True Grit meets South Riding

I have finally found time to see the Coen brothers' remake of 'True Grit', a film almost limitlessly superior to the monstrously overhyped, historically absurd, factually misleading 'The King's Speech'. I'll come on to that in a moment. But first some contributors here think I will feel in some way mortified by the awards heaped on 'The King's Speech'. Why should I? We all know how Hollywood rewards the meretricious and the obvious, and why should it surprise us when it happens again? I must pay tribute to whoever was behind the publicity for this film ('The King's Speech'), which has actually managed to recruit normal human beings to spring to its defence when I ( and incidentally my left-wing brother Christopher) have pointed out its glaring and undoubted inaccuracies and other faults. Why do they do this?

The thing about 'True Grit', apart from the fact that it is enjoyably funny, exciting, absorbing and very good-looking, is that it has taken so much trouble to imagine the past. Now, the BBC have spent a fortune in 'South Riding' on steam engines, tailoring, vintage vehicles and such stuff (though in fact they could never persuade most of the extras to subject themselves to the actual hairstyles of the time, particularly the way the men looked). And of course they have a lot of smoking, the TV producer's unfailing signal to the audience that we are now in the past.

But what they don't seem to grasp is that the whole effort is ruined by their failure to pay any attention to the way people talked in the past. One actor in 'South Riding' is shown in a trailer (I've yet to spot this in an actual broadcast) saying 'I can't believe I'm hearing this' as if he were a character in EastEnders. This is only the most glaring of the various anachronisms I have spotted. I'm also slightly puzzled that the Squire, Robert Carne of Maythorpe, who attended St Peter's School in York and was a cavalry officer in the First World War, is depicted as speaking in a broad all-purpose Northernshire accent which I doubt he'd have possessed. I'm not sure. Maybe an expert on Northern Posh can set me right about that.

But in 'True Grit', the characters all speak as I think people did in the 19th century. That is, more slowly, with the words emerging individually instead of in a slurred stream (yes, I know Jeff Bridges sometimes breaks this rule, but there are reasons for this) , with less abbreviation and a more correct grammar. Their phrasing is also influenced by the Bible with which they were all closely familiar. This really does give the watcher the impression that he is in a different, harder time, when cold was colder, tastes and smells stronger and language more potent. It is also a joy to the ear, delivering its dry humour with a slow precision, like an old clock.

Not exactly Entebbe, is it?

No doubt the rescue of several British subjects from Libya involved courage, organisation and competence, of the kind our armed services can still provide. They are among the few British organisations which still insist on high levels of training, which punish failure and reward success. They have been able to ward off - so far - much of the deadening egalitarianism which has destroyed professionalism and even basic competence in so many other areas of service and endeavour.

I do not know how long this can last as the armed forces are stripped of men, experience and equipment by a supposedly 'Conservative-led' government to pay for the NHS, windmills, comprehensive schools and foreign aid. It cannot be pointed out often enough that HMS Cumberland, crucial to these operations, is on her way to the breaker's yard. Oh, and a note to broadcast journalists. The phrase 'The HMS Cumberland' is an illiterate solecism. Think about it. 'The Her Majesty's Ship'. Not good, eh?

Mind you, as we cease to be a maritime power many people probably don't know what 'HMS' stands for. I long ago gave up explaining that warships didn't have crews, but 'ship's companies', and that those who served in them were 'in', not 'on' their ships. I think even the Navy has given up on this one, which used to be the distinguishing mark, linguistically, between those who knew the Navy and those who didn't. And regular readers here will have noticed my teeth grinding at the use of the word 'Battleship' (the specific name of a huge, heavily-armoured and mightily-gunned type of mobile fortress) to describe some trifling tin frigate only just too big for a boating lake. But I digress.

Back to the great rescue. I am puzzled that it is being represented by so much of the media as if it were some kind of ultra-macho operation. The Entebbe hostage rescue by the Israeli Sayeret Matkal, or the Iranian embassy siege rescue by our own SAS, are the standards by which such things must be judged. And this was not such an operation, or anything remotely like it.

So why the fuss? I think my colleague James Forsyth, who compared the government's initial Libya performance to the behaviour of a budget airline, was closer to the mark. The Hercules flights, and the voyages of the doomed HMS Cumberland have been overblown.

I suspect the government is encouraging this view, as it adopts a raucous and rumbling tone in its dealings with Libya to try and make us forget its failure to do its most basic duty last week, that is the protection of its own people.

But how ridiculous it all is. Supposedly we are now terribly moral about the wicked Libyan regime, denying diplomatic immunity to its leaders, freezing its assets, refusing to print its banknotes. Tough, eh? This Libyan wickedness does not seem to have troubled the existing British government (or its predecessor) at all until about two weeks ago, or why was a British firm printing those banknotes and why were there so many British personnel in Libya in the first place?

By the way, please don't go on at me about the supposed 'Lockerbie Bomber'. There is absolutely no evidence that the Libyan Abdel Baset al-Megrahi had anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing, almost certainly carried out by terrorists under Syrian control, at the behest of Iran.

The truth is that Colonel Gadaffi's government is being punished not because it is wicked (so is Syria's, for instance, as I keep needing to mention) but because it is weak and tottering. How embarrassing all this will be if the Gadaffi family manage somehow to regain control of the country. Terribly sorry, your colonelship, sir. Hope you understand we were only going through the motions? Can we have our printing contract back? No hard feelings, eh?

Which brings us to a fascinating but inescapable irony, or is it a paradox? . The more ferocious and ruthless an Arab government is, the more effective it is at grinding rebellion into the pavement at the earliest possible moment, the more likely it is to retain the favour of Her Majesty's Government and its allegedly ethical foreign policy. The message is 'if you can hang on to power, we'll stick by you. But lose it , and we'll denounce you till our throats are sore.' Surely some mistake?

Some people (I had a letter from one this morning) still believe that governments have humanitarian impulses, and go to war to do good. The great myth that we intervened in Yugoslavia to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing still persists, even though the Iraq war - launched on a similarly false idealistic prospectus - is now almost universally discredited. Many people still harbour the fantasy that World War Two was fought to rescue the Jews from Hitler. No such luck, as the millions of dead Jews from Frankfurt to Minsk could attest, if they were alive to do so. By the time the Foreign Office could bring itself to believe the terrible reports reaching it from Auschwitz, at awful cost to those who smuggled them out, it was pretty late anyway. But even then they didn't do anything.

Nations follow their own interests. Some governments are better at it than others. This particular government, judging by the last few weeks, isn't very good.

A few quick general comments

Elaine (I have removed her inverted commas as requested) is cross because I said: 'She is cross that I don't share her wide-eyed, naive admiration of these ambiguous and unfinished events.'

She retorts: 'I have never suggested anything of the sort.'

Oh, I don't know. Why else would anyone get so worked up that I had suggested the possibility that outsiders might have influenced the great Arab Revolt (which is all I did, as she seems now to accept, having written repeatedly as if I had stated it as a fact). Who would get so defensive, if he or she didn't have some idealist picture of the revolt?

Ever since the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, which so far as I know was a genuine popular street revolt, it has been plain that in the TV age this is quite a good way of destabilising a government. Those whose job it is to destabilise other people's governments cannot have failed to observe this . The wave of 'colour revolutions' in former Soviet countries have always seemed to me to be open to question, as they so very much suited the foreign policy of various Western countries - and the governments which resulted from them have seldom if ever lived up to the ideals expressed. States which wish to survive this sort of thing have also been thinking about it. Vladimir Putin , in his customary ruthless, clever and competent fashion, has created the sinister state-sponsored youth movement 'Nashi' to deter any attempts at such a 'colour revolution' in Moscow. In Iran, the pro-regime Basiji and the Revolutionary Guard developed particularly brutal and effective methods (charging into the crowds on motorcycles) to intimidate and scatter the Tehran crowds after they rigged the Presidential elections.

It's also clear that repressive states, whose authority rests on the control of the streets, falter at any stage, then they are lost.

The interesting paradoxical consequence of this, from an idealist Western point of view, is that the rulers who are readiest to open fire on crowds at an early stage are those most likely to survive, and therefore are immune to the alleged human rights concerns of, say, William Hague. Mr Hague rages against Colonel Gadaffi on the assumption that the Colonel is finished. He keeps his lip buttoned about the Peking tyranny, because they mowed down their own people in Tiananmen Square, the Syrian tyranny because (on the assumption that Iran is not involved) everyone remembers the Hama massacre. I do wonder what might happen if Gadaffi manages in the end to hang on. It will all be very embarrassing.

If I wanted to destabilise one of these countries, I would (amongst other things) suborn the middle ranks of the security police, so that they failed to act effectively in the first crucial hours of street protest. President Mubarak was almost certainly finished once his police lost control of Tahrir Square and the streets around it. He would have had to be far more ruthless to regain it once he had last it.

'Harrison' asserts :'It seems to me that Mister Hitchens's main strategy, whenever he wants to rebuke someone who is critical of Israel, is to criticize the actions of another government.'

He or she entirely misses the point. The poor thing has to, for to do otherwise would be to examine his or her true motives in a way that might be disturbing.

That point is that Israel does many bad and reprehensible things, for which I often criticise it, just as I might (and do) write critically of any country I visit, or whose government does things of which I generally disapprove. But the 'anti-Zionists' criticise Israel alone and exclusively. They are apparently unaware of or unconcerned by the equally wicked actions of others often including their own home countries. This is particularly notable when they complain about Israeli mistreatment of Arabs, which undoubtedly takes place. But they say nothing about Arab mistreatment of Arabs, which also takes place. This indicates that their concern is not over what is done, but about who does it.

I have never had a satisfactory reply to this from the 'anti-Zionists' . This is because it is in fact unanswerable. It is claimed that Israel is a special friend of the USA. So is Saudi Arabia. But the anti-Zionists are silent about its abuses. It is claimed that Israel receives vast military subsidies from the USA. So does Egypt. But the anti-Zionists are silent about its abuses. And so on. Arab Sunni Muslims mistreat Arab Shia Muslims. Arab Muslims persecute Arab Christians. Arab regimes murder and uproot their own populations. Nobody complains. Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank after conquering it in 1948. Nobody complained. It just goes on forever. Where propaganda reigns, the truth is, as usual, elsewhere. But some of us know what is going on, and will keep saying so.

I just love the way Mr Everett misses the equally important (and related) point about race and culture. If we didn't have multiculturalism, then the problems he described wouldn't exist. But what else could he do but miss it, if he wants to maintain what appears to be his belief in racial determinism? Others, interested in the matter and having open minds, are urged to read Thomas Sowell's book 'Race and Culture'. Mr Everett may continue to hope for salvation from the BNP if he likes, but heaven help us if he is right. Recent research seems to show that the British people long for a conservative formation which doesn't have the BNP's national socialist taints,. the BNP, like the Tory Party, is an obstacle, not a way out of our difficulties.I have explained why. The index may prove useful here.

Have I missed something, or has Mr Finn of the BBC given up his attempts to claim that the BBC is impartial? I'll take this as an admission of defeat, I think.

I can't easily expand the index, as I have stated. When I have time (which I don't now) I may be able to remove some categories, which I need to do to allow me to create any more. When I first began building the index, Ididn't know there was a limit on the number of subjects. Thoughtful person can imagine the problems this caused, when I belatedly found out.

I don't believe pre-1914 Portsmouth was exceptional in its levels of drunkenness. Any seaport city has such problems, and Britain had plenty of those (almost all its major urban areas, in fact, except Birmingham) . Lloyd George's licensing laws (which I have always believed were his pay-off to the temperance interests which had supported the Liberals, the munitions factories being merely the pretext) transformed working class life for the better.

Stupefied in the gutters of the new Gin Lane, we’re just where our leaders want us

Here we go, back down Gin Lane.William Hogarth’s depiction of a country drowning in drunkenness (pictured below) used to feature in the history books of my childhood as a quaint reminder of a debauched past.

We didn’t know how lucky we were. Now it does not seem so distant. In how many homes is drink now a reason for embarrassment, fear, disease, loss and other perils? How many children are growing up with a drunken parent? In how many hospitals is drink the principal cause of injuries on two or three nights of the week?

In how many towns and cities do we see men and women hope¬lessly inebriated, sprawled, spewing, incontinent, enraged, violent or dangerous to themselves and others?

Hogarth would not be surprised to see it. My grandfather, raised in the rougher parts of Portsmouth, remembered it very well from the years before the First World War. But in my parents’ time, and in the first part of my life, it was not like that. Pubs were closed for much of the day, and for longer on Sundays. Most shops did not sell alcohol at all. By comparison with now, drink was very expensive – especially spirits.

I don’t remember any particular demand to change this. In my early years in the newspaper trade, where a certain thirstiness has always been common, I learned that if anyone really wanted to get a drink at any time of day, he could do so with a bit of ingenuity or forethought. There were discreet ‘clubs’, often enjoy  ably raffish and sordid. There were pubs that let you in after hours. There were special licences for market traders and – all else failing – there were the buffet cars of railway trains.

But I also saw a valued and talented colleague carried out of the newsroom by four strong men, weeping, struggling, shouting and very visibly wetting his trousers. I saw others destroyed in various ways – their mem¬ories shattered, ordered by doctors to stop drinking or die. One – a man always on the edge of severe violence – did die, so lonely and unmissed that his decomposing body was found in his bleak, empty home some weeks after he had departed this life.

Around this time I noticed that the (Tory) Government seemed to have decided that the drink laws needed relaxing. Why? Various blatantly bogus ‘experiments’ were carried out in Scotland, based on the fatuous idea that the licensing laws actually caused drunkenness. We were told that these trials had ‘shown’ that weaker laws led to less violence and disorder on the streets.

Next it was the turn of the rest of the country. Laws that had worked well for 70 years were rapidly repealed. Labour Ministers began to talk rubbish about introducing a continental ‘cafe culture’ under which we would be supposedly treated as grown-ups. But we are not continentals, and it was not grown-ups who would be the main victims of this change. During the 2001 Election campaign, Labour – to its eternal shame – texted young voters with the message: ‘Don’t give a XXXX for last orders? Vote Labour on Thursday.’

So in the space of about ten years, a subtle and elaborate system for keeping us out of Gin Lane was dismantled. But why? The group of distinguished doctors who urged higher prices for alcohol last week suggested that politicians were too close
to the drinks industry.

This is no doubt true. The Tory Party was always the party of booze. The Prime Minister
was for a while on the board of a company that aggressively sought 3am licences for its chain of funky bars. But what about Labour, the party of Methodism and Temperance and the Band of Hope? Well, that was the bit of Labour they got rid of. Lobbyists from the drink industry were at one stage accused of writing New Labour’s licensing legislation themselves. And if they didn’t, they might as well have done.

I don’t think that money alone explains this. The people who run this country seem to have a growing desire to see as many of us as possible stupefied, either with alcohol or with cannabis or with trash TV. Perhaps they reckon it is the only way we can be persuaded to put up with the mess they have made. It’s certainly working. If the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had flooded their streets with strong lager and alcopops, instead of relying on thugs and tear gas, they’d probably all still be safe in power.

The sex-fuelled BBC bulldozer has demolished South Riding

Don’t waste time watching the BBC’s ghastly, sexed-up version of South Riding on Sundays. Buy the book and read it instead.

That tiresome nuisance, Andrew Davies, has completely missed the point of this glorious, generous novel, so good and beloved that it has never been out of print since it was published more than 70 years ago. But he and the BBC have only just heard of it.

Mr Davies says: ‘I often find myself writing scenes that the original author forgot to write.’ What he means is that he rides his big red sex-fuelled bulldozer through the works of better writers, shoving aside their subtleties and putting in grunts and clinches – and cliches – instead. He would find a way to put explicit sex and crude Left-wing politics into Treasure Island if anyone let him.

Actually there is sex and there are Left-wing politics in South Riding. There are also other kinds of love and disappointment, cruel death, feminism, pacifism, and a fiery, angry desire to bring education to the poor. But they are not the sort of sex or politics the BBC likes.
For they are coupled with a deep and open-minded understanding of the older, conservative England that the old Left sought to change, with a strong if reluctant sympathy for the Christian religion, and a liking for the English people as they are, rather than as busybodies might want them to be.

The book is a long love letter to the East Riding, to Yorkshire and to England. And its thoughtful heroine would never – as Anna Maxwell Martin does on TV – make a trite pacifist speech at a job interview, or turn up for such an occasion in a short-sleeved scarlet suit.
‘Nothing could have been more sober and businesslike than her dark brown clothes,’ says the book about this very scene.

Mr Davies and the BBC think they know better. But they don’t.

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

I am grateful to all those who got in touch about my account last week of the attack on Samantha Fraser, whose lovely face was smashed by a brick hurled at her by a lout. You are right to be concerned. But the real point remains. The failure of the justice system to punish the culprit was not an anomaly or a mistake. Everyone was doing his or her job as the Government wanted them to. There is no reason to believe this will change.

It's all here: Tinfoil hats and respected think tanks, plus Judophobia, and do crowds know when they're being manipulated?

Mr Bumstead says he doesn't know what he needs to apologise for. How about the following words of his, which appear to imply that it is even possible that I would accept money from a tainted source? "If somebody had said: 'If some future BNP member list reveals that Peter Hitchens was financed by the BNP to further their agenda (as is quite possible), will we all have to change our views about how wonderful he was?' That would be a slur as it would raise the possibility (as you concede), without evidence, that Peter Hitchens (good) was manipulated by the BNP (bad) in order to discredit him."

For me to be 'financed' by the BNP, it would be necessary for me to know at least that I was the recipient of money from somewhere. I might seek not to know what the ultimate source was, or I might actually know. But either way I would be severely culpable, either for knowingly accepting tainted support or for failing to make proper checks on the source of that support.

I submit that a crowd of people in a large square are not remotely in the same position.

If a regime has used the techniques used (for instance) by Britain and the USA in 'Operation Ajax' in Iran in 1953, I might well be a westernised Egyptian/Tunisian/Bahraini/Libyan with dreams of democracy, inspired by what appeared to be a spontaneous movement, and genuinely idealistic. I would not know that the events in which I was taking part had been orchestrated or paid for by agents of a foreign power - for both the paymasters and the recipients would have an interest in keeping this fact secret from me.

Knowing what I know of Arab countries, I think the idea that they can be transformed into Anglosphere or even European Continental style law-governed democracies is absurd, and that those who think this possible are impractical idealists who are bound, sooner or later, to be used by less idealistic, less scrupulous forces (as has in effect happened in Egypt, now ruled by the Army). And by the way, do we know for certain that the Army will now continue indefinitely with the foreign policy of the Mubarak regime? I should say it was unclear.

It is not a slur to raise the possibility that the crowds may have been unconsciously manipulated, nor is it a slur to speculate on one possible source of that manipulation. These things happen. Given the hugely different nature of the regimes targeted by sudden coincidental outbreaks of 'people power' and the curious fact that equally corrupt, equally tyrannical Syria has been immune from it (as has the Hamas tyranny in Gaza), one does have to wonder. Britain and the USA certainly used to do such things. Iran intervenes constantly on the affairs of other countries, especially post-Saddam Iraq and Syria. Syria intervenes in Lebanon, acting largely as Iran's proxy. These are known facts. I resent being accused of a 'slur' for speculating reasonably on the basis of them. I also dislike the suggestion that I could conceivably be the recipient of money from a tainted source.

If realistic thinking aloud, combined with a rational rejection of naive and superficial optimism, is to be characterised as a bad action (and surely the word 'slur' has this effect) then reasoned discussion is impossible. It's good old emotional censorship again, by which I am said to have 'insulted' various people by doubting (say) the existence of 'ADHD' or of 'dyslexia', or casting doubt on the value of modern examinations, etc etc.

Mr Denton asks: 'Isn't it very hypocritical how you, on the one hand, disapprove of politically correct terms like 'homophobia' and then, on the other, freely use the term 'Judophobia' whenever the Israel or Jewish subject pops up?'
No. It isn't. The word 'homophobia' is used (for instance) by my enemies to describe and so defame me. I have no 'irrational fear' or 'irrational dislike' (choose your preferred translation), or any other sort of fear or dislike of homosexuals, as individuals or as a group. The use of the expression is designed to portray a reasoned position as a pathology and to damage me personally.

By contrast, we have as evidence of an irrational fear and dislike of Jews in the Arab and Muslim world the speeches of President Ahmadinejad casting doubt on the Holocaust, the description of Jews in Arab propaganda and the speeeches of popular preachers as being 'descended from pigs and monkeys' (the website MEMRI can and does provide reliable translations of this sort of stuff), foul 'Der Stuermer'-type depictions of hook-nosed, child-killing Jews such as the wall-painting in Gaza witnessed and described here by me, the continued propagation of discredited tripe such as 'the Protocols of the Elders of Zion' in the Arab media, the repetition in mainstream publications even of the mediaeval Blood Libel (the alleged use of Christian children's blood in the making of Passover pastries), the passages in the Hadith about the stones and the trees denouncing Jews at the last day, the close ties between many past Arab leaders and German National Socialism (most notably Haj Amin al Husseini, who fled to Berlin during the Third Reich and helped raise a Muslim division of the SS, he was the personal hero of Yasser Arafat), the sheltering of Nazi war criminals by Arab regimes - Alois Brunner, a notorious National Socialist child murderer was for many years given asylum in Damascus, where he may possibly still be living. I have myself listened to perfectly agreeable, well-educated, sane and intelligent Arabs spouting the most embarrassing rubbish about Jews as normal conversation in their living rooms.

I might add that my attempts a couple of years ago to hold conversations just outside my office with British 'anti-Zionist' protestors against the Israeli attack on Gaza (an attack I myself denounced as a cruel folly), in which I attempted to suggest that Arabs were sometimes mistreated by each other, were met with such unreasoning fury that I had to flee for my own physical safety when it became clear to them that I sympathised with the Jewish state.

And in general when I ask critics of Israel to explain why they single that country out for criticism, in a world full of comparable or worse wickedness, they tend to become either silent or enraged. What they never do is explain their selective rage. To do so would be to admit that there might be an unreasoning core to it. The whole phenomenon of Judophobia is a very strange one, not as far as I can see susceptible to reason. I've tried many times to hold reasoned, fact-based correspondences with persons who have this difficulty. It is quite futile. Some people just have this trouble, and there we are. One would feel sorry for them if it were not that from time to time their trouble leads to murder and other cruelty. My own solution is to try to persuade them that it is a problem, and one they should make an effort to control. But the temptation to indulge it, under the flag of anti-Zionism, is too strong for many sufferers.

I use the term 'Judophobia' for two reasons: First because I know that it will get past their outer mental defences against unwelcome thoughts. When they hear something described as a 'phobia', they initially assume that it must be one of those things that they ought to be against. This is the way they proceed. The jolt they receive when they realise that their views could be described in this fashion is potentially educative, and certainly satisfying.

Second, I do it because the phrase 'anti-Semitism' has lost its power. People either assume that they are themselves too nice to be such a thing, or assume that they are being called Nazis, when they know they aren't Nazis, so it bounces off.

I don't in the least think that 'Holocaust denial' is a loaded term. There is no doubt that the German National Socialist government engaged in the systematic, deliberate, industrial mass-murder of Jews, including women and tiny children. Those who seek to deny or minimise this are to be despised, as are all apologists for, and coverers up of crimes.

Mr Bumstead asks of the ECHR: 'There is another point though. The ECHR in our legal system is a superior court of appeal to which British cases can be referred. If it has ruled that prisoners have the right to vote and a British litigant pursues his case there then the ECHR will rule in his favour and damages and legal costs will have to be borne by the government. This function of the ECHR was meant to be abolished by the 1998 HRA which was meant to implement human rights law within the domestic legal system but if we stop doing this (i.e. start ignorning judgements from the ECHR) then we simply open ourselves up to indirect payments at a later date. Therefore the only way to avoid inevitable payments to prisoners would be to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR - leading to the same result (by a circuitous route) as direct fines would have.'

I'm not sure I understand this point. This particular case was initiated, so far as I know, before the ECHR was incorporated into British law, which is why it wasn't ruled on by a British court. The Strasbourg court is not a 'superior court in the British system' but a separate body with no legal power to impose its judgements here. It has no power to force the British government to do anything. If this country denounced the whole Convention, as in my view it should, then our courts would no longer be able to use the Convention as a basis for decisions, and they could get back to their proper job of interpreting law rather than masking government policy on the hoof by extravagant 'interpretation'.

Mr Finn writes: 'You will find his less than cordial encounters with Barbara Roche, George Galloway, Yvette Cooper, Alistair Darling among others pre and post Blair. Do you really think that Gordon Brown (who I am sure you regard as hopelessly left wing) would have relished the opportunity of going up against Jeremy Paxman? '

This laboriously misses the point, which I clearly made from the start. Yes, Mr Paxman had clashes with such people, but *not from a conservative position*. Do I regard Mr Brown as 'hopelessly left wing'? I am not sure, Certainly he is an unreconstructed egalitarian (hence the ghastly Laura Spence episode). But his association with Blairite economic policies, and with the Iraq war, would have made him unpalatable to most leftists at the BBC.

Mr Finn again, writes of the 'many caveats you have had to add to your main assertion, including the one saying that the BBC decided, with Paxman in tow, to turn on the Brown government the moment they realised that Cameron was 'one of theirs' '

I have not 'added these caveats'. These are points made many times here before (do please use the index) and elaborated in the book 'The Cameron Delusion' .

Then Mr Finn continues down his slope of utter (but deeply self-serving) misunderstanding of the point at issue: 'Let's run with this preposterous notion for a moment. Another search on Youtube reveals Tony Blair, long before, being grilled quite convincingly by Jeremy Paxman along with others from the Blair government. '
Yes, Mr Finn, but *not from a conservative position* - rather from the position of a discontented leftist. Such criticism of New Labour was always permitted in the BBC, because their only dissatisfaction with the Blair government was that a) it was economically Thatcherite/liberal and b) it went to war in Iraq.

Then we get cheap abuse (this is the ultimate weapon of the BBC person challenged in this fashion - quite a senior BBC figure called me a 'liar' without foundation on a public platform only last week, and I had to make him apologise for it). Mr Finn writes :'I was merely reacting to those tin-foil hat-wearers who frequent this forum and claim that the BBC is of the left.'

How unimprovably witty and trenchant.

Well, while wearing my tinfoil hat this morning I distinctly heard the Today programme presenter Evan Davis (approx 7.35 am) refer to the think tank 'Politeia' as 'right-leaning' or 'right-wing' (the sausages were sizzling so I am not absolutely sure which - but I am sure it was one of them). Now I would be most surprised if Mr Davis or any other Today presenter would ever refer to a left-wing think tank as such. The word 'respected' tends to be used for those. And they don't even know they're doing it, just as Mr Finn doesn't (and cannot) actually understand the argument into which he has so self-righteously and superciliously ventured. It really is very easy to work out why.

The goldfish syndrome

Do goldfish know that they are wet, or even that they are in water, or (when they are in one) in a bowl? I doubt it. I imagine that they never consider these things. They just think that what is, is - and that it ought to be so, and always will be so. They only ever meet other goldfish who have the same view. They have powerful mental defences against considering any alternative. 

BBC persons are similar. From their Oxbridge Junior Common Rooms to the sad day when their friends gather to say farewell at the crematorium, they never meet anyone who disagrees with them, except for contemptible outsiders who they can safely dismiss as unimportant or stupid or 'fascist'. Just as the poor bewildered fish doesn't know he is wet, they just cannot understand that they are biased. And the revelation of the truth can only come at some cost - fear of the dry, waterless, bowl-free world beyond, in which survival might be in doubt.

I constantly encounter this difficulty. My recent dispute with the 'Feedback' programme (see the index under BBC' and 'BBC Bias') was an instance of it. They didn't have any idea that their treatment of me had been, itself, biased - until I told them so and rather vigorously petitioned them for justice.

The latest instance is in a contribution from a Mr Stephen Finn (on the 'Why Jeremy Paxman Might Not Be a conservative' thread), who says he has worked for the BBC. It is in many ways so perfect an example of the type that I am tempted to have it stuffed and put in a glass case. This posting is an extension of my reply to Mr Finn.

Mr Finn says he can answer my question: "Can anyone remember him [Jeremy Paxman] interviewing a Blair-era Labour minister in a similarly hostile fashion, from the position of a *conservative* Devil’s advocate?"
Mr Finn says :"Yes, many times. I'm sure we all can. "

Well, I thought here we were going to be referred to at least some of these 'many times' and told when they were, and involving whom, perhaps with some indicative quotations. But they don't seem to be there - which doesn't greatly surprise me.

Because, you see, I'm not sure we 'all can' remember anything of the kind ever taking place. I for one cannot recall a single instance of this. I can, by contrast, clearly recall Mr Paxman treating William Hague (as Leader of the Opposition, mind you) with weary disdain when Mr Hague had been stabbed in the back by Lord Cranborne over House of Lords reform and was trying to defend his position. Mr Paxman actually offered to hand over the questioning to a Labour minister, also present in the studio (who wisely declined the offer).

I thought then, and think still, that this action was one of the most significant moments in modern British broadcasting. In the years after May 1997 the BBC, which had been furiously adversarial towards the Thatcher and Major governments (notably concentrating on Tory splits over the EU during the election campaign, while making no balancing effort to examine faultlines within New Labour) were simply unable to adopt a similar stance towards the Blair government. They could and did attack it from the Left (on civil liberty, economic policy etc) but they lacked the intellectual artillery or ammunition or personnel to attack it from a conservative position.

This was partly for the reasons given by Mark Thompson, who has conceded the existence of a left-wing bias 'in the 1980s' which has somehow disappeared in the years since, or by Andrew Marr, who memorably said that the BBC is "a publicly-funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large". All this, he said, "creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC".

When Andrew Marr says 'liberal' he doesn't mean 'partisan Labour' - he means culturally, morally, socially liberal, the opposite of me.

The problem arose only partly because of this difficulty. The liberal bias also has a huge effect on recruitment, training and promotion. Thus by 1997, the BBC had almost no major figures in the Presenterocracy (or anywhere else much) who weren't instinctively radical. The BBC's treatment of distinguished journalists who weren't in the club, such as Jeff Randall and Andrew Neil, is very interesting. Mr Randall has described the baffled hostility he encountered. Mr Neil, it seems to me, is forever limited to late-night or daytime programmes. He is by all measures a superb broadcaster, quite qualified to present 'Newsnight' or any of the major flagship radio programmes. But somehow this doesn't happen. I might add that neither Mr Randall nor Mr Neil strike me as being particularly socially conservative,  tending more towards the economically liberal view of domestic policy.

The BBC only became adversarial towards Labour, in the form of the doomed Brown government, after the Tories (first neutralised by Michael Howard, then actually subject to a sort of political gender reassignment under David Cameron) had adopted the radical programme of Blairism (as discussed in my book 'The Cameron Delusion'). They could then be safely supported, as the Blairite heritage of political correctness and radical constitutional change, not to mention the holy NHS and the comprehensive school system, were safe in their hands.

Mr Finn continues: "Speaking as someone who has worked in a BBC newsroom I can only say that in my experience the BBC are fanatical about balance in news broadcasting. That view may be unpopular here but it happens to be true. "

Mr Finn suffers from the standard BBC mental blockage on this subject. He mistakes formal balance between political parties (which is sort of achievable) for real impartiality between two points of view ( which, because it requires a thinking, informed person to be a neutered nullity, is beyond the wit of man and unbearable for any red-blooded human).

And because his world would fall down around him if he ventured outside this tiny, safe and irrelevant magic circle, he misses the whole point of what I am saying.

I recall with joy a conversation with the late BBC veteran Vincent Hanna, a fine journalist and undoubted left-winger, who used to take a savage delight in pursuing any BBC person who ever showed any signs of *party* affiliation. I asked him if he had never himself had any political affiliation in this country. No, he said, he'd once been a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, but that didn't count. I pointed out to him that this assertion was itself doubly contentious, and said something quite important about his views on several subjects. He wasn't all that amused.

The BBC is indeed scrupulous to the point of physical pain in ensuring that fair amounts of time are given to the major parties, according to agonisingly detailed formulae. This is mathematically possible, though difficult, and I am sure they feel very virtuous about it.

However, it is wholly ineffectual even in this narrow field because it does not deal with the following:

*How much space to give to lesser parties which did not earn any coverage through their votes at the last election, but which may now have a considerable potential vote which may be affected by the tone and quantity of coverage given to them.

*The advantage which can be given to the government (but isn't always) through use of the 'sandwich' - in which the reporter outlines the controversy between the parties with reasonable fairness, but then adds that 'government sources' or some other anonymous thing, take a particular view or expect a certain outcome or adopt a certain interpretation of the facts. These unnamed sources or 'experts' are a device by which the government (if it is in favour) or the opposition (if it is in favour) may be given the best of the argument without anyone needing to step off the plinth marked 'impartial reporting'. Once you are aware of this method, you'll see it all the time. But most people aren't, so they are manipulated by it - and editors at the BBC are often very lax in controlling it.

*The use of loaded verbs such as 'claims' instead of 'said' (this happens all the time, and was applied on a BBC news report on Thursday night to a statement made by the Prime Minister). No BBC reporter, committed by Charter to impartiality,  is entitled to cast doubt on the veracity of any statement made by any legitimate politician in good faith in this way. Yet they do it all the time.

*The use of tone or expression of voice, the giving of the last word, the angling of questions, the control (or lack of it) of facial expression (I remember the ecstatic grin on the face of one BBC journalist, now a prominent newsreader, on election night in May 1997 as the news of Labour's victory became clear).

Once we move from direct politics into the hundreds of other areas of contention, from immigration and the EU to man-made global warming, the sexual revolution, exam inflation, Israel versus the Arabs, Northern Ireland, religion versus secularism, capital punishment, gun control, the nature of American society, and so forth, the formula simply cannot apply as the parties often aren't divided on these matters. But the population, which pays the licence fee, is divided. And it is in these matters that the BBC endlessly demonstrates its bias by selection of presenter, choice of angle, time given to particular subjects and not given to others (to be sure, Roman Catholic priestly sexual abuse is important, and there's some interest in homosexual priests and bishops, but BBC religious affairs programmes concentrate on these subjects to the exclusion of, or minimisation of many equally interesting and important religious topics).

Nor is this problem confined to news and current affairs programmes. Woman's Hour, the Archers, the News Quiz, Have I Got News For You, all contain many instances of partiality in non-partisan but important and contentious matters.

The origin of the current discussion on this is the reprimanding of Mr Paxman for an article in the Guardian. The reprimand was futile and ineffectual - Mr Paxman's article can have surprised nobody. Why should we pretend that we didn't know this was what he thought? The whole presumption on which the incident was based was the absurd one which Mr Finn defends - that policing explicit political bias is any answer to charges of deep cultural, moral and social implicit bias. It isn't. Can we return to that?

Central Heating: George Orwell Speaks

My brother Christopher has been in touch on the subject of central heating and civilisation, prompted by our debate here on what ‘The Abolition of Britain’ is actually about. He is sure that I must have got the idea that central heating weakened family ties from an essay by George Orwell. (I am not so sure, suspecting that I found it first in Richard Hoggart’s ‘Uses of Literacy’ or Young and Wilmot’s ‘Family and Kinship in East London’. This particular Orwell essay is not in my much-scribbled-in, worn-to-a-ravelling four volume Penguin Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism’ from the late 1960s).

Pointing out (with accuracy) that one of his family duties in our childhood was ‘minding the fire’, so he knows what he is talking about here, he writes: ‘ The relevant essay is called “The Case for the Open Fire”, and was published in the Evening Standard on 8 December 1945. It’s a defence of coal-burning hearths as against gas or electric ones rather than central heating, but it says inter alia that “the survival of the family as an institution may be more dependent on it than we realise”. He goes on to say that “it has an aesthetic appeal which is particularly important to young children.”

He continues: ’The reason why I think you will scour Hoggart and Young in vain is that they didn’t have Orwell’s intuition. There were certain things - weights and measures is another good example - where he went straight to the point and didn’t consider things like research. But perhaps someone else - Alan Sillitoe for example, or even Raymond Williams - did manage the same observation.’

Well, there you are. If I can’t kill off the idea that I’m against central heating, I can at least claim to have the great George Orwell at my side in this hopeless but noble struggle. One of the glories of working for a newspaper is that I could within minutes slip downstairs and call up the actual article (the ‘Evening Standard’ files are held by Associated Newspapers, which bought the title in the 1980s).

And so here I have it before me, published just as news of the Bretton Woods agreement hit the front page, a Saturday evening essay to decorate a thin, rationed, crammed newspaper. Gosh, it reminds me that London evening papers used to come out on Saturdays, which they long ago ceased to do.

And here is the core of it. Orwell is discussing how the new homes, to be built in the post-war era, will be heated.

“A small but noisy minority will want to do away with the old-fashioned coal fire”, he predicts. “These people - they are also the people who admire gaspipe chairs and glass-topped tables - will argue that the coal fire is wasteful, dirty and inefficient. They will urge that dragging buckets of coal upstairs is a nuisance and that raking out the cinders in the morning is a grisly job, and they will add that the fogs of our cities are made thicker by the smoking of thousands of chimneys.

“All of which is perfectly true, and yet comparatively unimportant if one thinks in terms of *living* and not merely of saving trouble.

“I am not arguing that coal fires should be the sole form of heating, merely that every house or flat should have at least one open fire round which the family can sit. In our climate, anything that keeps you warm is to be welcomed and under ideal conditions every form of heating apparatus wouldbe installed in every house.

“For any kind of workroom central heating is the best arrangement. It needs no attention, and since it warms all parts of the room evenly, one can group the furniture according to the needs of work.

“For bedrooms, gas or electric fires are best. Even the humble oilstove throws out a lot of heat, and has the virtue of being portable. It is a great comfort to carry an oilstove with you into the bathroom on a winter morning. But for a room that is to be lived in, only a coal fire will do.

“The first great virtue of a coal fire is that, just because it only warms one end of the room, it forces people to group themselves in a sociable way.This evening, while I write, the same pattern is being reproduced in hundreds of thousands of British homes.

“To one side of the fireplace sits Dad, reading the evening paper. To the other side sits Mum, doing her knitting. On the hearthrug sit the children, playing snakes and ladders. Up against the fender, roasting himself, lies the dog. It is a comely pattern, a good background to one’s memories, and the survival of the family as an institution may be more dependent on it than we realise.”

And so it continues, with occasional swipes at cold, quick efficiency and memories (shared by me) of heating the poker red-hot, seeing salamanders in the depths of the blaze and throwing salt on the flames to turn them green (there is a snarl at fake-coal electric fires - ‘the most dismal objects of all’) and even a swipe at ‘clammy’ hot water bottles as inferior to the old warming pans. There is also this wholly inimitable and beyond-parody Orwellian segment, in which the leftist struggles rather comically with the traditionalist: ‘ Many a devout Communist has been forced against all his principles to take in a capitalist paper merely because the Daily Worker is not large enough to light the fire with.'

Why Jeremy Paxman Might Not Be a conservative

Please note that’s ‘ a conservative’, not a ‘Conservative’. As I so often have to insist during these discussions about the mighty appointed BBC Presenterocracy, it’s not *Party* affiliations I’m interested in, but which side of the great moral, cultural and social divide the person is on.

Mr Paxman is on record as saying that he has voted for ‘all the major parties. “More than the main three, oh certainly.” This was in an interview with Decca Aitkenhead of ‘the Guardian’. As readers here will know, I don’t regard the Conservative Party as being particularly conservative, so that doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the subject in question.

Then there’s the past. Mr Paxman says he was a communist at school, and famously described himself as a socialist when he applied, in his twenties, for the editorship of the Left-wing ‘New Statesman’ magazine.

All right, you say, so people change their minds. As indeed they do, and should.

But (in answering the question I pose above) I can offer two significant pieces of information. So far as I can discover, Mr Paxman is not married to the mother of his children, despite the relationship being apparently long and happy. In my generation, such a situation generally means that those involved (one thinks also of Alastair Campbell and his unwife, Fiona Millar) do not approve of marriage. This position is neither particularly uncommon nor controversial among the metropolitan Guardian-reading left. But it is not a conservative view.

Second, let us return to the ‘Guardian’ interview with Ms Aitkenhead for a moment (this was published on 9th February 2009).

She asked him if his children were educated privately. Here’s what happened: ‘When I ask if he educates his children privately, he gets very defensive. “I’m very ready to be hung for anything that I do, but I think their lives are their own.” But they don’t decide where they go to school. “Yes, but it is they who go to school.” I’m not asking you to name their school, I say, I’m just asking if you educate your children privately. “Mind your own business.” ‘

Now, I have educated my children privately since the moment I could afford to do so. I’d rather not (I’d have much more disposable income if I didn’t). But I regard it as a defensible, wise choice. I’d rather the state schools were capable of doing what private schools do, and that they didn’t do some of the things that private schools tend not to do - that is, undermining the messages children get at home, with multi-culti, anti-Christian, PC propaganda.

I don’t think the generality of private schools are by any means immune from many of the weaknesses of modern education, but they are not as bad as the generality of state schools. I know there are some exceptional state schools, but - despite being rather well paid - I can’t afford to live in their catchment areas, which, thanks to the requirement for large sums of capital, is (oh, what a lovely paradox) often far more expensive than paying fees for a few years.

I think there are strong, powerful reasons for my doing this.

On the other hand, Leftists (see the chapter on ‘Class War’ in my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’) see something morally questionable in using private schools, and when they do it, often do it reluctantly. Among affluent metropolitan leftist types, it’s a constant source of anxiety (see the long and fascinating quotation from Nick Cohen about this in my ‘Cameron Delusion’) . It cannot always be solved by such dodges as getting your children into Roman Catholic schools that are in all important respects grammar schools. Or by moving to the hugely expensive and tiny catchment areas of Camden Girls or William Ellis, among the few excellent private secondary schools in London. Sometimes, and this really hurts, the whole chequebook has to come out or the children get hurt.

For these people, private education is morally troubling. That’s why David Cameron, who wants to appeal to precisely this class of person in the media, has wangled his child into a simply lovely C of E primary rather than pay the fees he could easily afford (though things will get much more difficult once secondary schools are involved). That’s why Ms Aitken, who is a very sharp interviewer, asked the question. She knew it was profoundly revelatory. And that is why Mr Paxman, an equally sharp interviewer, didn’t answer it.

In general, I’d also ask my ‘Paxman is a conservative’ theorists to see if they can answer this question. Mr Paxman never had any trouble before 1997 interviewing Tory ministers from an oppositional (and therefore leftist) point of view. His job, you might say. He has to play Devil’s advocate, etc. But can anyone remember him interviewing a Blair-era Labour minister in a similarly hostile fashion, from the position of a *conservative* Devil’s advocate? Not as a disappointed leftist Devil’s advocate, please note (the standard anti-Blair critical position of the post-1968 media classes). But from a socially, morally, culturally ( and constitutionally) conservative point of view?

Relevantly, I can recall during my long-ago stint as an (openly partial) presenter on the then ‘Talk Radio’, interviewing William Hague, and wishing afterwards that I had been able to find it in myself to be harder on him. But the muscle and force just hadn’t been there.

Could Iran be Involved?

  Several readers ask about my throwaway line, speculating that people might view the great Arab wave of uprisings differently, if it turned out to have been orchestrated from Iran, as is quite possible. Some seem to have taken my speculation as an assertion. Not a bit of it. That something is 'possible' does not mean that I know it has happened, or that I am saying that it has happened.

I know of no evidence that Iran is behind any of these episodes. And I think we must allow that, thanks to TV and the Internet, some of them may simply be copycat actions by populations seeing an opportunity. But what put the idea in my mind were two facts which emerged in the past few days.

One was the surge of protest in Bahrain (now for the moment eclipsed by events in Libya). The other was the passage through the Suez Canal on their way to Syria of two Iranian warships (not 'battleships' as some people insist on calling them; a 'battleship' is a specific class of heavily armoured and heavily-gunned vessel, now more or less obsolete, and certainly not possessed by Iran. A 'warship' covers all types of ships adapted or built for warlike purposes, from a minesweeper to an aircraft carrier).

Well now, Bahrain has previously been the target of Iranian attempts to destabilise its government and take it over, back in 1981. Teheran is specially interested in this tiny kingdom because of the majority Shia Muslim population there, and because of one other thing, which I shall mention. Iran's position as guardian and friend of Shia Muslims has already hugely increased its influence in Iraq, and also in Lebanon. Teheran in general has a policy of trying to overcome its isolation in the Muslim world by becoming more powerful and by riding the wave of Judophobia and anti-Israel sentiment on the Arab street. President Ahmadinejad's shameful (and here I do mean the word as a direct criticism) Holocaust-denying railings against Israel have made him the taxi drivers' favourite in every Arab city, a status unheard of for a Shia Persian .

But Bahrain, though tiny, is also enormously significant in the Great Game of power and oil, because it is the indispensable base for the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet ( and was until 1971 a Royal Navy base, when we still had them in that part of the world).

It also struck me that the regimes which had already fallen, those of Tunisia and Egypt, were broadly sympathetic to the USA, as is Jordan, which has some current difficulties with crowds. And even Libya, since the Clinton-Blair rapprochement, has been more or less in the pro-American camp , despite Colonel Gadaffi's noisy rhetoric. What's more, sooner or later the question is going to arise - if all these tyrannies fall - of whether Saudi Arabia's widely-unloved monarchy can survive. Iran would certainly rejoice to see an anti-American government arise there.

Whereas I have yet to see any serious sign of revolt in Syria, an undoubted despotism, but one which just happens to be a close ally of Iran. I remember, in my small, discreet hotel in Tehran a few years ago, being alarmed to find as my fellow guests several senior Syrian Army officers, impressively uniformed, obviously on some co-operation mission. I thought my accidental presence might get me suspected of spying, but fortunately this didn't happen.

As to why Iran might think on these lines, I suspect the Iranian leaders might find it rather amusing, even just, to drive Western influence out of the Middle East through such methods. After all, Iran's own rather popular government, that of Mohammed Mossadeq , was disgracefully overthrown in 1953 by a joint CIA and MI6 plot, involving paid mobs, suborned newspaper editors and the rest ( you can read the CIA account of it on the web). My former MP, C.M. 'Monty' Woodhouse (MP for Oxford in the early 1960s and again from 1970-74) , was one of the organisers, as was the amazing Kermit 'Kim' Roosevelt (Grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt).

These things do happen. And we are not always told about them at the time. On the other hand, it could all be a complete coincidence.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Oddly enough, or perhaps not that oddly, most people are not made to think when they encounter facts. They ignore the ones they dislike, and welcome the ones they like. So I am more than a little wearied by the contributor who presents me with the latest piece of research which appears (we’ll come to that) to fit his pro-drug agenda, and appends the words ‘Makes You Think, Doesn’t It’ in a finger-wagging, brow-furrowing, darkly significant, pub wiseacre sort of way. All I know is that I have never managed to make this particular character think by producing information which contradicts or undermines his view. So the answer to his question is ‘Probably not in your case’.

Unscrupulous propaganda and crude arguments are far better for persuading audiences in public debates than careful, thoughtful argument - and fair-minded concessions to an opponent are almost invariably treated as a sign of weakness. It’s all very sad.

I once won an argument and a vote in a long-ago Labour Party meeting - the only time I ever did in that forum - through an act of conscious and crude manipulation. I decided, just to see what would happen, and for purposes of revenge, to use my opponents’ methods against them and see if it worked. My left-wing foe (I’ve completely forgotten the topic under discussion, though I can remember her chubby, self-satisfied face) gave me what I needed. She said that her plans would need to be introduced through ‘enabling legislation’.

All I needed to do (it really was this simple) was to say, repeatedly that Adolf Hitler had employed ‘enabling legislation’ to bring in his regime ( ‘Hitler, yes, Hitler! comrades, did this very thing’) to gather enough deluded votes to beat her. I had no need to discuss the actual proposal at all. The crude, illogical, irrelevant smear was quite enough, just as such smears were always enough to defeat my proposals. I still recall the mixture of triumph and slight shame I felt. All I needed to do was to descend to their level, and I too could begin to win votes. I had already used good old Trotskyist entryist methods (I’ll tell you which ones another time) to get a seat on the party General Management Committee - how horrified they all were when I turned up with valid credentials. But in the end I tired of it. Nothing worth having could have been won by such means, and the pleasure of seeing the other lot beaten would soon have cloyed. As for the Labour Party, who could possibly have foreseen that it would manage to portray a takeover by the moral, cultural and sexual left as a return to ‘moderation’, and win the 1997 election on the strength of it? Not I, for one, though in those days I had only just become a political reporter, and did not yet know how ignorant that part of my trade is about politics.

But let us return to our ‘Makes You Think' friend, and his (or rather the) research on MDMA ( ‘Ecstasy’) as published in the Observer. As it happens, I seldom write about MDMA here, being much more concerned about Cannabis. So I don’t make any special claims to know much about it. The story itself is one of those that retreats a bit as you approach it, like a bank of fog.

It was carried out by a team led by Professor John Halpern of Harvard Medical School, and published in the journal ‘Addiction’ last week. I am not sure how available it is, having been otherwise engaged on the Samantha Fraser affair (see previous posting) and lacking time to search.

Nor have I checked the nature of the US National institute on Drug Abuse , which granted more than a million pounds for the research.

The study is mainly directed against previous research which has suggested that use of MDMA can lead to brain damage. I have to say that ‘brain damage’ ( an effect hard to define and hard to detect) is not the effect I would necessarily associate with this drug, suspecting it rather more of leading to genuine (that is to say physiologically caused) clinical depression and other emotional deficiencies in later life.

Now, the Observer story notes this, saying: ‘... the taking of ecstasy has also been linked to damage to the central nervous system and research in recent years has suggested that long-term changes to emotional states and behaviour have been triggered by consumption of the drug’.

It goes on ( and please, please read the whole thing. I am not in any way trying to filter it): 'Halpern was sharply critical of the quality of the research that had linked ecstasy to brain damage. "Too many studies have been carried out on small populations, while overarching conclusions have been drawn from them," he said.’

Now, those who have read the whole report may correct me if I am wrong, but this seems to narrow the matter down only to the ‘brain damage’ part of the problem.

No surprise there. I am really not sure how one could measure objectively the sorts of effects which I suspect this drug ( along with some others) of having. As Allan Bloom put it so powerfully in his general attack on drugs and rock music in ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ : ‘In my experience, students who have had a serious fling with drugs - and gotten over it - find it difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations.

‘It is as though the colour has been drained out of their lives and they see everything in black and white. The pleasure they experienced in the beginning was so intense that they no longer look for it at the end or as the end.

They may function perfectly well, but dryly, routinely. Their energy has been sapped, and they do not expect their life’s activity to produce anything but a living, whereas liberal education is supposed to encourage the belief that the good life is the pleasant life and that the best life is the most pleasant life...

He then makes a metaphorical connection between the drugs and the music that goes with them , saying ‘as long as they have the Walkman (we would now say MP3 player) on they cannot hear what the Great Tradition has to say. After its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find that they are deaf’.

I think there are also some interesting reflections on drug use and later depression in Tim Lott’s interesting book ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’.

I myself have a suspicion that drugs, by artificially stimulating pleasure-producing nervous reactions designed for rare moments of real triumph, joy and ecstasy (the real one), deplete the body’s reserves of joy and delight and leave them empty in later life when they may be badly needed. But again, how would one measure this objectively?

But to return to the Observer report: ‘The resulting experiment whittled down 1,500 potential participants to 52 selected users, whose cognitive abilities matched those of a group of 59 non-users. (My note: I think this is a very small sample for much of a conclusion, but I am open to correction here) “We even took hair samples of participants to test whether they were telling the truth about their drug and alcohol habits,” said Halpern.

“Essentially we compared one group of people who danced and raved and took ecstasy with a similar group of individuals who danced and raved but who did not take ecstasy. When we did that, we found that there was no difference in their cognitive abilities.” In other words, previous studies highlighted problems triggered by other factors, such as use of other drugs or drink, or sleep deprivation.’

My main response is that this study sought to narrow what was being examined to a very specific part of the possible effects of MDMA, one which may not even be its most fundamental risk to users.. I’d be interested to know more about its genesis. What it found is undoubtedly interesting, but I do not think it is the clean bill of health that a casual reader might imagine it to be.

On some other matters of general conversation, nothing that I have read about the EDL makes me warm to it or see it as a solution to our problems, though it has better PR and more tactical nous than the moribund and increasingly factional BNP. I think some of those involved with it have unlovely pasts.

James Hedges is right in his response to Tom Bumstead. The story about the ECHR’s lack of actual powers was carried in ‘the Times’ but picked up by many other media outlets.
I think Mr Wessex has told us rather more about himself than he has about the Middle East. Oh dear.

It seemed to me that Mr Paxman’s thoughts on the Iraq matter were only interesting because they appeared under his name, and that they were couched in the form and shape used by the Left. I am grateful for the figures on support for the war, which are indeed interesting. I also opposed the Kosovo war, an enterprise in which I found myself very lonely indeed - but it was good practice for the early stages of the Iraq affair, when non-Leftist opponents of the invasion were rare indeed, and when the BBC more or less stopped asking me on the airwaves because it couldn’t cope with the dissonance between the fact that I was an official bad person, and the other fact that I held officially laudable views. Bad person holds good view. This does not compute.

While it is true that some non-Leftists opposed the Iraq war ( I was one of them) they did so in different ways and in different places from the left who did so. And for different reasons. I once declined an invitation to speak at a ‘Stop the War’ rally because I thought and think that the slogan ‘Free Palestine’, which was part of the package, was absurd, and unconnected with the issue. Whatever the region would be if the Arab Muslim cause triumphed, it wouldn’t be free. The Palestinian Authority had attracted several severe criticisms from Amnesty International even before it became an official government, and had pioneered new methods of TV censorship, never previously tried. Imagine what it would be like if it attained sovereignty.

I can’t here go into the many reasons why law-governed, constitutional government is rare to non-existent in Arab Muslim countries. Here are a few : the power of clans, which makes political parties hard to form; the Shia-Sunni division, the absence of a pluralist tradition, the non-existence of the concept of separation between church (or mosque) and state, the absence of any kind of adversarial tradition or genuinely free press.One could go on and on.
But I would ask readers to recognise that an absence of enthusiasm for the overthrow of Arab despots isn’t in any way an enthusiasm for those despots. It is based mainly on an unwillingness to believe that these events will lead to anything much better, and an irritation at the over-optimistic and shamelessly supportive coverage which supposedly impartial organisations have shown. The night Mubarak didn’t resign, the BBC nearly had a brain haemorrhage, so furious was it over thee Egyptian President’s failure to do as it had predicted he would. So far it has produced two naked military regimes where there had previously been a top-dressing of constitutional government. Worth it?

How do I know that the men who assailed Lara Logan weren’t Mubarak supporters? I don’t, but it strikes me that, had they been , the world’s press would have been very keen to say so, since that would have fitted the narrative they had decided to follow. I think the story was a) delayed and b) shorn of one its most significant facts (‘Jew! Jew! Jew!’) precisely because this upset the preconceptions ( and increasingly the desires) of the news organisations covering the matter. Had the attackers been Mubarak thugs, wouldn’t someone have said so by now? But they haven’t, so far as I know.

I’m amazed at the apparent enthusiasm for AV among contributors here. The FPTP system, which I much prefer, produces strong governments which can be turned out in a night if they prove unsatisfactory, and compels parties to make coalitions before the vote, rather than afterwards. The reason it currently works so badly is not because there is anything intrinsically wrong with it, but because it is dominated by dead political parties, kept alive by state subsidy, guaranteed BBC access and dodgy billionaires. AV will do nothing to fix any of this. Our constitution was fine before Labour started mucking it up in 1997, and it is being changed to suit the governors, not the governed.

No system is perfect. But the perversion of Parliament mentioned (the abolition of the death penalty, for instance) were achieved by bypassing elections. the Jenkins-Heath alliance, as discussed in my ‘Abolition of Britain’, was able to get majorities for the permissive society, and for EU membership, by creating a cross-party radical alliance between Labour and Tory ‘progressives’ - an alliance which was never tested at the polls. The system was about to deal with this, via the collapse of the Tory Party under IDS, when the establishment stepped in placed the Tories in receivership so saving them from the fate they deserved (see my ‘Cameron Delusion’) .