambuca all night (so much so that hours afterwards your blood still contains twice the legal maximum), when you are jet-lagged and when you have had only two hours sleep,  is in itself a criminal act.  This footballer's friends rightly urged him not to drive. They would have been better friends if they had pinned him to the ground and thrown his car keys down the nearest drain, or simply called the police and made sure he was stopped and breathalysed (assuming the police would have responded) before he'd gone a mile. But we cannot know the future.

If the man had merely crashed and not even hurt himself, he should have gone to prison for a very long time for taking such an enormous risk with the lives of others. But that was not what he did. Even though clearly aware of his dangerous and incompetent physical state, he continued to drive appallingly badly, and at speeds of up to 97 miles an hour, a velocity which he must have made a major and conscious effort to reach,  before he caused two deaths and - no small thing - permanent and severe physical injury to the bereaved father of the dead boys.

To continue driving, once you are aware that your performance is erratic and that you are suffering from lack of sleep, is doubly criminal.  To drive at such a speed under such conditions is, likewise, a premeditated homicidal act in which the only unknown is the name, or names, of the people you can reasonably expect to kill. If you don't kill them, it won't be any thanks to you. Does the fact that the killer doesn't know or care whom he kills make it better? I can see no reason why the law could not classify it as a premeditated homicidal act. The roads are never empty. A drunk and sleepless driver who ventures on to those roads has a strong statistical chance of causing a fatal accident. I call that premeditation.  In a way it's worse than an ordinary murder, since in this case the killer does not even mind whom he kills. The motive, however, is ultimately the same as that of all murders - an arrogant belief that our own pleasure or convenience is more important than the life of another. Also, getting drunk ( as I've pointed out in other contexts) is a voluntary act which adds to the criminal's responsibility for whatever crimes he commits while drunk. It's the opposite of an excuse. It makes it worse.

Anyway, it's time something stern was done about the growing savagery, impatience and selfishness of drivers,  who annually slaughter 3,000 people in Britain and maim thousands more, more often than not in pursuit of their own arrogance and boy-racer fantasies. How many of these life-ruiners killed or maimed solely because of a moment's understandable inattention or a pardonable misjudgement? I wonder. My suspicion is that most of this bloodshed is the direct result of prideful and inconsiderate behaviour, much of it made worse by drink or drugs. It starts with the half-wits who tear down parked-up suburban streets at 40 or 50 miles an hour. It also involves the growing numbers who think a zebra crossing (or even a light-controlled pelican crossing) doesn't apply to them, and zoom on through. Then there are the drivers who think, mistakenly, that  they can see round corners, and so don't need to slow down when they go round those corners. I see them every week (I've seen police cars, not even with their lights flashing, tearing round corners in this heedless mad fashion). They are incredibly common.

It continues with the teenage show-offs who overturn cars full of their friends on late-night journeys from nightclubs, or who overtake madly on blind bends and hilltops, erasing the innocent lives of people coming the other way who have no chance of avoiding death or terrible injury.  We often read or hear about these, though their actions are now so commonplace that they generally only make the local papers or bulletins.

There are many reasons for this. But one of them is undoubtedly the fact that homicidal driving is not punished as it should be.

Then Paul Jones tells me "the callous, and disgusting idea that a human being is so expendable, that he can simply be done away with, tied up and killed by the hangman, as a sort of public sacrifice,"an example to others", is not a Christian notion. I am surprised to hear you expressing it.".

Sorry about that. Perhaps Mr Jones could explain why it is not a Christian notion. I don't regard the executed person as a sacrifice. This is an idea introduced by Mr Jones.  And if the condemned man were not restrained,  the hangman would have a harder job of it, and there would be a greater chance that the execution would go wrong,  which wouldn't benefit anyone very much. But as for it not being a Christian notion, please tell me why not.

The Commandment says "Thou Shalt do no Murder". The Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England  (Article XXXVII, to be precise) specifically permit the death penalty for "heinous and grievous offences".  The predictable and effectively premeditated killing of two small boys who happened to get in a  footballer's way as he drove to see his girlfriend, drunk, exhausted and gripped by a silly rage, seems to me to be a 'heinous and grievous offence'.

The Roman Catholic church was until recently not opposed to the death penalty, and only lately switched to its current abolitionist position, largely under the influence of a Pope whose main experience was of dealing with totalitarian tyrannies, whose use of the death penalty was indeed oppressive. This suggests to me that for most of human existence the Christian churches have not opposed the death penalty,  and it wouldn't have occurred to them to do so. It also suggests that those Christians who oppose the death penalty in all circumstances are reinterpreting scripture to suit themselves and the fashion of these soppy, vicious times, and that it is perfectly possible to be a Christian and to favour it.

Christ himself had an excellent opportunity to issue a condemnation of the death penalty for heinous acts, in principle, since he was unjustly sentenced to death for treason after a show trial, on the urgings of a politically inflamed mob, and then executed alongside two thieves  in a way which gave him many opportunities to speak out against the idea of execution as such. He did not, or is not recorded as having done so anywhere that I have seen.   I agree that arguments from silence are dangerous. But contrast this with His halting of the stoning of the woman taken in adultery, which He effectively prevented by saying "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

Human beings are not 'expendable', especially innocent children,  but sometimes it is permissible and even necessary to kill certain individuals when they threaten us with grave danger, or when they take certain cruel and appalling actions for which it is impossible for us to forgive them. As I have pointed out before, the victims of killers cannot forgive them because they are dead. And it is presumptuous of us to forgive on their behalf.

I think a law which properly punished this sort of behaviour would curb the monstrous selfishness of so many drivers, and persuade them to use the brake more often and the accelerator less fiercely,  and so make life a great deal better for all of us. Anyone, who(like me) bicycles lawfully on the roads of this country must be aware of the aggressive revving and angry overtaking which is the 'motorist's' all-too-common response to having to show consideration for a non-car-user on the road.  I cannot help thinking that the strange almost idolatrous love of drivers for their cars (which baffles me completely but which obviously exists) lies behind the discomfort at my suggestion that this footballer should have been hanged. Watch any car commercial on TV or at the cinema, and observe the strange reverence and love with which these banal machines are presented to us.

By the way, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor is quoted at me, by a correspondent urging me not to suggest that we lock people up and throw away the key. Any careful reader of my work will know that I am not in favour of long periods of imprisonment, and don't call for the throwing away of keys. I believe prison sentences should be harshly punitive, but not specially long. I think execution greatly more humane than imprisonment till death, which so many 'liberals' advocate as an alternative.  And I think that the reintroduction of capital punishment would help to make shorter sentences for other crimes possible, by re-establishing the keystone of the penal system. Our prisons are full, and crime is high, because we have abandoned the use of fear to keep people on the straight and narrow. Yet there is no substitute for it. As I've said so often elsewhere, if bad people aren't afraid of the law, then we will have to be afraid of bad people.

Also, I really don't see why I am not allowed to hate cars, which seem to me to be a combination of wicked ideas ( selfishness, vanity, extravagance, covetousness, arrogance) in solid form, or to describe some of them, especially the monstrosities favoured by footballers and other showbiz types, as stupid. If we have to have cars, then let them at least be rationally designed for their purpose. When the maximum speed limit in this country is everywhere 70 miles an hour, why are cars even made and sold here which can reach 97 miles an hour?