A Brief History of Crimea

My old friend Edward Lucas of 'The Economist' has responded to my article about Sevastopol with a vehement (his word) rebuttal on his blog. A search engine should find it under ‘Economist, Eastern Approaches, Peter Hitchens’, or you can click here.

I have submitted the following reply there, and am displaying it here too.

My thanks to Edward Lucas for a serious response to my article about Ukraine. I have a high opinion of Edward, whose courage and indispensable help in Prague in 1989 I will always remember. I have been fascinated, ever since, by the different courses taken by many of the reporters who experienced the extraordinary and exhilarating period which ended the Soviet Empire. I have watched with great regret the miserable slide of Russia into autocracy and corrupt squalor. I have also wondered if this could have been avoided. And I have been troubled by the way in which the newly-free nations of Central and Eastern Europe have all too often become subjects of a new supranational project, their brief independence blotted out in a new world which has little time for national sovereignty.

I don't think I have a soft spot for big countries. But I did live in Moscow for more than two years, and learned there to separate Russia, its people and culture, from Russia, state and power.

I am well aware of the wretched story of the Krim Tatars. But I did not (and do not) think it had much bearing on the point I sought to make.

Edward goes on to doubt my contention that many Ukrainian inhabitants would prefer to be Russian. He says:

‘It would be nice to see some polling data to support that. (None exists).’

I too would like to see such data. If it doesn't exist, then that is presumably because it has not been in the interests of anyone rich and powerful to obtain it. Polling - as Edward surely knows - is a device for influencing opinion, not a device for measuring it. From my own experience, I am confident that 'many’ (I shouldn't have been that vague if percentages were available) Ukrainian inhabitants would rather be Russian, particularly in the Crimea and in the Eastern part of the country.

He also says that my contention that Mikhail Gorbachev ‘had kindly dismantled the communist machine’ is ‘insulting to the millions of people who through their own bravery and vision helped overthrow the evil empire.’

Debaters should beware of people who claim to be 'insulted', by an idea that disturbs their own certainties. This sort of language is the enemy of cool reason. Is Edward saying that Mr Gorbachev's actions were not significant, and quite possibly decisive? Had he (or another leader) chosen the path of isolation, repression and massacre, what would have happened to those millions? Would the famous 'Velvet Revolution' we witnessed in Prague have taken place without his blessing, or the collapse of the East German regime? The Tiananmen option was available, and was very nearly used in Leipzig. I think we can credit Gorbachev with many things, while acknowledging his indecision and flaws as well.

Then he is cross about my remark that: ‘We sponsored annoying mini-states next door to Russia.’

He chooses to interpret this thus: ’Mr Hitchens appears to be arguing that they should have stayed inside Russia, volens nolens, and that the West should not have lifted a finger to help them.’

That's how it may appear to him. I cannot help that. But it isn't actually what I say, or what I think. As one who was present during the January days and nights in Vilnius in 1991, when the KGB murdered a number of Lithuanians and I found myself looking directly up the barrel of a Soviet tank, I don't take this view. I was interested in Baltic independence in the days when most people in the West had never heard of these places, and I am haunted to this day by the description of the deportations in Czeslaw Milosz's 'The Captive Mind', as well as by the nasty modern KGB violence I saw in Vilnius (and Riga). But it seems clear to me that the long-term independence of these tiny states is endangered, not protected, by bringing them into NATO. Russia's interest in them is, was and always will be strategic. If Russia believes they are likely to be bases for a hostile alliance, then it will seek to undermine their independence.

I have no idea what NATO's real purpose is since it completed its mission in 1991, except perhaps as the provisional wing of globalist interventionism. There are few places further from the north Atlantic than Afghanistan. But I can see without much difficulty why Russia regards this organisation as implicitly hostile to it. Nor do I think the Baltic countries necessarily benefit from abandoning their new-found independence to the EU, which steals the sovereignty of all the nations it absorbs. It seems to me that these countries would be better off outside both these bodies, and outside the Russian empire as well. It is this possibility that Edward and his fellow 'New Cold War' advocates repeatedly deny.

As for the 'annoying' bit, I was thinking much more of Georgia, which has been encouraged into foolish sparring with Russia by various Western politicians and thinkers. How can this policy be sustained? Who benefits from it? What purpose does it serve, save to strengthen the arguments of Great Russian Chauvinists in the Kremlin? Long after the USA (and the EU) have lost interest in the Caucasus, Russia will still be there. Claims that this policy forms part of some sort of campaign for liberty and democracy in former Soviet states are deflated by the Anglosphere's continuing support for the extraordinarily nasty regime in Azerbaijan, and by its similar closeness to some of the more squalid dictatorships in Central Asia.

Edward simultaneously quotes and dismisses another writer who suggests that I am part of some Russian PR effort. Well, if Edward thinks this is tripe (as he does, and as it is) he would have done better not to quote it at all. But it gives a hint of the sort of overheated reaction which the New Cold Warriors have to any suggestion that their actions and attitudes might have helped to create the Putin autocracy - which I happen to think they did, by bullying and belittling Russia, and flooding it with spivs and snake-oil purveyors after 1991. The very word 'democracy' is gravely discredited in Russia, thanks to the experiences of normal people in that period.

As for my 'alternative', I don't really offer one, except caution, modesty and the avoidance of hubris. Alas, the damage is largely done. I merely point out that the conventional wisdom is mistaken, that the open-mouthed sycophantic coverage of such events as the 'Orange Revolution' has done us no favours, and that the future in this part of the world is far from settled and we should perhaps prepare for further turmoil rather than imagine that we have opened a Golden Road of peace and prosperity for ever. Is it sensible or right, ever, to force a language on people who don't want to speak it? Is Ukraine, as at present constituted, a viable polity? Are the Anglosphere nations right to treat Russia as a perpetual threat and pariah long after its global ambitions have collapsed and its military power has rusted away? Its regime is miserable. But then so is that of China, with which we seek good relations.

I think these policies are wrong, and the slogans which sustain them are barriers to thought. And it is thought that I hope to promote. It's my job, and Edward's. Why else did he and I make those chilly, alarming, thrilling journeys into the dark east in 1989, from which we've never really returned?

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Is Ed really Red? And other questions

I'll once again point out to the people who claim that I have no knowledge of policing, crime prevention etc that I have written a book on the subject, involving plenty of factual research into the operation of the English criminal justice system and the police.  Those who claim I know nothing of the matter are therefore simply mistaken. Whatever they may wish to say against me, this is something they cannot say, unless they have read the book and wish to challenge the validity of my research.  The fact that they disagree with my conclusions does not mean that I am ignorant, merely that they disagree with me. The reasons for their disagreement are almost certainly explored in the book.
 
It was, as I have pointed out before, originally published as 'A Brief History of Crime' and then (with two chapters removed and one added) reissued in paperback as 'The Abolition of Liberty'. Those genuinely interested should have no difficulty in obtaining it through libraries or bookshops. Those who are not genuinely interested will of course not read it, because they already know they don't like it. But they really can't go about claiming I don't know the subject.
 
Likewise Mr 'Un', who I think may in reality be 'Miss' Un.  People who try to tease or provoke me by going on and on about my brother  Christopher reveal more about themselves than they do about the subjects I seek to discuss here. I have been candid in several articles about my disagreements and other quarrels with my brother, and have nothing further to say about it. I am -rather obviously, given the religious basis of our disagreement - constrained in what I say by rules which don't constrain him.  I certainly won't be drawn into any criticism of him, when he is, as he is now, seriously ill. I know that some people have neither manners nor taste, and that others are incapable of arguing in a civilised manner. They are allowed to show that here if they wish to do so, but they can't expect much consideration in return.
 
My contention that we used to be a free and happy country (by comparison with our current state) is only partly measurable by objective methods (I think the shrinking of liberty is pretty measurable, in laws passed and protections destroyed, but happiness is harder to quantify). But it is supported in this book, and in my earlier publication (likewise easily available) 'The Abolition of Britain'.  So are the unanimity, and dogmatic hostility towards traditional British customs, liberties etc, of our political class. These questions are extensively described and explained in this book. As I have often pointed out, many of my critics think they have read 'The Abolition of Britain', but turn out not to have done so when questioned on its actual contents. They have instead read hostile reviews of it, and imagined that they have read it. They would learn much if they did read it, which is presumably what they are afraid of.
 
A lot of hostile visitors to this site would have much more interesting things to say if they would examine my actual arguments in detail (this weblog is merely a shop window for my books, in my view),  instead of engaging in lazy caricature and puerile mockery. Whom do they think they are fooling, by misrepresenting and distorting my positions, on a weblog which I write, and where many readers have read my books? They are their only victims.

I welcome disagreement, but only where it comes from someone who has considered my position and taken some care to understand it.
 
Now to the matter of the alleged 'Red Ed', the youthful Miliband whose election as Labour leader has prompted almost the entire political media. It contains two delusions. The first is that the trade unions are some sort of repository of revolutionary thought, longing to drag the Labour Party back to the days of Militant, Michael Foot etc.
 
Piffle. The unions have for years been a powerful and effective pressure group, operating mainly through the EU and its regulatory powers,  who have under Labour and Tory governments alike suceeded in securing the imposition on this country of  extensive and powerful laws on British workplaces, which the militant shop stewards of 30 years ago couldn't have dreamed of.
 
The idea that the battles of the 1980s - over nationalisation, union power and so forth, are still in progress is likewise nonsense. The left learned form the collapse of the USSR. It didn't learn that it was wrong. It learned that its methods needed revision. Specifically, it learned that direct state ownership of the economy doesn't work. Instead, they turned to regulation, which allows the state an enormous role in the economy, without the direct detailed responsibility required by nationalisation. Most reasonable people, having experienced privatised utilities - gas, electricity, telecommunications etc,  can see that the problems of these industries under state control (especially for consumers) were much more to do with monopoly (which more or less persists)  than with ownership. And also that there are some industries, notably railways, which only a wholly dogmatic person would privatise. They are plainly better run by the state.
 
The division between left and right is now really in the areas loosely described as 'sex, drugs and rock and roll', plus of course the use of the education system to impose equality of outcome on its victims. And on the abolition of national sovereignty and its replacement by global or supranational governance, backed up where necessary with liberal military intervention.
 
In this division, the Tory, Liberal Democrat and Labour Parties are all on the left, signed up to the sexual revolution, the moral revolution, the cultural revolution, comprehensive education, EU membership, etc.
 
In which case the real problem is not 'Red Ed', but 'Red Dave' Cameron, 'Red Nick' Clegg and indeed 'Red Dave' Miliband, whose political differences with his brother are too tiny to be perceived without a powerful electron microscope.
 
And that leaves aside the very strange but true development - that the main qualification for high office these days is not experience, but the lack of it.
 

You do wonder, looking at these people, whether they have left their lunchboxes at home. Ed himself, with his wide, wide eyes and look of perpetual surprise, seems particularly in need of a  mother's love and care.

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As Ukrainians force Russians to turn their back on their language and change their names, I ask, is this the world's most absurd city?

Imagine some future Brussels edict has finally broken up Britain and handed Devon and Cornwall over to rule by Wales.

Imagine the Royal Navy, much shrunk and renamed the English Navy, being told it has to share Plymouth with a new Welsh fleet; that is, if it is allowed to stay there at all.

Picture the scene as cinemas in Plymouth and Exeter are forced to dub all their films into Welsh, while schools teach anti-English history and children are pressed to learn Welsh.

Street signs are in Welsh. TV is in Welsh. Police cars patrolling Dartmoor have ‘Heddlu’ blazoned on them, banks have become ‘bancs’ and taxis ‘tacsis’.

Meanwhile, Devon and Cornwall are cut off by a frontier from the rest of England, closing down industries with English links, and people are issued with new identity documents with Welsh names.

Utterly mad and unthinkable, you might say. And you would be right. But something very similar has happened in what used to be the Soviet Union, and we are supposed to think it is a good thing – because Russia is officially a bad country, and its former subject nations are therefore automatically good.

Remember how the world’s media reported on Kiev’s ‘Orange Revolution’, which lasted from November 2004 until the following January, with gushing approval?

Remember how you were supposed to think the Orange-clad crowds were a ­benevolent expression of popular opinion?

Remember talk of a ‘New Cold War’, in which wicked Russia was the enemy and ‘we’, the European Union, were going to extend ‘our’ rule deep into the former Soviet lands?

Well, if there was such a war, we are busy losing it because ‘our’ side is misguided and wrong, and because it was always absurd to try to dislodge Russia and the Russians from the great plains of Ukraine and the shores of the Black Sea.

In this part of the world, Russia just is. You might as well try to shift the Himalayas with a bulldozer.

If you thought that political madness in Europe ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, then you should visit present-day Sevastopol, perhaps the most absurd city in the world.

Sevastopol belongs to Ukraine, but hardly anyone here is Ukrainian. Two rival fleets ride at anchor in its majestic harbour. Two rival flags fly from its public buildings.

But now this absurdity may be – slowly – coming to an end. A few months ago, in a crucial event largely ignored in the West, Ukraine’s parliament voted to give the Russian navy a new long lease on its base in Sevastopol.

This was the end of the flirtation between Ukraine and the West. It was greeted by opposition MPs with showers of smoke bombs and eggs (the parliamentary speaker sheltered under an umbrella, presumably a Russian one).

I am not sorry about this. I always thought that destroying the old Communist Evil Empire was quite enough. Why did we then need to rub Russia’s nose in the mud?

They are an old, proud people and most of them didn’t want to be communists.

As for the defeat, anyone could see it coming. It always happens. Britain’s war in the Crimea in 1854 (launched by a drunken, half-asleep Cabinet in what seems to have been a fit of pique) was officially a victory, but all its gains were reversed less than 20 years later.

So the Charge Of The Light Brigade was not just a blunder. It was a pointless one. Imperial Germany seized Ukraine in 1917, and lost it again the following year. Hitler’s Germany repeated the action in 1941, and we all know how that ended.

Now the creation of a fanciful new country called Ukraine, less than 20 years ago, is running into trouble as many of its inhabitants prefer to be Russian.

So why did anyone think it was a good idea to challenge Moscow, on the same repeatedly lost ground? Why are our airwaves and newspapers still full of scare stories about Russia, when the real danger to our independence comes from the EU, and the real threat to our peace and prosperity comes from rather further east?

Why do commentators still peddle tales of a Russian menace, when Russia is a military weakling, its ill-disciplined forces largely equipped with scrap metal?

I think our treatment of Russia since the fall of communism has been almost unbelievably stupid and crude. We complain now about the autocratic rule of Vladimir Putin. But it was our greed and our bullying of the wounded bear that created Putin and his shady, corrupt state.

We insisted on humiliating the Kremlin, when Mikhail Gorbachev had kindly dismantled the communist machine. We sponsored annoying mini-states next door to Russia.

We pushed the anti-Russian Nato alliance (who else was its target?) ever further eastwards as if there were still a Soviet threat. We flooded Russia with spivs and carpet-baggers, and called this disgrace ‘democracy’. Then we wondered why they didn’t love it.

And still it is fashionable to posture in the think-tanks of London and Washington with babble about the need to ‘contain’ Russia, and to side with self-proclaimed people-power ‘revolutions’ in the capitals of Russia’s next-door neighbours.

And if Russia objects we throw up our hands and gabble that a ‘New Cold War’ is in the making.

No, I am not an apologist for Comrade Putin. I like Russia, and wish it had a better government. I think it would have done if we had been more thoughtful after 1991.

But I am against stupidity in foreign policy, and this has been a particularly foolish, short-sighted episode. Let me show you just how foolish it has been by taking you first to the beautiful Crimean seaport of Sevastopol, once the pride of Russia, now absurdly part of a supposedly independent Ukraine.

I went there long ago, under tight escort and carrying a special permit, because this handsome city of white-pillared buildings, shady parks and mighty warships was then a secret, closed city, the most important base of the Soviet Union’s global navy.

Not any more. Things are better, and things are worse. In two decades, Sevastopol has gone from being a sort of Stalinist Sparta, austere and warlike, to a seaside Babylon of pizzerias and nightclubs.

Nearby Balaclava, once one of the world’s most heavily fortified submarine bases – where the boats hid from nuclear attack in a hollowed-out mountain – is now a rather tawdry seaside resort.

Most of Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s ocean-going navy has long ago been scrapped and turned into washing machines and razor blades. Now, two navies compete for space in its harbour (designed long ago by a British admiral).

One is Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, a shrivelled remnant that can just about sink a Georgian patrol boat (Georgia has a population of 4.7 million) but which has quietly conceded mastery of the Black Sea to Turkey. And this is supposed to be a threat to the mighty and prosperous West?

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to a man I shall call Yuri, an English-speaking officer of the Black Sea Fleet, who mourned: ‘Yes, I remember when we had one of the world’s great navies – but these days we can’t even challenge the Turks for control of the Black Sea, for the first time in 200 years.’

What’s left of the Black Sea Fleet can be seen tied up in Sevastopol’s harbour. The seductive, sleek lines of the beautifully designed ships can’t conceal the fact that these vessels date from the age of the Ford Cortina and the Boeing 707.

Several of the best-surviving ships now form part of the new, pro-Western Ukrainian navy, which shares the port with Russia – thanks to the wholly unexpected creation of an independent state of Ukraine.

This sublimely silly development meant that Russia’s main naval base was suddenly in a foreign country, and its inhabitants became aliens in their own land. It gets more ridiculous. On one side of the harbour, a fortress bears the slogan ‘Glory to the Russian navy!’ A strongpoint a mile away is adorned with a banner proclaiming ‘Glory to the Ukrainian navy!’

Sevastopol’s deputy mayor, Pyotr Kudryashov, knows all about this rivalry. By an accident of history, his son Sergei, 30, and his daughter Anna, 35, are both serving at sea as naval officers – but Anna is in a Russian ship, and Sergei is in a Ukrainian one.

Both wanted to join a navy, and each joined the one that was recruiting when they graduated. In theory, if the New Cold War ever turns hot, they could be firing missiles at each other. Mr Kudryashov, who thinks such a conflict most unlikely, jokes: ‘They get on very well – just like brother and sister.’

If you stroll down the city’s pleasant, sunny Lenin Street, past the elegant 19th Century naval museum, you will meet officers and men of both fleets strolling by in their crisp uniforms.

The Russians, with their shoulder boards and hats the size of large pizzas, still look very Russian. The Ukrainians, in their crisp khakis, look almost exactly like US navy men on shore leave in San Diego. Both, of course, speak Russian to each other.

But, thanks to the New Cold War, the Ukrainian sailors are supposed to speak Ukrainian. For Sevastopol, officially a Ukrainian city, is not very keen on its new status.

Street signs are still in Russian. When I asked the waitress in a cafe to explain an advertising slogan on the wall to me, she shrugged in an entirely Russian way before replying: ‘How should I know? I don’t speak Ukrainian.’

Yet a few months ago the cinemas in the city were obliged by law to dub all their films, even those in Russian, into Ukrainian – which is slightly more unlike Russian than Spanish is unlike Italian. This only stopped because the cinemas were empty. The schools, though most reluctantly teach their classes in Russian, teach Ukrainian history, often with an anti-Russian tinge.

As Yuri says: ‘It is infuriating for us, to have our children taught about how wicked Russia was.’

One particular annoyance is the hero-worship of the Forties Ukrainian partisan Stepan Bandera. Soviet history dismissed him as a ruthless brigand and Nazi collaborator.

Most modern Russians agree. But the last President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, had Bandera proclaimed a national hero, as popular among Russians here as an IRA parade would be in Protestant Antrim.

For this and other reasons, many Russians, especially navy families, send their children instead to a special Russian school – the best in town – built and paid for by Moscow in what looks to me like a direct ­challenge to Ukrainian sovereignty.

There is even a branch of Moscow University here. Moscow maintains a sort of embassy in the heart of Sevastopol, cheekily sited not far from a rather provocative statue of the Russian empress Catherine the Great, also paid for with Moscow roubles.

If all this is not ridiculous enough for you yet, meet retired Rear Admiral Vladimir Solovyov, former intelligence chief of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, now in charge of a welfare organisation for retired sailors.

The admiral, a stocky sea-dog type, says with a chuckle that he knows the East Coast of England well, as seen through a powerful telescope.

He was a real Cold Warrior, but now says: ‘I don’t think modern Russia is strong enough to wield power the way the USSR did in the Cold War.’

These days his enemy is different. When this proud Russian recently tried to obtain a residence permit to retire in Sevastopol, he was told that he had been compulsorily awarded Ukrainian citizenship (and was now ‘Volod­omir’ instead of Vladimir).

Having gone through hoops to become ­Russian again, he now has to leave the country every three months – or face being fined for overstaying his permit.

He gets a Russian pension and lives in a Russian-owned flat. In all important respects, he is in Russia – but technically, he is a foreigner. Like many Russians stuck in a newly foreign land, he warns against attempts to turn him into something else.

‘They made a big mistake. We love many things about Ukraine, the food, the music, the culture, the literature – but when it comes to being told to watch films in Ukrainian, they went too far. And we have a right to see our children grow up thinking, speaking and writing the way Russians do.’

It is true that there are plenty of parts of Ukraine where people do feel and speak Ukrainian – mainly in the west around the city now called Lviv (though in the past 150 years it has also been the Austrian city of Lemberg, the Polish city of Lwow and the Soviet city of Lvov – in this part of the world you can move from country to country just by staying in the same place).

But travel east, as I did, to the old coal-mining region of the Don Basin, and you will find out why so many Ukrainian citizens did not support the 2004 Orange Revolution. I went to the decayed town of Gorlovka. Independence has done little for this place.

Cut off from its Russian hinterland and its markets, it is expiring. All around are dead slag heaps and ruined mines and factories, and tragic landscapes of collapse under a ferocious sun.

Gorlovka’s coal mines and chemical works fed the USSR’s industries. Now they are mostly dead and the town – twinned with Barnsley in the Eighties – is nearly as bereft of its traditional industries as its Yorkshire opposite number.

Sad, empty playgrounds are melancholy evidence of a city condemned to die. There is still a statue of Lenin in the main square but on its flanks are scrawled graffiti – a thing I have never seen before in the former USSR. The image of Lenin was once revered, and later hated, but never trivialised by drawings of Bart Simpson.

The mayor, Ivan Sakharchuk, is proud of his treaty with Barnsley and also insists that there are no ­difficulties with being Ukrainian. I am not so sure. Nobody uses the town’s Ukrainian name of Horlivka.

Many of the street signs are still in Russian. The names of shops are in Russian. The newspapers on sale are in Russian. In the rather smart Cafe Barnsley, the only beer on sale is Russian and the radio is tuned to a Russian station. I suspect the
people are hoping for – and expecting – a Russian future.

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One enlightened policeman isn’t going to scare the bad people

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Things will not get ­better. Just because Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constab­ulary has suddenly realised that police officers should once again walk the beat, do not expect that anyone will pay any attention.

Maybe you’ll see a token patrol of two tiny, rotund PCSOs, chatting to each other as they tactfully ignore the anti-social behaviour raging all round them.

The yelling louts and the ­problem families will still rule the streets. The police will still regard you as a nuisance if you call them – assuming you can get through. And if they do respond to your call, they will shake their heads sadly and say there’s nothing they can do. Here, have a tissue, a crime number and some counselling.

In the unlikely event that ­anyone is ever arrested and charged for a crime, and then actually convicted and imprisoned, they will still be rapidly released after a few months mixing with their mates and taking drugs in warehouse jails.

What has already happened to burglary – now regarded by authority as a trivial and uncontrollable offence – is happening quietly to murder. The plans to introduce a charge of ‘second-degree murder’ will in the end enable many killers to get away with short sentences, and eventually (you read this here first) with fines and ‘community service’.

The result, as with burglary, is that it will become com­monplace, like so many other crimes that are now dealt with (or rather, not dealt with) by fatuous cautions and unpaid on-the-spot penalties where the culprit isn’t even required to go to court.

Look at the two burglars, pictured happily awaiting arrest as they sat trapped on the roof of a home they had violated. Did they look like men afraid of the law, or dreading their punishment? Of course they didn’t. Bad people in our society are not afraid. This is why we must all be afraid instead.

Listen carefully to those in authority when they promise to put things right. They do not really mean it, because they continue to believe in the ‘progressive’ ideas of the Sixties. They don’t believe in punishment. They don’t believe in deterrence. They believe that police constables should be treated as suspect and untrustworthy, while criminals should be treated as unhappy victims of their backgrounds.

They believe in ‘Human Rights’, which are invariably the rights of the wicked and the selfish.

It is true – I have been saying it for many years – that our cities could be altered overnight if they were once again guarded by proper constables, armed with nothing more than a truncheon and the force of per­sonality. But this cannot be, because our governing elite actually hates this idea.

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, burbles about reducing police paperwork, as every Home Secretary I can remember has done. But she will not repeal the Police And Criminal Evidence Act 1984, that piece of Tory legislation whose codes of practice are the origin of most of that paperwork. Nor will she repeal the Human Rights Act, which polluted our legal system with ultra-Leftist drivel.

This is because she, in common with our entire political class, is your enemy – devoted to the ideas and policies that have turned a free and happy country into a lawless slum, in one generation.


Is St Paul’s the place for a fashion show?

There were remarkable scenes outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London last week, as various women struggled and tottered into the national church in startling outfits and on improbable heels.

They were there to attend a memorial service for Alexander McQueen, the fashion designer who, most regrettably, took his own life in February, aged 40.

I must admit to being slightly surprised that this great national, religious building – the scene of the funerals of Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and Sir Winston Churchill – should be used for such a gathering.

The cathedral says that Mr McQueen was a notable figure (which is undeniable) and a Londoner, which is also the case. I do not know if Mr McQueen had any religious affiliation, or what it was if so. Nor does St Paul’s.

I am assured the service itself was decorous, though I would question the inclusion of Gloomy Sunday, a song sympathising with suicide, in a Christian ceremony.

As it happens, I think such sad souls should be treated gently by the church, without too many questions.

But a memorial service in St Paul’s is not the same thing as a quiet funeral.


‘Radical’ Vince: the cosy reality

Whatever would happen if Tory voters actually woke up and grasped what David Cameron is doing? The level of misunderstanding of what is going on is tragic.

It is not the first time. Silly Labour Leftists and Tory golf-club twits, in a similar bout of delusion, jointly fooled themselves that Anthony Blair was some sort of conservative. While they did so, Mr Blair mounted a virulent attack on marriage and Christianity, destroyed rigorous education, encouraged mass immigration, raised taxes to unprecedented levels and vastly expanded the public sector, while handing over our powers and freedoms to foreigners.

Now the same people weirdly imagine that David Cameron is some sort of conservative. In the golf clubs they bray that he is using the Liberal Democrats. In Left-wing covens they complain that the Liberal Democrats have been swallowed by the Tories.

This is drivel. The blazing truth is that Mr Cameron is the smiling, willing prisoner of the Sixties Leftists who run the Liberal Democrats, and with whom he agrees about almost everything from cannabis to wind farms. His coalition with them enables him to trample on the remaining proper conservatives in his party, in the name of necessity. But actually he much prefers it to the majority Tory ­government he couldn’t achieve.

‘Our Liberal-Conservative Gov­ernment will take Britain in a historic new direction, a direc­tion of hope and unity, conviction and common purpose,’ he announced at the very start. It was ‘a historic and seismic shift in our political landscape. It can demonstrate in government a new progressive partnership’.

He meant it. And so a new party is taking shape among us, which, for the sake of its own survival, must pretend in public that it is two parties for a little while longer.

Did you know that Vincent Cable sent his supposedly ­radical Liverpool speech to the Tories to be vetted in advance? He did, and it was approved.

The same went for Nick Clegg, who amazingly cannot tell legal tax avoidance from criminal tax evasion. And when, next month, the Tories gather in Birm­ingham, all their speeches will likewise have been vetted by the Lib Dem machine. This is just a glimpse of the cosiness with which the Cameroon liberals have hugged their ­supposed political foes.

There is no way out for the actual Liberals, even if they wanted it, for their MPs can only hope to survive the next Election thanks to a pact (probably unstated) with the Tories.

But there is no way out for the Tories either, for they have decided they want office at all costs, and the price they have paid is that their voters and activists must ever here­after work their guts out to keep a Left-wing government in power.

And if they fail and Labour wins (which it well might), they still get a Left-wing government. Cunning, eh?

Liverpool's Two Cathedrals

Some time ago on this site I wrote about the astonishing building that is Durham Cathedral, an architectural monument - in my view - at least as valuable and striking as the Taj Mahal or the Moscow Kremlin, and in many ways greater than either in power and significance. Today I want to ponder another English building which is not given enough attention, and on its less lovely neighbour.

One of the many pleasures of visiting Liverpool for the Liberal Democrat conference was the chance to see again Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral. I'll come back to that in a moment, but first of all let us look at the setting in which this extraordinary edifice stands.

Matthew Parris wrote in The Times this morning that the urban landscape of Liverpool is pretty blasted and devastated, despite years of intervention by the state. I don't dispute this account. No doubt there is much that is sad, neglected and poor in Liverpool, not least in its bleak outer suburbs and in its demoralised inner-city zones.

He saw this because he arrived by car. Though in the past I've seen some of the dreariness of the harsher bits of Liverpool, this time I missed it - the train traveller arrives right in the middle of what is still a great 19th-century city, crammed from edge to edge with listed buildings, beautifully cleaned and restored and probably looking as good as they ever have. (As far as I know, Liverpool possesses the country's only Grade One listed gentleman's convenience, the startling pink marble urinals in the Philharmonic, a pub so wonderfully ornate that you can be intoxicated there without drinking a drop, simply looking at the mosaics, stained-glass windows and sculptures.)

Huge sums have also been spent on a new waterfront, a sharp-edged, glittering playground for people with credit cards, a mixture of new Labour angular architecture - glass, polished stone, planking, steel cables, you know the sort of thing -  and handsome restored seaport buildings, their original function long gone, and so melancholy as well as uplifting.

Sizeable chunks of well-proportioned brick-built houses and handsome streets still survive, often full of funky new bars and restaurants. It says much about modern Britain that both these worlds - the brightly-lit and luxurious, and the dingy and blasted - exist side by side in one fairly compact city.

Brooding above all this is the 330-foot tower of Liverpool Cathedral, which unlike its older brother cathedrals is one of the very few built specifically as an Anglican building. The others, of course, were originally Roman Catholic, though I would say they embodied a very different (and more English) form of Roman Catholicism from the rather Italianate one which has been dominant in the English RC church since it was re-established here in the 19th century.

This is most definitely a modern building in that it was constructed using modern techniques, designed by men familiar with modern engineering and architectural precepts. I doubt if its enormous Gothic arches could have been achieved by the builders of the middle ages, though I may be wrong.

But it is also entirely within the tradition of English cathedral building - the unique version of church architecture which grew up here, through Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular styles. Its size is greatly moving, both seen from a distance and close to. It is a work of considerable majesty and power, and if you are touched at all by buildings, it will affect you as soon as you see it, and draw you towards it.

And it does not in any way disappoint. The quality and richness of its sculpture, the purity and subtle colours of the stained glass windows, the astonishing perspectives which suddenly open up before the visitor, are all equal, in my view, to those to be found in much older churches. Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect, was himself a Roman Catholic, and so I think rather thoughtfully conscious of the difference between his tradition and the Anglican - and of the things they have in common. The Lady Chapel, much more ornate than the rest of the cathedral and a particularly tranquil and comforting space, is supposed to be what Scott intended the whole building to be like, and in some ways I wish he had managed to achieve this.

But the more austere character of the main part of the building is just as easy on the heart, and (though I personally think the tea-room should be separated from the main body of the church, and deplore the neon sign above the West Door) the visitor goes away more thoughtful and better than he was when he arrived, which is all you could ask for.

The amazing thing is that somehow this Edwardian project, conceived when the Church of England was still full of authority, dignity and grandeur, managed to survive essentially unchanged well into the second half of the 20th century, despite war, inflation and the receding tide of faith. What a stroke of providence that it did.

Compare and contrast the Church of England's rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after its destruction in World War Two, which despite great efforts always seems to me to be a failed mixture of more or less Godless modern architecture and religious themes. The surviving spire of the original church next door only serves to emphasise what was lost, and what late 20th-century man lacked the conviction to recreate.

And also look at the other end of Hope Street, at the Roman Catholic Liverpool Cathedral. This too was intended to be a majestic and astonishing building. The (Protestant) architectural genius Edwin Lutyens proposed a mighty basilica, more or less Byzantine but with a giant dome - which would have been a worthy partner to its Anglican brother church further along the same ridge. Look up the original designs to see what was lost. You will have to go to New Delhi to see anything comparable, in Lutyens's superb Indian government quarter, built to survive for centuries to come and still rather embarrassingly speaking of British Imperial Power in the heart of independent India.

But war and lack of funds, together - I suspect - with a feeling that the Lutyens design was just too conservative and overpowering for the new world that began in the 1960s led to a radical change of plan. On top of Lutyens's crypt, Sir Frederick Gibberd was commissioned to build a strange circular funnel, more fitted to guitars and folk masses than to the solemnity of the old church.

It could easily have been the other way round. In this comparison, not sectarian but between the preserved spirit of a departed age and the unwise welcome of the spirit of the new age, we can see in one upward glance from the Mersey how far we have sunk thanks to progress.

These two buildings - one rooted in centuries of worship and reverence, the other conceived by men who thought we could dispense with the past - together make one of the great sights of our time. Can anyone look at it and say that the last hundred years have been all gain, and no loss?

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A letter from Merseyside, and a few notes

First of all (I am attending the 'Liberal Democrat' conference, as it is quaintly called) let me restate my simple position on the use of law to control alcohol. Unlike cannabis, which is not legal and is not part of our culture, alcohol has been legal in this country for many centuries, many people use it in moderation, and it is perfectly possible to consume it without stupefying yourself. The only purpose of cannabis is self-stupefaction. And, by the way, the fatuous suggestion that it is useful in medical applications is pure propaganda, as long ago admitted by Keith Stroup (quoted in the 'Emory Wheel', a US college newspaper).

Mr Stroup, a leading light in NORML, the US campaign for marijuana legalisation, said the medical cannabis argument was a 'red herring' used in an attempt to give pot a good name. I agree with him.

As someone with a hereditary tendency to develop Glaucoma, I took some interest in the suggestion made that cannabis could relieve the symptoms of this disease. So it can, but at the cost of rendering the user more or less insensible, so, while you may be able to see, you can't make sense of what you *do* see. Glaucoma is best treated by the regular monitoring of peripheral vision and eyeball pressure in those susceptible, leading to its early detection. As it happens, the principal active ingredient of cannabis, THC, is used in the drug Nabilone, available in Britain on hospital prescription as a nausea-suppressant for those undergoing chemotherapy. It is not particularly widely used, presumably because there are better alternatives. Of course, such drugs are given in measurable doses (impossible in a drug which is smoked or eaten in cakes and biscuits) and they do not provide the 'high' which is the actual point of cannabis for its users. That is why the legalisers aren't interested in them, or don't even know they exist. I believe that claims made for cannabis as a 'treatment' for multiple sclerosis are unscientific, not backed by any serious or precise or objective research. No doubt a stupefied person may feel some relief of symptoms. But this is not a treatment, any more than swallowing a bottle of brandy would be.

Which brings us back to alcohol. Prohibition as practised in the USA had the same major flaw as does the current non-war against drugs here. The authorities acted only against sale and supply, not against possession or consumption.

It also suffered many other difficulties, not least as it was seen by migrants from countries such as Germany and Italy as targeted against them by Anglo-Saxon puritans who had a largely dry culture.

But above all, because of the cultural acceptance of alcohol by so many, an abrupt legal ban was unlikely to work. Even the Islamic Republic of Iran has been quite unable, despite extremely fierce laws, to enforce its alcohol ban with any real effect. When I was there three years ago, I met many people who were regular drinkers and was offered (though I did not accept) the services of a bootlegger.

And this is the case in an Islamic country where all but a tiny few are told by their religion to abstain from alcohol, and one which could fairly be called a police state, in which the authorities possess terrifying powers and in which informers flourish.

Likewise in Gorbachev's USSR, the late 1980s anti-alcohol campaign flopped completely, mainly succeeding in creating a shortage of sugar in the shops, as people turned to home-made moonshine.

So I think it is clear that an outright ban on alcohol, even if desirable, would fail in Britain (whereas an outright ban on cannabis, heroin, ecstasy, cocaine etc, properly enforced, would reduce the quite small numbers of furtive users of these filths and poisons to an insignificant minority, quite rapidly).

Assuming a ban on alcohol was the aim, rather than a sharp reduction in public drunkenness, then the best approach would be the one that has been adopted towards tobacco, a substance I would happily see driven from our society altogether. I cannot see any moral justification for continuing to sell it, now that we know what it does. Nor can I understand how people can be stupid enough to smoke it, now that they know what it will certainly do to them, in terms of heart disease, emphysema etc, and what it may possibly do to them, in terms of various cancers.

But to ban it outright? No. First, it must be removed from our culture, and I think the approach of making it increasingly difficult to find a place where it may be consumed, and the growing special disapproval of public smoking even where it is lawful, will in time bring us to the point where stronger measures may be taken. Maybe this could be done with alcohol. As I have many times said, I would willingly give up the small amount of alcohol which I drink, if I believed that by doing so I could help protect others, less able to exercise self-control, from its many wicked effects. I just don't happen to think that my sacrifice would achieve anything of the kind, and so prefer to proceed along the lines of restricted sales, tough licensing laws and the religious re-education of the people (as took place both in Protestant England and Roman Catholic Ireland in the 19th century) which would lead necessarily to greater temperance.

My simple point is that the same impulse which leads me to seek a legal ban on cannabis does not, in logic or consistency, require me to seek precisely the same measures against alcohol and tobacco.

As for the 'Liberal Democrats'...

...this conference is plainly the first instalment of the Tory conference. They should really be called 'Liberal Conservative Conference Part One' and 'Liberal Conservative Conference Part Two'. I'll go into more detail on this in my Sunday MoS column. But I cannot see how, having got into this coalition, the Liberals can ever get out of it again. There may not be a formal electoral truce at the next general election, but I think there'll have to be an informal one. And I would predict that the two parties will achieve a formal merger between the next election and the one after.

And a couple of other things

I distinguish the 'Mail on Sunday' from the 'Daily Mail' for the simple reason that they are two separate newspapers, each with its own editor and staff. The MoS is not the 'Sunday edition' of the Daily Mail but a title in its own right (I understand that North American readers may find the distinct status of British Sunday papers unfamiliar, as it doesn't exist there. I also realise that on our website the two papers are not as clearly distinguished as they are in print. But I have never written so much as a full stop for the 'Daily Mail', despite the BBC's repeated description of me as 'Peter Hitchens of the Daily Mail'.

As for those who complain about the items on celebrities, etc, in the newspapers, I remember an enjoyable cartoon from the 'New Yorker' of some years ago showing two men in a train. One is a thin, studious-looking professorial type holding a thin, long newspaper whose headlines, surmounting dense columns of grey type, deal with such things as 'Latest economic figures announced' and 'President appoints new housing secretary' and 'Moldovan ballet arrives in Milwaukee'. The other man is short and a bit fat, not at all professorial, and is holding a short fat paper whose headlines are along the lines of ‘Hundreds die in horror fire’ and ‘Rock Star arrested in brothel’. The paper plainly contains large and dramatic photographs of these and similar events.

The tall thin man is craning his bespectacled head over the short, fat man's shoulder, reading avidly about the rock star and the fire, and neglecting the ballet, the economy and the President. The short, fat man is likewise so absorbed in fires and scandals that he doesn't notice he is sharing his paper.

And such is life. Man can only bear so much seriousness, and newspapers, which unlike the BBC cannot make any money unless people buy them voluntarily, must in all reason appeal to the sensational, glamour, trivia and celeb-loving side in almost all of us. (If you doubt this, look at the changes recently introduced in some of the 'heavy' papers, and at - for example - the Guardian's G2 supplement). As a fearsomely serious person myself, I would love there to be huge circulation papers mainly devoted to high-minded subjects, and to some extent it is true that the greater market for froth and frippery reflects our declining school system, but the truth is that people are interested in celebrities and sport, watch or listen to soap operas, and like looking at dramatic or glamorous pictures. And that the same people are generally also interested in politics, religion and foreign affairs especially if these are crisply presented and leavened with controversy and well-expressed opinions. The real achievement, which I think we do pretty well here, is to intersperse the popular things with the serious and important matters that we need to know to be responsible and knowledgeable members of our society.

A free press has to be a commercially successful press, or it cannot long remain independent of the state. To be commercially successful, it has to appeal widely. As I say, the trick is to do so while still providing proper news and serious commentary.

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How to be Bourgeois, and other matters

I am pleased to see the enthusiasts for Stephen Fry attempting to hit back here on his behalf. I have long enjoyed the wonderful description of Mr Fry given by the Dictionary of National Celebrity ‘a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like’, not least because it helps to explain much of the enthusiasm among received-opinion leftists for this person's rather unprofound and trite opinions.

Radical opinion has now become so dull and free of thought or knowledge that Mr Fry actually appears to quite a lot of people as a latter-day Oscar Wilde. Say what you wish about Wilde, and personally I think him greatly over-rated for political and cultural reasons, but there is no doubt that he had a genuinely outstanding talent and an original wit. So did his near-contemporary H. H. Munro (Saki), who I think to be the more interesting of the two.

More baffling is the admiration for Mr Fry's supposed comic skills. For anyone who actually appreciates P. G. Wodehouse, Mr Fry's version of Jeeves and Wooster was so creakily wooden and blatant as to be almost physically painful. It is not impossible to portray this pair on TV - as I have pointed out before, Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael did so brilliantly, with much subtlety, in the early 1960s, and were actually lauded by Wodehouse himself - who must be the ultimate judge.

But it is difficult, and it requires the actors involved to realise that Wodehouse's genius lies in his descriptions. You can't actually put lines such as 'Ice began to form on the butler's upper slopes' into dialogue. But you can, having read it, know immediately and exactly what it means, and if you have the sympathy and the talent, you can presumably convey it on screen.

Mr Fry is praised here for describing my newspaper's stablemate, the Daily Mail, as a 'shrieky weaselly little bourgeois tabloid'. Like some contributors here I am interested by the use of the word 'bourgeois' here. This expression (as George Orwell long ago pointed out) is completely unknown in normal spoken English, except as the name of a typeface, and I would expect the compositors who used it would have pronounced it 'borjoyce', just as Churchill would refer to the Nazis as 'Narzees', and the Gestapo as the 'Jesterpo' - not because he couldn't do foreign if he wanted to, but because the deliberate mispronunciation of foreign words is a very old expression of Englishness.

The origin of the use of the word 'bourgeois' as a boo-word is quite clear and unmistakable. It comes directly from the propaganda of the Communist movement. (I remember a debate in the International Socialists, in which writers for the 'Socialist Worker' were solemnly instructed to cease to use the word 'bourgeois' and write 'big business' instead. The move, intended to make our propaganda more accessible to shop stewards in car factories, was not much of a success.)

In short, the use of the word in this way identifies the user as in the tradition of the classical left - the left which apologised for, or concealed from itself, the totalitarian results of its thinking. I wonder what Mr Fry thinks about Cuba, by the way? Does anyone know? I am sure the word 'bourgeois' is still used in English-language propaganda beamed from Havana. Many fashionable leftists continue to defend this awful prison island, where non-violent political dissenters have their testicles pierced as torture, and whose leaders only recently apologised for the virulent persecution they heaped on homosexuals for many years, virtually uncriticised by their fellow-travellers and apologists in the West.

And that's all it does. As an insult, it is pretty feeble, as is its little brother 'petty-bourgeois', often coupled with 'Fascist' or (in the case of the more cautious and better-educated) 'Poujadist'.

Shrieky?

I am not quite sure what this is intended to suggest. If it is over-excitement, didn't Mr Fry himself get a little over-excited about the visit here of the Bishop of Rome? One wonders what a newspaper edited by him would look like.

It seems to me that many of the front pages of the 'Independent' these days might qualify at least for the description 'shrill', (and that newspaper is probably technically more 'bourgeois' by some way than is the Daily Mail).

Tabloid?

Now that every daily paper except the Telegraph, the FT and the Guardian is tabloid in shape, this word likewise lacks any particular power.

So I am unchastened by this condemnation, and fail to see what is brilliant or even notable about it.

I am still hoping that we may be able to create an index for this blog, which would make it so much easier to deal with contributors who (plainly primed by some central propaganda source, probably our schools) try to muddy the waters on cannabis by saying ‘Wot about alcohol, then?' as if this were a clinching argument.

These people have plainly never thought about this at all. They also come late to the argument.

I have repeatedly said here that the existence of one legal poison in our society, with all its disastrous consequences, cannot possibly be a logical or moral justification for the introduction of another.

I have also repeatedly said that I favour strong legal restrictions (and moral ones) on the sale and consumption of alcohol, and that I support measures (backed by law) to discourage tobacco smoking. So the attempt to claim that I am inconsistent also falls.

Why can't these people just say what they really mean, which is ‘How dare you interfere with my selfish pleasure? Who cares if other people worse off than I, are harmed by the laxity of the cannabis laws?’ Then we would know what they actually are, and how much attention to pay them.

They couldn't really care less about alcohol (which many cannabis users drink at the same time as they smoke dope) or tobacco (which they mix with their chosen muck), and only raise this issue to obscure the truth. But there are enough fools in this world who are taken in by this stuff to make it worthwhile for them to put it forward yet again. One or two will always fall for it. Here it will always be met with scorn and derision.

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Will all we have turn to dust and ashes, just like my Soviet roubles?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Britain cannot go on as it is. Either our dominant elite will recognise that their ideas are wrong, and must be changed. Or a series of avalanches will sweep away our comfortable lives.

I think I know which is more likely. Catastrophes do happen, and people survive them after a fashion, though their lives are never really the same afterwards.

The post-1968 ruling class are so convinced of their own rightness that I can no longer believe that anything will persuade them they might be even a little bit wrong.

And once again I am reminded of the complacent fools’ paradise that was the Soviet Union in its last years. Somewhere I still have the bank book I acquired in communist Moscow, after a lengthy interro­gation about my class background.

In it are recorded the few hundred roubles I deposited there and will never see again. But Russians often had many thousands stored away.

All of it was dust and ashes when reality finally burst through the broken Iron Curtain.

Great mountain ranges of savings were abolished in an evening, as the currency was ‘revalued’ out of existence. Supposedly generous health schemes collapsed – though in truth they had long been short of drugs, especially painkillers and antibiotics, and the filthiness of the hospitals had been a grave danger to recovery. Jobs that had been meant to last for life were abolished, and the places where those jobs were done vanished. Pensions went unpaid or became valueless.

The money, the jobs, the Welfare State were all based on an illusion. When the illusion became unsustainable, they crumbled.

Well, how can we afford to carry 1.5 million people who have never worked? How can we afford to house jobless migrant families in Notting Hill grandeur? How can we sustain the enormous NHS which we gorged with cash in good times, while quietly loading it with enormous long-term debts to finance a building splurge?

None of this is real. Our economy continues to function out of habit and faith rather than because we are paying our way in the world.

Our state education system is a gigantic international joke, so bad that the remaining employers here would mostly much rather hire Poles with hardly a word of English than the products of our anarchic classrooms, where multitudes have ‘special needs’ and failure is the only thing that is rewarded.

The people who said that manufacturing doesn’t matter now admit they were wrong, but that does not bring back the lost factories. The North Sea money that carried us over much of the worst is nearly all spent.We have acquired a Government whose main reason for existence is to protect the status quo, which hates to think and which loves to pose – but to which there is no sensible opposition. Only a contrite confession of failure, combined with a readiness to reconsider every policy from welfare to crime to schools to immi­gration, could possibly avert the great smash which seems increasingly likely to me.

We had our first warning in the failure of the banks. What will follow, if we pay no attention, will I think be worse.

This pitiable husk is the evidence of our  non-war on drugs

The sly, dishonest propagandists who claim that the ‘War on Drugs’ has failed really do need to explain what war this is, exactly, and when it was ever fought. Look at the pathetic case of George Michael, who – drugged out of his mind with supposedly harmless, supposedly soft cannabis – drove his powerful spoilt brat’s car into a shop.

It occurs to me that he could just as easily have hurled his machine at a family with young children, or have caused a gory pile-up on a motorway. Those unmoved by this possibility might look at the man himself, a pitiable husk whose long-term admirers must be increasingly embarrassed by him.

And is it not reasonable to suggest that much of this folly, crime and degradation results from his repeated use of drugs which are supposedly illegal? Yet what has happened to Mr Michael when he has been caught breaking that law, as he has been over and over again?

Meaningless ‘cautions’, that is what – though his case has not been so spectacular as that of the ‘singer’ Pete Doherty, who has been in court for drugs offences so many times that the Criminal Records computer overheats when his name is fed into it.

If these famous people were properly punished, and if the police did not constantly seek excuses to fail to do their jobs, then we might actually have that war.

And we would have much less drug use.

Laws that are enforced are effective. Look how quickly the market traders of Britain surrendered to kilograms after the prosecution of Steve Thoburn. When did you last see anyone smoking on an aeroplane, where such an act can have you led off the flight in handcuffs?

Meanwhile, those which are not enforced are worthless – like the non-existent ban on using a hand-held mobile phone while driving, which the police cannot be bothered to put into effect.

Let us please have a real war on drugs, especially on the brain-wrecking poison cannabis, the dangers of which have been concealed by decades of falsehood. There will of course be casualties. But, as the wretched George Michael has shown, there are plenty of casualties now, when no war is taking place.

Christians cannot be right about anything these days. If Stephen Fry had remarked that returning to Britain via Heathrow was like arriving in the Third World – which it so often is – then his worshippers and sycophants would have said what a clever and original thought it was.

And BBC Radio 4, or Radio Fry as it should be renamed as he is on it so much, would have hired him to make a series of  programmes about the awfulness of airports, to be delivered in that insufferable, giggly golden syrup voice of his.

But when a Cardinal says the same thing, he is denounced by all Left-thinking people for racism, even though there is not the slightest evidence that any such thought had crossed his mind.

It is the slovenly shabbiness, and the general feeling of arriving somewhere worse than the place that you have come from, which is the problem with Heathrow and many other places in this country too.

* Once the police forces of this country could have relied on fierce public support against cuts in their funds and manpower. Now I think they will get very little. For years I have said they should sell the helicopters and fast cars and get back on foot.

I said they should reopen police stations and man them. I said they should remember that the middle classes are their friends. And almost all I heard in return was moaning that I was anti-police and unfair to a fine body of men. Piffle.

The police forces of this country have broken their covenant with law-abiding people and now they lack friends when they need them most. If they had listened to me instead of being so sensitive, this would not have happened. Flattery is not the same as friendship, and criticism is not necessarily hostile.

Question - who said 'not all sex involving children is unwanted and abusive'. Answer - The Pope's biggest British critic

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Here comes the Pope, though he would have much more fun if he stayed in Rome for root canal dentistry.

His mysterious visit, to the country in Europe where he is most likely to be insulted, is the target of every liberal elitist in Britain.

A whole assembly of crackpot sexual revolutionaries and wild ultra-Leftists will be ranged against him.

Such people normally do not have much popular support.

Against the previous Pope, their campaign would have been insignificant squeaking, barely heard above the applause.

But thanks to the abuse of children by some priests, and the Roman Church’s feeble efforts to punish them, all that has changed. It is now respectable again to be anti-Catholic.

Well, that’s reasonable. Paedophilia is disgusting, and particularly so among men supposedly dedicated to goodness.

But the Vatican doesn’t actually tell its priests to abuse children. The vast majority of them do not so do. And it has tried to stamp out the problem and to offer genuine apologies to the victims.

I (as a non-Roman Catholic) have examined some of the main charges levelled against Benedict XVI by his attackers, and found that several of them are simply untrue, whereas others have been crudely distorted.

I have also examined the record of one of the main critics of the Papal visit.

This is Peter Tatchell, prominent in the ‘Protest the Pope’ campaign.

I admire Mr Tatchell’s physical and moral courage, notably when he was badly beaten by Robert Mugabe’s bodyguards for attempting a citizen’s arrest of that monster. The effects of that beating still trouble him.

But this does not cancel out what I believe is the hypocrisy of his attempt - and that of the Left in general - to wage war on the Pope by employing the charge of condoning or failing to act against paedophilia (it is No  5 in the charge-sheet set out by ‘Protest the Pope’).

For on June 26, 1997, Mr Tatchell wrote a start­ling letter to the Guardian newspaper.

In it, he defended an academic book about ‘Boy-Love’ against what he saw as calls for it to be censored.

When I contacted him on Friday, he emphasised that he is ‘against sex between adults and children’ and that his main purpose in writing the letter had been to defend free speech. 

He told me: ‘I was opposing calls for censorship generated by this book. I was not in any way condoning paedophilia.’

Personally, I think he went a bit further than that. He wrote that the book’s arguments were not shocking, but ‘courageous’.

He said the book documented ‘examples of societies where consenting inter-generational sex is considered normal’.

He gave an example of a New Guinea tribe where ‘all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood’ and allegedly grow up to be ‘happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers’.

And he concluded: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures.

'Several of my friends - gay and straight, male and female - had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13.

'None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.

‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’

Well, it’s a free country. And I’m rather grateful that Mr Tatchell, unlike most of his allies, is honest enough to discuss openly where the sexual revolution may really be headed.

What he said in 1997 remains deeply shocking to almost all of us. But shock fades into numb acceptance, as it has over and over again.

Much of what is normal now would have been deeply shocking to British people 50 years ago. We got used to it.

How will we know where to stop? Or will we just carry on for ever?

As the condom-wavers and value-free sex-educators advance into our primary schools, and the pornography seeps like slurry from millions of teenage bedroom computers, it seems clear to me that shock, by itself, is no defence against this endless, sordid dismantling of moral barriers till there is nothing left at all.

Yet when one of the few men on the planet who argues, with force, consistency and reason, for an absolute standard of goodness comes to this country, he is reviled by fashionable opinion.


Bombing cities is just wrong –  even when the planes are ours

Can we be straight about the Blitz, now that it is 70 years since it began?

Most of us have two absolutely clear reactions to it. The first is that dropping bombs on women and children in their homes is a wicked form of warfare.

The second is that - despite all the horrors of being bombed - the British people were not demoralised or blasted into defeatism, but worked all the harder for victory because it was the only way to get back at the enemy who dropped death on them from the sky.

Yet as soon as anyone suggests that we were wrong to bomb German women and children in their homes - as I firmly believe we were - they are shouted down by cries of ‘They asked for it!’.

Actually, they didn’t ask for it at all. The children, as always, had no say in the matter.

And the people who bravely voted against Hitler to the last lived in the poor urban areas which we deliberately bombed.

And when anyone argues - as I do - that the bombing of German civilians was also an ineffective way of fighting the war, doing surprisingly little damage to the Nazi war effort, they are shouted down by apologists who seem to think that Germans responded to bombing differently from British people.

It’s not true, and those who have studied the facts agree.

Yet I am absolutely in favour of a memorial, large and majestic, in a place where as many people as possible will see it, to the young men who nightly climbed into their bombers and flew over Germany.

They believed they were helping to destroy a great tyranny. They trusted their leaders.

That is why they set off, hearts in mouths, in the full knowledge that they probably wouldn’t come back, and that they were likely to die in a specially horrible fashion.

Not since the Somme in 1916 had so much steadfast valour and youth been squandered by old men who ought to have known better.

On the Bomber Command war memorial, alongside the shattering number of names and the chokingly sad ages at which they died, should be the words ‘Lions, led by Donkeys’.

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

I have paid thousands of pounds and dollars in tax to British and American taxmen - both in supposedly free countries - over the past 30-odd years.

And they have never once said ‘Thank You’.

This is because they think, deep down, that they have an absolute right to all our money, and we should be grateful that they let us keep any of it.

If this isn’t true, then why are they so rude to us when we give them so much money? Can you think of anyone else who does this?

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It must be true. The BBC's own boss says it's biased

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

For about 20 years, I and a few others have been pointing out that the BBC is biased to the Left, morally, culturally and politically. I have made this case patiently, with evidence, not crudely.

And I have been met with unending scornful denial. This vital truth, that the most important cultural and media organisation in Britain, which shapes the views of millions on every subject, is tilted against the conservative cause in every field of human endeavour, has been for years the most obvious fact in the country – but also the one most utterly denied.

Well, now we have double-proof that the BBC is biased and knows it is. And also of how that bias has helped to shape British politics.

First, from the Director-General himself, Mark Thompson, above, we have the admission that, when he joined the Corporation 30 years ago, there was a ‘massive bias to the Left’.

I love that ‘was’, as if all those Eighties Leftists have stopped being what they were, and stopped hiring people like themselves.

Also there’s the absurd claim that the Corporation now has ‘an honourable tradition’ of journalists of the Right working for it. Really? Perhaps they are strong among the makers of children’s programmes in Gaelic.

The BBC remains reliably pro-EU, pro-PC, anti-Israel, in favour of the sexual revolution, soft on drugs, fanatical about man-made climate change.

It has partly cured itself of its crude anti-Americanism, and Mr Thompson’s confession is plainly a sign of a wider recognition that things have not been right, in both senses of the word.

Two of its own prominent journalists, Jonathan Charles (on the EU) and Roger Harrabin (on global warming), last week broadcast extraordinary programmes on Radio 4.

In one, Mr Charles actually said of the launch of the euro in 1999: ‘Even now I can remember the great air of excitement. It did seem like the start of a new era ... for a few brief days I suppose I and everyone else suspended their scepticism and all got caught up in that euphoria.’

I suppose he did. And Mr Harrabin mused, faintly hilariously: ‘I’ve never considered myself a climate-change sceptic.’ No, nor has anyone else.

But he conceded: ‘I’ve always had questions that weren’t fully settled, particularly about our ability to model future climate given our poor knowledge of some elements of the current climate system.’

But now we have the latest evidence, from Mr Thompson’s briefing notes, that the BBC has for a long time been co-operating closely with David Cameron, who disembowelled the Tory Party to make it acceptable to the BBC’s militant cultural revolutionaries.

I first pointed this out long before the Election, when the BBC refused to disclose details of a meeting Mr Thompson had then with Mr Cameron.

Around the same time, BBC coverage of the Tories switched from an unending stream of high-pressure slime to cautious approval, gradually warming into endorsement.

The key to this is which of the two was and is the senior partner at these meetings.

You will get a better picture of modern Britain if you grasp that it is the BBC which, as the medieval Church once did, gives or withholds its blessing to the leaders it approves of.

Lean to the Left, or face frozen disapproval, consistently unfair coverage, misrepresentation and actual exclusion from the national debate.

This is a real, dangerous scandal threatening our future. Yet it merits less space in the media than a fuss about cricket.

Blair, a baffled old ham striking a very peculiar pose ...

What a very odd creature is Anthony Blair. I feel I can justly point this out because Mr Blair has devoted so very much of his gruesomely interesting book to making nasty comments about the weirdness of Gordon Brown.

Maybe Mr Brown is weird. But isn’t Mr Blair just as peculiar? Just, for a start, look at the way he sat during the alleged ‘interview’ with Andrew Marr last week, right.

‘Audience’ would be a more accurate term. I have noticed he often does this, legs wide apart, with his tie draped over his, er, trousers. Strange, or what?

Then there’s the passage in which he claims to have had a premonition that he would become leader of the Labour Party.

‘Premonition’? Ha ha. I long for the day when someone explains just how this no-account barrister rose to high office. (Here I repeat my appeal for anyone who was ever represented by him in court to get in touch.)

How did he become MP for a safe northern Labour seat, and then leader of a major political party? All the books so far written fail to explain this miraculous series of events.

Maybe it really was the finger of destiny, as Mr Blair seems to imagine. Carole Caplin might know. Or maybe (my preferred explanation) it was really a good old Labour Party machine fix, which began with a search for someone malleable who was the absolute opposite of Michael Foot (no walking stick, no donkey jacket, no ideas, no books, no thick glasses, looks good on TV) and ended with an unhinged war on Iraq.

Note, as Mr Blair admits, that being Prime Minister was the first and only job in government he ever had. There’s a fascinating story to be told one day of how this grave national mistake came to be made, but this isn’t it.

Meanwhile, these memoirs – written in a consistently jokey style – are much more like those of an actor than those of any politician I’ve ever come across. He looks back on the great stage of history, across which he was ushered, inwardly baffled, by skilled directors and producers, much as some old ham might look back on his days in ­Hollywood. Iraq... do we really want to do it again?

And still I meet people who claim that the Iraq War was in some way a success. As the USA formally ends its combat role, the country is lawless, riven by sectarian hate. Despite its supposed ‘democracy’, its politicians cannot form a government.

Iran, supposedly our enemy, dominates Iraqi politics. Christians have fled persecution in their tens of thousands.

Many Iraqis live abroad, too scared to return home for one good reason or another. Women, far from being ‘liberated’, are now forced to wear black shrouds. There is terror in the streets. Power and water have never been properly restored.

The men America paid to fight for it are now deserting back to the insurgency.

The pro-British middle class, destroyed by sanctions, has never recovered. And a new war is in the making over Kurdish control of the northern oilfields.

And then there are the dead and maimed. Until those responsible in high places have admitted this was a dreadful error, we face the risk that they may try again, perhaps in Iran.

They must be made to apologise before any such stupidity takes place.

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The official persecution of Blackpool teacher David Roy, driven from his job for standing up to revolting indiscipline in his classroom, is yet more evidence that the State and the law in this country instinctively side with the wrong people. The lies of ­troublemaking children were readily believed.

Only Mr Roy’s determination led to his ­vindication. Many others, sensing the mood, have surrendered to chaos, and who can blame them?

But reports blaming this change on Labour policies are misleading. Successive Tory governments have left most state ­education in the hands of the Left. And they continue to do so.