Welcome to 2042 - the year when Britain is no more than a memory

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The New Year has always seemed to me to be a time for enjoying a bit of gloom.

So in the spirit of hearty pessimism, I’d like to take you forward 30 years, for an imaginary peep into the pages of the ‘China Daily’ of January 1, 2042. You can judge for yourselves how imaginary it really is.

'Cabinet papers issued today by the state archives of the People’s Republic cast an interesting light on the final years of the country formerly known as Great Britain. Younger readers should know that, 30 years ago, this once-important nation (now dissolved) occupied the vacation islands, famous for their mild climate and their picturesque historical theme parks, which lie off our far western coast.

'A memo from Prime Minister David Cameron to his deputy, Nicholas Clegg, runs in part "...and thanks so much, Nick, for your continuing self-sacrifice in our joint cause. I’m so sorry you have to put up with those moronic cartoons portraying you as the junior partner when – as we both well know - this is a liberal government in which I am happy to let you get your way.

'"I am especially grateful for your recent performance, a fine piece of acting. The dim old buffers who still vote for my party, however many times we let them down, were genuinely taken in, and thought a) that I had struck a blow for Britain in Brussels and b) that you were angry about it."

'There are also memos to the Interior Minister of the time, Theresa May, congratulating her for "sounding as if you really mean to do something about crime and immigration" and a ruder one to the Justice Minister, Kenneth Clarke, chiding him for "letting the cat out of the bag: it won’t do, old boy! Can’t you just be satisfied with getting your way? There’s no need to gloat in public."

'A letter from Mr Cameron to Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish government, is strangely friendly, given Mr Cameron’s frequent public assertions that he was against Scottish independence. Experts from the University of Shanghai have concluded that Mr Cameron secretly wanted a Scottish breakaway as the only chance of his party ever again winning an Election on its own.'

The China Daily continues: 'No trace can be found of any serious plans to reform the country’s disastrous state schools, nor to curb its out-of-control welfare system, known to be widely abused by criminals and to encourage parasitical sloth.

'As for the economy, the archives contain only a plaintive note from the Finance Minister to the Premier, bearing the words, "There’s no money!"

'The documents make it plain that the governing class of the country formerly known as Great Britain had no idea how to cope with the problems they faced and were mainly obsessed with public relations. In the light of this, the events of the next 20 years should have come as no surprise.'

I don't recall Dickens writing an Estuary English soap opera

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is one of the best books ever written. David Lean’s 1946 realisation of it is one of the best films ever made - not least because so much of its dialogue is taken direct from the original.

So why is the BBC’s new adaptation so astonishingly, disappointingly, ridiculously bad?

It is because the BBC is so full of people who simply refuse to admit that they have anything to learn from the past. In their world, all drama must be either Doctor Who or EastEnders (or in this case a combination of the two).
Pip Pirrip, raised in a blacksmith’s cottage, could not possibly have grown up to look like a male model. Herbert Pocket was never a vicious snob. Miss Havisham was a yellow-skinned, deranged hag, not a self-harming young woman.

Estella was an unattainable beauty - not a stroppy person with the adenoidal voice and the scowling visage of an affronted North London social worker.

Perhaps above all, Joe Gargery was a man of almost saintly goodness and humour, rather than the glum and self-righteous person in this TV travesty, who always looks as if he’s just off to a Chartist meeting.

I reread the opening chapters of the book to reassure myself about this and was repeatedly convulsed with laughter and moved close to tears. The TV version produced no emotion at all and resorted to incessant loud music to tell us how we should have been feeling.

The vandals behind it also managed to insert a scene in a brothel - perhaps they can tell me where this occurs in the book. Dickens, being a proper writer, managed to envelop the foul figure of Bentley Drummle in a cloud of evil without any such crudities.

And the script was full of modern soap opera language, often in Estuary English quite unlike the speech of the time – ‘con man’, ‘close the deal’, ‘he owes me’.

Yes, of course you need to make changes when you adapt an immense book into three hours of drama. But you need to stay close to the truth of the original, or you are destroying it. Something similar is now happening to Sherlock Holmes thanks to the half-witted cinema versions. In an age when few read any more, this third-rate stuff is in danger of replacing greatness with cut-price hogwash.

* * *

A Canadian judge has ruled that a teenager was under the influence of an ‘antidepressant’ when he knifed a close friend to death.

Judge Robert Heinrichs was told in his Winnipeg court that the killer (also a user of cannabis and cocaine) grew more irrational once prescribed the ‘antidepressant’.

‘He had become irritable, restless, agitated, aggressive and unclear in his thinking,’ the judge said.

‘In that state he overreacted in an impulsive, explosive and violent way’.

Now off the drug, he was ‘simply not the same in behaviour or character’.

It is a painful case, but it underlines the urgent need for  a proper inquiry into these widely used pills.

We're making North Korea worse

Small politicians try to look big by exaggerating the size and the danger of their foes. The West’s ridiculous attitude to North Korea is an example of this.

I have been there, and can report that this bankrupt, starving statelet is so poor it cannot even warm its own government buildings and must have used up much of its petrol reserves to stage the funeral of its deceased leader.

Its rulers are trapped in their palace. If they show weakness, they will be torn to pieces by their hungry, disillusioned subjects. Above all, they need a way out. If we do not help provide one they will, in the end, have to collapse into the arms of China.

Why should we want that? Yet we continue to portray this sad survival as a major power and adopt a high moral tone in our dealings with it. Yes, it can still do harm – but it is much more likely to do so if we maintain our current policy.

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Pyongyang Revisited – or, still no chance of a Flat White in North Korea

It does not feel as if four years have passed since I finally managed to visit North Korea. The experience feels as if it were yesterday.  Those who have not read my account of that visit, or who would like to read it again, may find it here.

I am glad that it took me so long to make the journey. Long years before, in May 1986,  I was one of the reporters accompanying Margaret Thatcher on a visit to Seoul. Don’t be too impressed. We were crammed in the back of a very old VC-10, a long way from her unless she decided to stun us with a monologue, which from time to time she did.  So I had been taken, tagging on the tail of her party,  to the strange and perplexing border between the two Koreas at Panmunjom.  Just yards away, with no physical barrier in the way, was the entrance to the Looking-Glass World of Communism which in those days stretched all the way to Germany.

Around the small enclave in the Demilitarised Zone were dense woods full of wildlife. Strange music played from a ‘village’ of concrete blocks, plainly uninhabited, which the North Koreans had built  for propaganda purposes. Tantalising mystery lay beyond the weird pavilion from which North Korean soldiers and their visitors gazed at us.  How simple it all seemed then – evil over there, good on our side. I really, really wanted to see the evil half of the world, perhaps so that I might be better at recognising good when I saw it later, and used many methods to try to go there. But as a journalist I was forbidden. Tour firms refused to take me. The North Korean embassy in Moscow, which I pestered with requests, coldly ignored me.

I suppose I more or less accepted that the North-South division was an oriental version of the German problem, and then went on to accept the idea that Pyongyang was some sort of heart of darkness, headquarters of evil, etc etc, until the lies of the Kosovo War, and then the Iraq war, corroded my credulity and compelled me to examine these things for myself.

When at last, via a Russian academic in Australia and another link in China that I will not mention here in case I need to use it again, I found a way in, I was determined not to write the standard account that I had seen so many times.  Nor did it seem likely to me that this small, isolated, desperately poor place could be a threat to the world, as so many people were writing.

As I say, you can tread here what I wrote then.  When we left, I and the others in our very mixed party made a half-serious promise to try to meet again for an event which still seems highly possible in my lifetime – the opening of the first Pyongyang Starbucks. This (though also probable as an actual fact) is a sort of metaphor for the transformation I have seen in so many other ex-Communist countries. It is one I hope for, and expect.

But only if we can control our rather childish readiness to believe in the North Korean bogeyman. North Korea is not a giant, but a dwarf. Those soldiers marching in those enormous parades are ill-fed and on average many inches shorter than men and women of the same age in the South. Their uniforms are made of cheap poor-quality cloth. Their weapons ( I have seen them up close) are obsolete and decrepit. I wonder how much real ammunition they have for them? Or how much fuel they needed to hoard and gather to keep the vehicles moving during the funeral of Kim Jong Il ?

I wonder ( and this is my own individual theory based upon observation) how many North Koreans , at all levels of society are either too hungry (if the rural poor) or too drunk (if the urban poor) to do their jobs properly. I have no doubt they could still do quite a lot of damage to South Korea if they wanted to. But I doubt if they could win any kind of war against a modern well-trained, well-equipped army made up of strong, well-fed young men.

I saw little of the countryside and what I did see was carefully pre-arranged, but even so failed to hide the absence of modern farm machinery or modern agricultural techniques, plus the fact that a supposedly electrified rail system was being operated, where it worked at all, by diesel locomotives. It was quite clear that even in the privileged elite city of Pyongyang, which is closed to most citizens, electric power was in very short supply (our hotel’s power was switched off as soon as we left each morning, and probably not switched on again until soon before we returned in the evening)  .  But I do know that the surveillance and stage-management broke down on two important occasions during my visit. Once was when we arrived at our designated restaurant to fund a man, dead drunk, prone upon the grass in front of the entrance. When members of our party tried to take pictures of this, our furious and embarrassed escorts  summoned loyal citizens to form a human wall around the drunkard until he could be removed.

On another occasion, I managed to get left alone with one of our escorts, the less confident or the two, and to persuade him to let me to roam a little along the bizarre street in which we found ourselves. It contained several absurd shops, with no staff and no customers, supposedly selling such nonsensical combinations of goods as motorbikes and cornflakes. The only busy spot was a small shop front with opaque doors, outside which a few men squatted.  When I asked my escort what it was, he said it was a bar. I suggested we visit it. In a state close to panic, he emphatically refused and steered me as far away from it as possible. Readers must understand that these escorts are human beings, who must be presumed to have wives and children, and that I for one thought it wrong to push them too hard into awkward positions.

Put these two experiences together with a third, when I opened my hotel room window,  high up over central Pyongyang, quite late one evening. the city was almost wholly silent (there was very little traffic, mechanical or human). But from far, far away I could clearly hear a voice singing. My guess is that Pyongyang is fuelled by rice wine, much as Hogarth’s London was fuelled by gin, and that the regime, within limits, is happy to numb its population in this way.

I describe elsewhere the boundless privation and misery which I am sure exist in the parts of the country that foreigners never see.  I am, not in any way trying to defend, justify or understate the sheer nastiness of such a state.

But I am trying to point out that it is a dead end. Without the Soviet subsidies, and the Chinese ones, which kept it going in Cold War days, North Korea is simply bankrupt. A small elite live in the strange, curtained luxury enjoyed by the privileged classes of officially egalitarian states , though much of it is exaggerated by myth and rumour, and their lives would probably seem cramped and limited to a well-off western family. The larger privileged class who are allowed to dwell in the capital live reasonably well by their own standards, but may by now be aware of how poor they are by comparison with their cousins in Seoul.

It is genuinely unclear just how much most North Koreans know of life outside, and if I eventually return this will be one of the questions I will be most anxious to answer.  Far more than they used to, I think, thanks to the many who have slipped across the surprisingly ill-patrolled border with China, some of whom have returned  or got messages about their lives to their relatives still stuck in Kim’s dark, decaying paradise.

The real problem for the country’s rulers (who of course know perfectly well how backward their country is, and how poor) is how to get out alive. They cannot risk a sudden collapse, as happened to East Germany. They would probably be torn to pieces, if the populace ever thought that the security apparatus had lost its will to kill. South Korea does not want this either. It greatly fears millions of refugees sweeping south, uncontrollable in their hunger and disillusionment, and then the enormous economic burden of reconstructing the blighted North from scratch. It was bad enough in Germany. It would be far, far worse in Korea.

There are far too many Western politicians who enjoy having North Korea to use as a bogeyman, for their various reasons. There are also that nasty new breed of foreign policy moralists, whose aim is to feel good about themselves rather than do actual good unto others, and who like to lecture the rest of the world about evil dictators, and long to put all such dictators on trial. It seems to have escaped them that this is why modern despots are so reluctant to stand down and increasingly fight to the death. If young Kim, the ‘Great Successor’ could be guaranteed a nice quiet exit and a chance to spend more time with his foreign bank accounts,  my guess is that he and his entourage would be only too happy to go.

But we won’t let them. We mistake their noisy self-aggrandisement for genuine aggression when I suspect they are just trying to say that they want Western Europe and the USA to come to their rescue  (how they long for a high-level American visit). They greatly fear that they will simply become a colony of China,  which will probably happen sooner or later if the ‘West’ doesn’t take advantage of the few months of opportunity that I think will follow the change of leadership.  These people need help, and above all a way out. They are , as I have written elsewhere, a stagnant remnant of the great flood which global communism caused. If we are genuinely concerned, we should realise that. I suspect there are people starving in North Korea now, who might well be saved from starvation if only we were to adopt a more imaginative and thoughtful policy, instead of pretending that this tiny, impoverished statelet is a menace to the planet.

And Thy Years Shall not Fail – a Christmas Reflection

First of all may I thank the hundreds of people who have contacted me to express sympathy on the death of my brother. I have tried to reply to as many such messages as I can, but it is physically impossible to answer them all in a reasonable time. So may I say to all of you who took the trouble to write, that I am very grateful that you did so, and am comforted by what you said. This applies perhaps most especially to those who wrote to me across great gulfs of disagreement. Civility between opponents is a light in the darkness, a recognition that we are all more united, as humans, than we are divided as supporters of causes or believers in faiths.

 

I shall once again be travelling during the next few days, so this is my last chance to write here until after the Feast of the Nativity. The Mail on Sunday will not be appearing on Sunday because it is Christmas Day, so there will be no column that week.

 

This will be a long gap, and during the brief period of peace in the storm of life, which I hope Christmas will be, I thought I would try to explain why for me, and for many others I suspect, this is such a precious season.

 

Of course, like most children in countries where Christmas is celebrated, I was from my earliest childhood thrilled by the promise of presents, the exhilarating, intoxicating smell of the pine tree in the house, the rich foods and the feeling that this was above all others a special time of year.

I cannot remember (and for the sake of Mr ‘Bunker’ I am sorry about this)  ever being particularly enthused about Father Christmas. Perhaps this is the fault of my father, who could be wonderfully unsentimental about his children, forgetting our names even though there were only two of us and he had presumably helped to choose them, referring to us as ‘that boy’ and ‘that wretched boy’ (these titles were interchangeable, depending on our most recent crimes and misdemeanours). There is also a superb passage in my brother’s memoir ‘Hitch-22’ in which he records trying to strike up a conversation with our father one breakfast time. The head of the Hitchens family blasphemed briefly before growling  ’It’ll be family prayers next’, and returning to a bloodshot examination of the Daily Telegraph. Many years of shipboard wardroom breakfasts, conducted in grumpy silence as the ship pitched and rolled and the plates slid this way and that, had left him hopelessly unprepared for domesticity.  I have no recollection whatever of him attempting to impersonate Father Christmas.

 

In fact I much preferred the weeks before Christmas, the strange light in the sky (the melodramatic, suspenseful nature of late December English weather is perfectly described in John Masefield’s enchanting book ‘The Box of Delights’) , the carol singing, the stirring of the pudding (the Church of England has now abolished ‘Stir-Up Sunday, in its incessant effort to get rid of everything about the Church that anybody actually likes. The prayer for that day contains an exhortation to ‘Stir up, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’ and refers to ‘plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works’,  and that Sunday,  a month before Christmas, was also in many homes the traditional date for stirring of puddings. I have never been sure if this is an accident, or a light-hearted insertion by a jolly Bishop centuries ago) .

 

And, as a boarding school child, there was the long clattering train journey home behind a snorting steam engine (F. Scott Fitzgerald, in one of his short stories, don’t ask me which,  is the only author I know of who has been able to reproduce the excitement of such a land voyage at this time of year. I suspect he quite liked trains. He is buried, perhaps irrelevantly, perhaps not,  in a small graveyard in Rockville, Maryland, very close to the railway line which runs from Washington DC to Chicago, within earshot of the evocative moaning hooters of the huge American locomotives. It was only when I visited his modest tomb that I realised that his full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, and that he had been called after the author of the US national anthem).

 

So for me the season is one of darkness illuminated with carols sung by lamplight, the sun low in the sky, and a promise, never entirely fulfilled on the day itself, of something wonderful to come. That sticks, when all else falls away.

 

It is only more recently, when it has become (as it wasn’t in my childhood home , though we got plenty of religion at school) an occasion for churchgoing that I have been captivated by the extraordinary, disturbing beauty of the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for ‘the Birth-day of Christ, commonly called Christmas Day’ as prescribed in the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer. If you are really fortunate, you may be able to find a church where these passages are read at midnight on Christmas Eve. Listen carefully, if you do. It may not be long before this lovely ceremony is entirely stamped out by modernising fanatics. You could be one of the last to hear it.

 

The Gospel is the soaring, fiery declaration from the opening of St John’s Gospel – ending with ‘and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of his father, full of grace and truth’.

 

But the Epistle, that of St Paul to the Hebrews, borrows from something much older, the 102^nd Psalm, when it draws itself up at the end to declare this promise :’And thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands. They shall perish: but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment: and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up , and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail’.

 

Now, I know there are plenty of readers here who find this sort of thing meaningless or actively repellent, and who could not imagine themselves taking it seriously or taking part in the ceremony which follows.

 

But I ask them, at this season, to set aside their scorn and their reductionist belief that the universe is no more than the sum of its parts. And to try reading these words out loud with an open mind and seeing if their poetry does not catch them somewhere deep inside. The dead are very present in our minds at Christmas (as A.S. Byatt rightly remarks in the extraordinary  quartet of books that begins with ‘the Virgin in the Garden’ ) and the past so close around us that you can almost touch it. There is no moment at which the fierce, all-consuming passage of time is felt so clearly.

 

Is everything that is gone lost forever? Or does it continue to exist in eternity? Well, as with all things, you may choose. But if you choose to hope that our small, squabbling lives have some greater meaning and purpose than we can at first see, then the words ‘Thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail’ seem to me to be so full of meaning (and themselves so very old that their mere survival is in itself astonishing)  that they are enough to make anyone tremble.

 

Well, that’s it. I think Christmas is a religious festival, and pointless without religion.  But I wish you all, even the unbelievers, a peaceful and blessed Nativity, safe and warm amid the blast and tumult of our tottering civilisation.

Don't forget they cheered Chamberlain's 'victory' too

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Sometimes whole countries can get things utterly wrong. This is usually because they prefer soft dreams to the raw truth.

We all know now that Neville Chamberlain made a huge fool of himself when he came back from Munich in September 1938 claiming to have won 'peace for our time' and 'peace with honour', and waving a worthless piece of paper in which Hitler promised that Britain and Germany would never go to war again.

But look at the newspapers of the time and you will find almost all of them crammed with sickly praise for Mr Chamberlain. He was invited on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace by King George VI and was there cheered by a gigantic crowd, many of whom would die in the war that followed.

They should have booed him - not because of what he had done but because he was fool enough to think that Hitler could be trusted. They applauded him because they did not want to be bothered by the boring details of European politics, and preferred to think that he had in fact bought peace.

Something similar is happening to us. Many people who should know better are still cheering David Cameron for his supposed mighty veto in Brussels on December 9.

They are doing this because they passionately want it to be true. They want Mr Cameron to be a patriotic conservative. But he isn’t.

They want Britain to stand up to the EU. But it hasn’t.

Mr Cameron did not in fact use the British veto. There was no treaty to veto. France and Germany were quite happy to get what they wanted by other means - France positively wanted to do so, and Jean-David Levitte, a senior aide of President Sarkozy, has described Mr Cameron’s action as a 'blessing'.

They were happier still to let Mr Cameron take the blame on the Continent - and the credit among his gullible and simple-minded 'Eurosceptic' backbenchers, who really oughtn’t to be allowed out on their own if they are this easy to swindle.

Nor did Mr Cameron save the City of London.

The French, who have never forgiven us either for Trafalgar or for not surrendering in 1940, are still determined to destroy the City. And they can do so - as long as we are idiotic enough to stay in their power by belonging to the EU.

They can and will do this through 'Qualified Majority Voting', under which Britain does not have a veto. Wishful thinking on this scale may not lead to war, as it did in 1938. But it will not help us get out of the EU, or protect us from those who pretend to be our partners, but are in fact our rivals.

Stop cheering. Start booing.

So which country will we ruin next?

President Obama wisely didn’t claim 'Mission Accomplished' when he posed with troops to proclaim the ‘end’ of the invasion of Iraq. If only it were the end.

Once the U.S. troops go, Iraq will become a new battleground between Iran, already hugely powerful through Shia Islam, Turkey, which hates and fears the growth of an oil-rich Kurdish state, and Saudi Arabia, which hates and fears Iran.

Not only was this war fought on a false excuse. It was then justified by another false pretext. And now its outcome is a far graver risk of instability and war than existed before we started.

Now, which Middle Eastern country can we mess up next?

* * *

Far too seldom the enemies of Britain actually admit their real  goals. The greatly overpraised Professor Richard Dawkins (pictured) has now blurted out in a Left-wing magazine that his aim is to 'destroy Christianity'.

Well, I knew that, and you probably knew that – but the anti-religious lobby have until now always pretended that they were just nice, tolerant people.

They’re not. They’re as intolerant as the Spanish Inquisition, but not yet ready to show it.

We need fathers - not social workers

If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. The British Government annually aids the creation of thousands of fatherless families, by the simple procedure of subsidising them with your money and mine.

That is why we have so many father-free homes. Married families with fathers are better, and we should stop being afraid to say so.

Rather than doomed projects to use the State to 'transform 120,000 households in the grip of drugs and crime', all we need to do is stop these subsidies, and the number of such households will instantly begin to diminish.

Setting up yet more social-worker agencies to poke their noses into people’s lives never works. Yet the Prime Minister plans to do this. It is as illogical and hopeless as trying to turn down the central heating by stuffing raspberry jelly into the controls, instead of simply altering the thermostat.

But the mad revolutionary dogma of political correctness falsely condemns the obvious solution as a ‘war on single mothers’. No, what is needed is a war on the people who want to keep those mothers single.

* * *

I do wish people would get more angry about the gap between the anti-crime rhetoric of politicians of all parties, and the truth.

Last week we learned that more than £1billion in fines will never be collected. And the unlovely Ryan Girdlestone (pictured) was let off without punishment after hurling a 40 lb paving slab at a 79-year-old pensioner.

He faked remorse in court, then laughed about it on his Facebook page.

These things follow dozens of ‘crackdowns’ and ‘tough’ speeches. These crackdowns and speeches are all lies. Yet you still vote for the people responsible. Why?

A sermon of empty words

Poor old Archbishop Rowan Williams doesn’t really matter much.

This is because he’s a rather dull mainstream leftist, who talks about politics when he ought to be urging our neo-pagan country to return to Christianity. At the moment we’re more interested in shoes and booze than we are in God.

Since all three major political parties are also controlled by dull, conformist leftists, the Archbishop (pictured) is superfluous when he enters the political arena.  He is powerless in the material world. As we have seen in the past few months, he doesn’t even control his own cathedrals.

But when the Prime Minister talks about religion, it’s a different matter. Mr Cameron has the power to shift this country sharply towards Christianity.

All he needs to do is to dismantle the many anti-Christian laws which have attacked the faith over the past half-century – for example, instant divorce, mass giveaways of contraceptives to children,  the teaching of promiscuity in schools, the licensing of greedy commerce on Sundays, plus of course the total abandonment  of right and wrong by the  justice system.

He won’t do any of those things. In fact, he’d sneer at anyone who sought to do so. So his creepy pose as a ‘committed Christian’ (committed to what?) on Friday is – like almost everything about this man – a brazen fraud on the public. 

Of the two, I think I prefer the Archbishop, who promises nothing and delivers nothing, to a premier whose parcels, when we eagerly open them, are always empty. Oh, and Merry Christmas.

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In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

How odd it is to hear of your own brother’s death on an early morning radio bulletin. How odd it is for a private loss to be a public event. I wouldn’t normally dream of writing about such a thing here, and I doubt if many people would expect me to. It is made even odder by the fact that I am a minor celebrity myself. And that the , ah, complex relationship between me and my brother has been public property.  I have this morning turned down three invitations to talk on the radio about my brother. I had a powerful feeling that it would be wrong to do so, not immediately explicable but strong enough to persuade me to say a polite ‘no thank you’.  And I have spent most of the day so far responding, with regrettable brevity, to the many kind and thoughtful expressions of sympathy that I have received, some from complete strangers.  Many more such messages are arriving as comments here. My thanks for all of them. They are much appreciated not only by me but by my brother’s family. Much of civilisation rests on the proper response to death, simple unalloyed kindness, the desire to show sympathy for irrecoverable less, the understanding that a unique and irreplaceable something has been lost to us. If we ceased to care, we wouldn’t be properly human.

 

So, odd as it would be if this were a wholly private matter, I think it would be strange if I did not post something here, partly to thank the many who have sent their kind wishes and expressed their sympathy, and partly to provide my first raw attempt at a eulogy for my closest living relative, someone who in many ways I have known better – and certainly longer - than anyone else alive.

 

It is certainly raw. Last week I saw my brother for the last time in a fairly grim hospital room in Houston, Texas.  He was in great pain, and suffering in several other ways I will not describe. But he was wholly conscious and in command of his wits, and able to speak clearly. We both knew it was the last time we would see each other, though being Englishmen of a certain generation, neither of us would have dreamed of actually saying so. We parted on good terms, though our conversation had been (as had our e-mail correspondence for some months) cautious and confined to subjects that would not easily lead to conflict. In this I think we were a little like chess-players, working out many possible moves in advance, neither of us wanting any more quarrels of any kind.

 

At one stage – and I am so sad this never happened – he wrote to me saying he hoped for a ‘soft landing’( code, I think for abandoning any further attempts to combat his disease) and to go home to his beautiful apartment in Washington DC. There, he suggested, we could go through his bookshelves, as there were some books and other possessions he wanted me to have.  I couldn’t have cared less about these things, but I had greatly hoped to have that conversation, which would have been a particularly good way of saying farewell. But alas,  it never happened. He never went home and now never will. Never, there it is, that inflexible word that trails close behind that other non-negotiable syllable, death. Even so, we did what we could in Houston, as the doctors, the nurses, the cleaners, and who knows who else, bustled in and out. I forgot, till I left, that I was wearing a ludicrous surgical mask and gown, and surgical gloves ( I am still not sure whose benefit this was for, but it was obligatory)  all the time I was sitting there, and – this is extraordinary – time seemed to me to pass incredibly swiftly in that room. I was shocked when the moment came to leave for the airport, that it had come so soon.

 

Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it.  

 

I don’t have much of this myself, so I recognise it (and envy it) in others.  I have a memory which I cannot place precisely in time, of the two of us scrambling on a high rooftop, the sort of crazy escapade that boys of our generation still went on, where we should not have been. A moment came when, unable to climb back over the steep slates, the only way down was to jump over a high gap on to a narrow ledge.  I couldn’t do it. He used his own courage (the real thing can always communicate itself to others)  to show me, and persuade me, that I could. I’d add here that he was for a while an enthusiastic rock climber, something I could never do, and something which people who have come to know him recently would not be likely to guess.  

 

He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times,  furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time.

 

This explains plenty. I offer it because the word ‘courage’ is often misused today . People sometimes tell me that I have been ‘courageous’ to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood,  because you think it is too important not to. My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. I’ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible.  It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember.  

 

We got on surprisingly well in the past few months, better than for about 50 years as it happens. At such times one tends to remember childhood more clearly than at others, though I have always had a remarkably clear memory of much of mine.  I am still baffled by how far we both came, in our different ways,  from the small, quiet, shabby world of chilly, sombre rented houses and austere boarding schools, of battered and declining naval seaports,  not specially cultured, not book-lined or literary or showy but plain, dutiful and unassuming. How unlikely it would have seemed in those irrecoverable suburban afternoons that we would take the courses we did take.  

 

Two pieces of verse come to mind, one from Hilaire Belloc’s ’Dedicatory Ode’

 

‘From quiet homes and first beginnings, out to the undiscovered ends, there’s nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends’

 

I have always found this passage unexpectedly moving because of something that lies beneath the words, good and largely true though they are.  When I hear it, I see in my mind’s eye a narrow, half-lit entrance hall with a slowly-ticking clock in it, and a half-open door beyond which somebody is waiting for news of a child who long ago left home.

 

And T.S.Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ (one of the Four Quartets)

 

‘We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time’

 

These words I love because I have found them to be increasingly and powerfully true. In my beginning, as Eliot wrote elsewhere in the Quartets, is my end. Alpha et Omega.

 

 

 

Sunday, Bloody Sunday – a long day’s journey into light

As it happens, this posting answers the jibe from ‘Tarquin’ that I attack anything David Cameron does, because it is David Cameron doing it.  I completely agree with and endorse his response to the Saville report on the Londonderry massacre (otherwise known as ‘Bloody Sunday’). He was quite right to offer the apologies of the British government and to accept that those killed on that day in 1972 were innocent, and to do so in generous and candid terms.

But that is not my reason for posting on this subject. I am moved to do so by reading Douglas Murray’s excellent and moving book on ‘Bloody Sunday’, recently published by Biteback.

I had long argued that the British government should apologise for this action, from a Unionist perspective. In my view Londonderry is a British city, under the British Crown. If British soldiers had done anything similar in Portsmouth, Bradford , Stirling or Swansea, the government would have fallen the next day.

The same must surely be true in this case.

Yet the shootings of 30th January 1972 did not bring down the government of Edward Heath. On the contrary,  a wall of dishonesty and obscurity was thrown up around the event, and it is without doubt true that the Provisional IRA was able to use it to establish itself as a major force. It was the worst British blunder in Ireland since the executions of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising.

I am old enough to remember the occasion. And I took part in a protest demonstration in York the following day, one of the few such demonstrations I can now look back on and say ‘I was right to be there’  - though I am sorry to say that the march turned violent at one stage, something that did no good to the cause.

At that time (and Dominic Sandbrook gives an extraordinarily good summary of the beginning of the Ulster troubles in his recent book ‘White Heat’) everyone involved was making a very considerable mess of Northern Ireland. It’s also my belief that the IRA, and the wicked men who always wanted bloodshed, took advantage of the ‘Civil Rights’ movement in a deeply cynical way – a way that wasn’t understood by the old and often naïve country gentlemen who were in charge at Stormont, or by the bored and detached politicians in London who suddenly had the Irish Question dropped in their laps. The one good thing that came out of it was Direct Rule (I don’t think there should ever have been a Parliament at Stormont) which achieved an enormous amount of wise reform, and which was the fairest and most law-abiding form of government the province ever had.

But the marchers who set out on that clear sunny day in January 1972 were overwhelmingly peaceful, religious, kindly people who felt that they had been unfairly treated and wished to say so.

And Murray’s description of the deaths of some of them – Patrick Doherty and Barney McGuigan – will break your heart.  It is with these appalling scenes that he rightly opens the book, underlining the fact that real men died, and shed real blood, and that is what it is really about.

And he follows, relentlessly but in a light, fluent and irresistible style which kept me reading late into the night, bringing the awful day back to life and then pursuing various fascinating aspects of the vast, almost endless Saville Inquiry, much of which he attended.

The report itself, thousands of pages, is unlikely to be read by most of us. That is why Murray’s book is so useful. I found myself repeatedly jolted by new knowledge (perhaps I should have known these things before, but I didn’t, and now I do, and that is Murray’s doing) . He delves into things which remain either buried in secrecy or lost forever, thanks to the failing memories of the eyewitnesses.

By being sympathetic to , or at least understanding of,   most of the main characters, his accounts of their failings are all the more devastating. Some of the soldier witnesses come out of the affair quite shamefully badly, evasive, dishonest, even disgraceful.

I don’t feel that this is so of Colonel Derek Wilford, the officer who seems to have taken most of the blame and whose identity – unlike that of the shooters themselves – has always been known, remains a moral puzzle. I remember strongly sympathising with his cry of pain in a long-ago radio interview (it ran roughly ‘Why is it always Bloody Sunday? What about Bloody Tuesday, Bloody Wednesday, Bloody Thursday, Bloody every day of the week when the IRA murdered innocent people’). He has a point.  The IRA was and is a horrible organisation, which gloried in grisly murder, often of unarmed people in front of their families. Those responsible are now free, and in some cases highly-regarded, comfortable public figures. There will be no judicial inquiry into their crimes. If there were, they might well be as evasive and unconvincing as the wretched soldiers who, in my view, lost control of themselves in an undisciplined outbreak.

And Colonel Wilford’s  loyalty to his men – quite proper in an army officer – remains commendable in a way, though it is not clear that they have been as loyal to him in return. He is also one of the few – if not the only person – who seems to have suffered as a result of his part in the disaster. He is the official scapegoat, his career blighted ever afterwards. 

Murray goes as far it is possible to go in the search for ‘Infliction’, the ultra-mysterious MI5 informant whose report, produced during the Inquiry,  was so embarrassing to Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness. Mr McGuinness’s tricky, crowd-pleasing performance at the tribunal is neatly and mercilessly described.

His account of the behaviour and evidence of Bernadette Devlin (I still think of her by that name. and remember clearly her brief and fiery transit through British politics), in which she seems at one moment to be horrified by what she has herself thought and said,  is extraordinarily powerful and evocative.

And his summary of the surprisingly strong evidence that there were in fact armed IRA men in Londonderry that day, and that some of them did in fact open fire is pitched exactly right. No, this does not in any way excuse the killings of unarmed, innocent men. But it does puncture a very important part of IRA propaganda about the event, and makes the stupidity of the killings easier for us, who were not there, to understand, though not to forgive.

All that having been said (and I could say much more if I had time) the crowning moment of the book comes at the end, when Murray returns to the poor McGuigan family, deprived of husband and father by an unjust and unjustifiable bullet. Earlier, he has recounted how, through a regrettable accident, Barney McGuigan’s widow came to see the terrible mortuary pictures of her late husband’s unspeakable facial injuries, decades after his death, an awful public ordeal followed by a ‘terrible eruption of sobbing’ .

If this account of grief beyond any human being’s power to offer comfort doesn’t make you hate war, I don’t know what will.

But now read this : ‘Barney McGuigan’s son Charles, meanwhile, would have been better justified than most in deciding that he should avenge the army, the security forces, the government that stood behind them.  But nor did he choose to do so in the years after his father’s death. To Lord Saville, he recounted how ‘at the time of my father’s death, my mother cleared a space in our kitchen and made me kneel under the Sacred Heart picture and swear to her that I would never do anything about my father’s death that would bring shame on the name of the family. Having lost her husband, I believe that my mother was determined that she would not lose any other member of her family as a result of what had happened.’ He finished  by saying ‘I have honoured that promise to this day.’

Murray also records the statement of Leo Friel, who saw Barney McGuigan shot. Mr Friel said : ‘I had witnessed what one person could do to another when I saw Barney McGuigan and I knew I could never justify doing this to another human being. I saw reality that day.’

He added, very tellingly :’ (emphasis mine) ‘ If I had been a hundred yards up Rossville Street and had *not* seen Barney McGuigan shot, I would have joined the IRA’.

Murray comments : ‘…These people, and many others, realised that they had a choice. And, like many others who have no memorials and are rarely recognised, they made the most important decision of all. They decided that in response to murder, they did not have to become murderers themselves’.

Yes, Bloody Sunday was a recruiting sergeant for the IRA, as the old cliché goes. But those who answered that Sergeant’s call were volunteers, not conscripts, They had an alternative. We should not forget that, when we judge these events.

How to Think – a user’s guide to the reasoning mind – plus some reflections on Cannabis farmers

It is easy to see why Britain is stuck in the EU, against its own interests. The pitiful level of many of the responses to my last two postings shows that two groups of people simply refuse to think about the subject. The first group are the ones who have been brainwashed into thinking that ‘Europe’ is automatically good, and that any doubts about the EU are caused by nostalgia or stupidity. 

They do not actually know or understand the case for the EU (which certainly exists) because they have never heard it made. But they have heard, from teachers , broadcasters etc., the jibes of ‘Little Englander’ and ‘Do you want to go back to the Groat, then?’  which the pro-EU lobby have encouraged. How the heart sinks, at the level of this sort of thing. Where does one begin? Aren’t people ashamed of engaging in a major national debate at this kindergarten level?

They have encouraged these childish jeers because they know that very few people would be attracted by their utopian vision of a continent in which all nation states have ceased to exist, and in which the destinies of the continent’s people are controlled from the centre by an unaccountable elite which thinks itself to be benevolent.

The second group are those who continue against all evidence  to believe that the Conservative Party is in fact conservative. In many cases, they believe this out of habit, and increasingly out of a fear (which they seek to suppress)  that it is not true.  For if it is not true, they might have to think and act – and anything is preferable to that.

These are two typical barriers to thinking. One, a received opinion held out of laziness and fashion, not deeply rooted in knowledge or reason, which lashes out at dissent with crude mockery. The other, a tribal clinging to a forlorn hope, held in place by fear of discovering that the truth is much less comforting than the illusion.

In both cases, the mind shuts down when it gets anywhere near the truth. In both cases, it is noticeable that the person involved does not deploy facts or reason himself.

After all, what did I actually argue? Most importantly that David Cameron was garnering praise from people who ought to have seen through him. Why? Because he was not in fact doing anything particularly exceptional or dramatic, and he was certainly not defying the real power in the EU -  namely the Franco-German axis. That axis is quite happy to proceed on a country-by-country basis rather than though the cumbersome treaty process. It is true that the actual Brussels apparatus,  whose spokesman is Mr Barroso, would like a formal treaty as it would give that apparatus more power.  But France and Germany are much more important. Further, he was not actually protecting the City of London, which remains at risk as long as we are subject to EU law, most of which is made by Qualified Majority Voting where we cannot deploy a veto. This is why it is so important for those interested to read the Booker-North book I recommended. It explains and describes how, over and over again, British prime ministers have been trapped and ambushed into such surrenders.

I thought it rather strengthened my case that I was able to quote John Lichfield, an unimpeachable Paris correspondent for a pro-EU newspaper, and John Rentoul, an enjoyably frank Blairite, in support of my case. Mr Lichfield didn’t write his account of the French attitude to please me. He just wrote it because it was true and he rightly regarded it as significant. Mr Rentoul greatly enjoys teasing the non-Blairite wing of the Labour Party, but he’s interested in recent history and he recognises that David Cameron is and always has been serious about his Blairism. Mr Rentoul (among other things the author of a biography of Mr Blair) should be able to tell.

I would add here, for those interested, that my argument also has interesting support from my own side. Some recent, relevant postings from EU expert and opponent Richard North(co-author of ‘The Great Deception’) can be found here 
 
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/12/walter-mitty-territory.html

and here

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/12/huge-coup-de-theatre.html

and here

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/12/story-so-far.html

In response to this, do I get any kind of thoughtful response from my opponents and critics?  Judge for yourself. From ‘Tarquin’ comes this gem  ‘All I know is that whatever Cameron had done, it would've been wrong’. Does ‘Tarquin’ actually ‘know’ this in any way? Can he point to any evidence that I have a personal hostility to David Cameron which overrides reason?  If not, then his contribution is no better than graffiti scribbled on a wall, intellectually vacuous and wholly unresponsive. It is unlikely that I will support any step taken by Mr Cameron, but that is because I disagree with his politics, for reasons I have set out (for instance) in several books. But it is not unimaginable that Mr Cameron will do or say something which I am prepared to endorse and, as I have said here before, I have no personal animus towards him, have enjoyed his company on the rare occasions when I have met him and do not doubt his intelligence.

The single most wretched contribution comes from a Roy Robinson, who sneers: ‘So the whole thing was a conspiracy between Cameron and Clegg ,I thought as much ! .I will have to go on to David Icke’s site to see how it is all linked in to the New World Global Order.’

Mr Robinson ( I assume this is his real name) might have been wiser to hide this tripe behind a pseudonym. He hasn’t read what I have written, and he does not respond to what I have written. I doubt very much if we will see him back here. But why can’t people recognise that this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed seriously?


The contribution from ‘Cary’ is a bit more intelligent, though he endorses Mr Robinson’s empty jibe, which doesn’t actually chime with the rest of his contribution. . ‘Cary’  says : ‘Much as it may pain Peter Hitchens to admit it, Cameron did something genuinely EU sceptic this week that has genuinely upset Clegg, Sarkozy and all the other EU fanatics. I doubt he did it because he is a committed EU sceptic himself; his motives were mostly about survival as Tory leader (he’s lost the support of a large part of party loyalists and MPs and there’s a bye-election coming up this week where, if things went badly, the Tories could finish behind UKIP and knives might start to be sharpened).’

Well, I am quite happy to accept that Mr Cameron may have done something ‘EU sceptic’ as I have repeatedly (including in my latest post) derided the word ‘Eurosceptic’ . I regard it as meaning, broadly  ‘critical of the EU in opposition, subservient to it in government’. ‘Scepticism’ can also be displayed in government, provided it is meaningless. The EU has always been reasonably happy to allow British governments (see my thoughts on losers in negotiations above) to adopt Churchillian poses, while ceding great slabs of power and wealth to the EU. But how does ‘Cary’ justify his assertion that Mr Cameron has ‘genuinely upset’ M. Sarkozy or Mr Clegg. My whole point is that Mr Cameron’s supposed veto (actually he didn’t veto anything – there was nothing to veto) was pleasing to the French President. As for Mr Clegg, he is so outraged that he has ….stayed in the government, and took two full days to express any reservations about Mr Cameron’s actions.

‘Cary’ then contradicts himself, by pointing out correctly that Mr Cameron’s main motive was to protect his position as Tory leader (a point I made in my article) . If that is so, then how and in what sense is his action ‘genuine’? It’s simply tactical, and wholly cynical.

Then we have ‘William’, who says ‘Peter Hitchens has to take this position though really doesn't he, as do UKIP. Can't let their 'true anti-european' brand be upstaged eh? Rather amusing to see these folks break bread here with the guardianistas.’

What does this mean? I don’t ‘have’ to take any position. Many other EU-critical journalists have praised Mr Cameron for his actions, in my view mistakenly.    I belong to no party, and have no line to toe. What’s more, I explain in detail how I came to reach my position. As for ‘Guardianistas’, an expression which I think long ago lost any freshness, as did ‘Call me Dave’, what has that to do with it? The reason I cite articles from ‘The Independent’  is to make it clear that my assessment of *events* is not distorted by dogma. Mr Lichfield understands French politics and knows what is important. Mr Rentoul understands the Blairite position and is well-informed on the Blairite attitude towards the EU.
‘William’ continues ‘Where this argument falls down is that Cameron will now be under pressure to offer a referendum, in the face of the EU acting against our interests, especially now the eurosceptics have tasted blood (even if it is, as you suggest, only in their imaginations).
Better hope that doesn't happen Mr Hitchens eh? May put you out of business.’

Well I hope I have made clear by now that I have no desire for a referendum. As long as there is no major party calling in a united fashion for our exit from the EU, a straight vote on EU membership would probably be won by those who wish us to remain subject to foreign rule. The pitiful lack of understanding of the subject displayed across the media and politics in the last week shows how easy it would be to bamboozle the population, and how poorly prepared the ‘Sceptics’ are for a real battle. In any case, no Parliament could or would be bound by such a referendum even if it did produce a vote to leave.

So no, it wouldn’t ‘put me out of business’ ( always assuming that if we did become an independent country again, there wouldn’t still be plenty of ‘business’ for me to engage in). It’s no use just having independence. You have to use it.

Andrew Williams wrote : ‘I wonder if the Veto may be more important than you suggest...in spite of Cameron's intentions. The back-bench rebellion has proven to be effective in influencing the PM (despite Tory and Blairite commentators deriding it as empty posturing). The reserved reception to Cameron in PMQ suggests EU rebels aren't swooning just yet.’

Well, first of all, what veto? There was no treaty to veto (just as - and I remember breaking the news of this to an astonished newsdesk at another newspaper - there was no IRA bomb in Gibraltar before the SAS shooting of the IRA trio there).

There was no treaty because such things take months to prepare.

The back-bench rebellion is ‘effective’ only in so far as it compels Cameron to do everything he can to avoid a course of action which will lead to a referendum. But that is all he did – avoid a referendum. He didn’t preserve Britain from an EU power-grab. That can and will still happen. Nor did he ‘repatriate’ powers from Brussels(this is a fantasy. No such thing is possible under EU law). Mr Cameron’s only action is a political one, to do with saving his ludicrous, unworkable party from a  richly-deserved split and collapse. Why should anyone be grateful for that? It is precisely this artificial preservation, by increasingly desperate measures, of a dead party,  that stands in the way of Britain’s long-needed departure from the EU. And there seesm to metohave been a great deal of fawning over Mr cameron by suppsoed 'sceptics' notably at the famous Chequers dinner on Friday night. I gather the whips called for a restrained response after Mr Cameron's statement on Monday, as by then the supposed wrath of the Liberal Democrats, which had finally awoken all those days later,  had to be soothed.  

I think the assertion by ‘Neil P’ that Britain would benefit from the collapse of the City of London is absurd. I doubt if Mr ‘P’ has much idea what would happen to him, and our national economy as a whole, if such a thing happened.

Germany’s superior schools, transport etc are indeed laudable, and I am a Germanophile who thinks we should emulate many of Germany’s domestic policies. But they are nothing to do with our national independence.

Once again, I am asked why it takes so long for comments to be posted. It is not because I need to ‘approve’ them. In most cases I don’t see them before they are published, though a few are referred to me.  It is because this site is part of a major newspaper group which takes the laws of defamation seriously, and because there are a limited number of people available to check contributions before they are posted. 

Mr ‘Dreyfus’ is perfectly correct in pointing out that Norway and Switzerland have handled their economies better than we have. Perhaps that is partly because we have been in the EU since 1972, and because our governments – rather than confronting this country’s need to modernise its economy and reform its education(for example) have hopes that in some magical way EU membership will save us. One very good reason for returning to independence is that we would have to rely on ourselves again, and could make our own plans and efforts to do so. While we have declined greatly, as who has said more than I, all is not yet lost. We still have a base from which we could recover. Not paying our vast contribution to the EU would help.

Various people have cast doubt on claims made by contributors that Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, warned of war. Well, on 26th October in a speech to the Bundestag, she said as follows: “No one should think that a further half century of peace and prosperity is assured. If the euro fails, Europe will fail.”

A note on cannabis farming

When I heard that there had been a revolting massacre in the Belgian city of Liege, ending with the self-slaughter of the culprit,  I immediately wondered what drugs the killer would turn out to have been taking. And lo, (though none of the BBC radio or TV reports that I have so far heard or seen have mentioned this, though of course they do stress his ownership of guns) , the killer –Nordine Amrani – had earlier been convicted of cannabis farming. 

When he was arrested in 2008, police found he had grown 2,800 cannabis plants in a warehouse.  While I doubt if he could have consumed all his products himself, it seems reasonable to assume that he sampled his own goods, probably quite extensively.  All that we know of his last days is that he apparently thought he was being ‘picked on’ by the police. The idea that you are being picked on is, I am told, quite common among heavy users of cannabis. It is also demonstrable that various types of mental illness are associated with heavy cannabis use.

I gather that gun law in Belgium is quite strict, or has been since 2006.  Amrani was prosecuted under it, though somehow he seems to have been allowed to keep or acquire a substantial arsenal (I am not sure if this illustrates the feebleness of the law itself in practice, or  the usual near-total failure of gun laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, or both. Amrani had been in trouble with the police since his teens, and would probably have been banned from legal gun-ownership in most states in the USA, certainly since what is described as ‘a vice conviction’ in 2003).

But it seems to me that you don’t start shooting and throwing hand grenades (surely these are illegal anywhere?)  around in the middle of a crowded Christmas market unless you are in some way mentally ill .

Mental illness among individuals is (or was until the recent prevalence of legal and illegal mind-altering drugs) remarkably rare.

I mention these connections because I live in hope that sooner or later someone in government may act on them, and launch the necessary research to see if there is a link.  I know that the connection between cannabis and mental illness flies in the face of the vast and costly PR campaign that has been waged on behalf of this drug for the last half-century, claiming that it is ‘soft’ and harmless and herbal. But does a wise person then reject the possibility that the correlation might actually be causation?

David Cameron’s Phoney War, or A Curse in Disguise

It is sad to watch so many people falling for a blatant fake. The Prime Minister did nothing courageous or even significant in Brussels last week. No doubt it is a coincidence that his behaviour greatly helped France’s President Sarkozy.

After all, how does that fit with the British media’s portrayal of Mr Cameron’s post-summit relationship with M. Sarkozy as angry and resentful? It doesn’t. So which is right?

Let me quote here from a report in Monday’s ‘Independent’ by John Lichfield, that paper’s experienced Paris correspondent. Mr Lichfield reported that ‘Britain’s self-imposed isolation from EU treaty reform talks is a ‘blessing’ for other EU Nations, one of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s leading advisers said at the weekend’.

He quoted Jean-David Levitte, the President’s chief diplomatic aide, as saying that Britain’s split from the rest of the EU 27, though ‘regrettable’, would ‘make future negotiations on a fiscal union to save the euro much simpler’. It could therefore be seen as a “benediction” or “blessing”. It would ‘short-circuit the need for laborious negotiation with Britain on a formal EU treaty. It would therefore make it possible for the other 26 EU countries to reach a looser “inter-governmental” agreement by March.’

That’s what Mr Lichfield says. I would add that probably this is what President Sarkozy wanted all along. Did British diplomats in Brussels know this? If not, why not? If they did know it, did they tell Mr Cameron? If not, why not? If so, when? If they did tell Mr Cameron, then does he really think his action was as bold and courageous as his marketing men have told the media it was? I only ask, because I have been reporting on negotiations since 1977, when I was a labour correspondent in the lost days of union militancy, and am much too old and leathery to believe what I am told at the post-negotiation press briefings.

There is, I’m sorry to say, a sort of convention that those who lose in negotiations (especially if they have to sell the deal to members or voters) are allowed by the victors to pretend to have won. After all, if you really have won, you can easily put up with the other guy claiming to have done so. Likewise, as someone who has heard a gossiping politician, and former cabinet minister, bitterly and profanely lamenting the day his party *won* a crucial by-election ( Labour, Darlington, 1983), I know that what people say in public is not necessarily what they think in private.

In this case, many Labour politicians had hoped that their party would lose the by-election, so as to give them the pretext to mount a putsch against their hopeless leader, Michael Foot, just in time for the fast-approaching general election. The stocks were sold, the press was squared, the middle class were all prepared and then, dang it, the Labour candidate went and won.

You could have heard the groans for miles around the Shadow Cabinet corridor. So, losers sometimes claim to have won, and politicians don’t always say what they mean. Bear it in mind. Nobody in the EU, except perhaps the dispiritingly wooden Mrs Merkel, really wanted all the palaver of a new treaty, which would without doubt have forced at least one referendum (in Ireland).

Mr Cameron certainly didn’t want such a thing. He will (he has already done so several times) strain every sinew to avoid such a referendum on any EU topic, since merely holding it will tear his party in two. This is the only good reason to hold one. Even if 60% of the British people voted to leave the EU, it wouldn’t happen. Our present political elite would never act on it. That will require a party pledged to leave in its election manifesto, winning a clear majority.

Michael Howard, the establishment liberal who made a career out of posing as a ‘right-winger’, popped up on the BBC on Thursday arguing that the planned new treaty wouldn’t require a British referendum because it wouldn’t directly affect Britain – a curious coincidence given that Mr Cameron himself was then expecting that he would shortly be agreeing to just such a treaty.

Lord Howard did this because at that very moment, Mr Cameron’s Tory foes were circling like crocodiles, waiting and hoping for the opportunity to attack. Luckily for Mr Cameron, his ‘veto’ put the referendum out of everyone’s minds. It also enabled him - and his critics -  forget about his pledges of ‘repatriating’ powers from the EU – pledges that he knew perfectly well could never be redeemed .

The EU never gives up any power. Why anyone believes such stuff, I have no idea. Wishful thinking is too kind a description of it. But without the Sarkozy coup, the case that no referendum was required would have been very hard to make. Mr Howard was presumably saying this precisely because the Tory party’s directing elite were afraid that Mr Cameron would fail to make that case.

Mr Howard’s tattered ‘right-wing’ credentials might, I suppose, have swung a few gullible backbenchers (given their servile, braying praise of Mr Cameron, even as he pledged his continuing loyalty to the EU in the Commons on Monday afternoon) . But the gigantic change proposed, placing Euro members under the fiscal control of Brussels, will certainly put Britain under strong indirect pressure to conform (does our Treasury already consult informally with the EU about budgets, I wonder?). Much of our policy is now openly based on not rocking the Euro boat, for fear that we will be blamed – and in some way punished - if it sinks.

Without the Sarkozy coup, Mr Cameron would have been under grave pressure to call a referendum. Such a referendum would have condemned him to months of trying to deal with The EU problem, which flares up in the Tory Party like piles but (unlike piles) has the power to destroy that party altogether, if not cunningly handled. Neither Mr Cameron, nor his Europhile friends, nor the posing ‘Eurosceptics’ actually want a real test of their supposed resolve to stand up to the Brussels monster. If Brussels wants to tax the City of London, it will, as long as we are fool enough to be in the EU.

The Liberal Democrats, much enjoying their period in government, are also not yet ready to break away from the coalition (that will come later, as they prepare to separate themselves from the Tories, perhaps 18 months before the May 2015 election). Mr Cameron does not much fancy trying to run a minority government yet (that too will come later - both coalition parties need to fool the voters into believing that they are separate, before they go to the polls again) .

This nugget of truth – that Mr Cameron was given a cunning escape route by the French, showed no special courage, and (alas) did no lasting damage to Britain’s ties to the EU - is surrounded by plenty of boilerplate about how ‘isolated’ Britain now is in the EU. Well, that was true from the moment we joined, has always been true and always will be true as long as we belong. We are part of no axis, belong to no alliance.

And we differ from the rest of the EU so deeply in history, law, politics and culture that it could not be otherwise. Such platitudes are only interesting if people try to explain them, and offer any solution. There are two possible solutions to our isolation. One is that Britain abandons its unique laws and system of government, forgets and then spits on its history, abrogates what remains of its independence of action and willingly subjugates itself to rule from abroad, and to continental attitudes towards the rule of law; or that Britain leaves the EU and begins once again to function as an independent nation, no more isolated than any other sovereign country on the planet and a good deal less isolated than many of them. Either course would mean that we were no longer ‘isolated in the EU’.

The choice seems quite easy to me. What, I wonder, do Michael Heseltine, Peter Mandelson and Paddy Ashdown think? Anyway, strange as it is to be relying so much on the left-wing press for good sense on this matter, let us now turn to the thoughts of that incorrigible, shameless Blairite, John Rentoul, writing in the ‘Independent on Sunday’. You can read the whole thing here.

But to encourage you, let me give you a flavour of this rather cheeky analysis. He begins by praising Mr Cameron for following the example of Mr Rentoul’s hero, the original Blair. Mr Rentoul recalls approvingly that Mr Cameron (the heir to Blair, remember?) is doing what Mr Blair did before him. In December 1999, Anthony Blair vetoed a plan for a withholding tax on investments (very similar to the scheme rejected by Mr Cameron last week) at the EU summit in Helsinki. Mr Rentoul writes of Mr Cameron’s behaviour : ‘I do not believe that any other prime minister would have done anything differently.

'Not Ed Miliband, whose response to the summit was a predictable but meaningless "isolated in Europe", "would not have started from here" whinge. Not Gordon Brown, who was flatly opposed to an EU withholding tax in 1999, and who was robust in resisting any possible threats to British competitiveness. And not Blair, who was more enthusiastic about the financial services sector than Cameron and George Osborne, post-Lehman Brothers, can afford to be.’

I suspect that, had he known of it when he wrote his article, Mr Rentoul would have dismissed Nicholas Clegg’s wearisome, going-through-the-motions complaints about ‘isolation’ in the same way. Mr Clegg took two whole days to discover he was outraged by Mr Cameron’s behaviour. This must be a world slowness record for outrage. Chilled molasses move faster. Did Mr Cameron perhaps ring him up and say ‘ Nick, what are you up to? I don’t need this support. A bit of outrage from you would come in very handy just now, old boy. My “sceptics” are pretty thick, but if you keep supporting me like this , even they might smell a rat’ ?

 

Back to John Rentoul for a moment. He explains Mr Cameron’s behaviour in entirely reasonable, non-ideological terms. : ‘This is surely one of those points when large forces collide and mere leaders, even the most persuasive, cannot make things happen by force of will. The only role for the individual in this kind of history is to make a mistake, and I do not accept that Cameron did that.

‘Nor do I accept, incidentally, the suggestion made by a source close to Ed Miliband that the Prime Minister invented a "phantom menace" to British interests to justify walking away from the fiscal compact because he did not want to face down his own party in Parliament. ‘Call me naive, but I do not believe that Cameron would make up a pretext to pose as the leader who said no to the pantomime villains of Brussels.

The view in No 10 early in the week appeared genuinely to be that an agreement of all 27 countries would be preferred, however difficult that might be to sell at home. And when even a member of the Shadow Cabinet talks about the threat to the City from "Barnier-inspired hostile legislation", referring to Michel Barnier, the French commissioner for the internal market, Cameron's insistence on protecting British interests seems sensible.’

I think this is broadly right. But that does not mean nobody was playing games.

What if President Sarkozy, knowing perfectly well that Mr Cameron could not accede to his demands, persisted with those demands? This is always a good way of getting people to do what you want them to do. Mr Cameron didn’t need to be in on the plot to see – with his undoubtedly quick mind – that it would suit him very well to do Mr Sarkozy’s will. (Though, as I note above, it is pretty shocking that Britain’s huge mission to Brussels didn’t see this coming).

So, if Mr Cameron’s actions are pleasing to Paris, and defended by the keeper of the Blairite flame, how do we explain the maidenly raptures of the ‘Eurosceptics’, as they swoon in a simpering heap around Mr Cameron’s beautifully-polished brogues, and his majestically-tailored trouser-cuffs? Well, as I always explain to such people, they don’t understand the issue. The EU is not something you are ‘sceptical’ of.

You might as well be sceptical of the Income Tax, or Death, or the Atlantic Ocean, or sleet. It exists, no question of that. The difficulty is, what do you do about it? And the choice is simple. You stay in it, as it is and will always be. Or you leave. I say, leave.

Those who wish to understand the nature of the EU, and the history of Britain’s engagement in it, are once again earnestly urged to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest Christopher Booker’s and Richard North's superb history of the whole business, ‘The Great Deception’. It is easily obtainable, clearly written and nobody should be in British politics, or engaged in writing about politics, who hasn’t read it.

Victory? Not while we're in the clutches of Angela's giant vampire squid

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Funny, isn’t it, that British premiers always come back from EU summits boasting that they have defied the Eurocrats, or scored mighty victories over them.

Yet, year by year, this country grows less independent, more subject to rule from abroad.

What sort of defiance ends in a grovel? What sort of victory ends in subjection? The phoney sort, invented by government PR men and swallowed by a tame media flock.

The EU is a giant vampire squid that, having once clamped itself on to its victim, steadily sucks the life out of it until it  is a husk.

As long as we belong to it, this grisly process will go on until England and Britain vanish  from history.

Mr Cameron knows what will happen to his grand veto. At some point in the next 18 months or so, he will be ambushed by our EU partners.

It will happen in the small hours at some endless, vital meeting when his head is spinning from lack of sleep and boredom. Perhaps he will be trying to save the remaining scraps of Mrs Thatcher’s famous rebate.

And somehow the City of London will be subject to the rules he claims to have vetoed.

This, too, will be announced as a 'victory'.

It has happened to all the others, including Margaret Thatcher herself, though at the very end she grasped what was going on and tried to alert the country. That was why the Tory Party destroyed her - and why it in turn deserves to be destroyed.

The puzzling thing about our subjection to the EU is that Parliament could end it in an afternoon, by passing a short Bill. The EU has no power to make us stay. Nor can it hurt us if we leave. Why would it? We buy far more from EU states than we sell to them. Trade  barriers, even if they were valid under international law, would be suicidal for the EU.

Relations between us and our neighbours would be far warmer if we were not members. We have no real allies in the EU because no other EU nation (apart from Ireland, a sad and separate story) is remotely like us, politically, economically, legally or culturally.

No other EU nation has similar interests.

Switzerland and Norway, just as exceptional in their own different ways, have sensibly stayed outside and prosper as a result. If these tiny nations can cope on their own, why can’t we?

Plenty of mainstream British politicians, Labour as well as Tory, know all this. Privately, they will admit it.

But, mainly for fear of the  EU-loving BBC, they do not have the nerve to say so openly. And so the British public think it is impossible or dangerous for us to leave. And we are made to shudder at the prospect of being in the slower section of a 'two-speed Europe'. I have no idea why this should be, as long as we’re in it at all. When you are on the road to perdition, it is surely better to drag your feet a bit.

And the EU, in the grip of the mad cult of the single currency, is hurrying towards disaster.

The new plans for clamping all these different countries in a German-made vice of austerity will fail, as the 'Growth and Stability Pact' failed before.

Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, like Frau Merkel’s patron Helmut Kohl, are clueless about economics. They still do not grasp that the euro itself is the problem, that its lunatic rigidity is what is destroying Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Ireland.

They talk as if dissolving it would be some kind of Armageddon. Yet the Soviet rouble was dismantled to the joy and benefit of almost everyone involved from Lithuania to Tadzhikistan. And the Czechoslovak crown was smoothly divided into two during the 'Velvet Divorce'.

Britain began to boom the moment we dropped out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a prototype for the euro.

But the French and German leaders are in the grip of a dogma - not quite as absurd as the Marxism that ruined Russia, but alarmingly similar in one way.

The madness takes a simple form. If the facts don’t fit the theory, then ignore the facts and carry on as before. That way leads to weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

Not only should we be glad to be in the slow lane on this particular highway. We should be looking anxiously for the first available exit - and for leaders brave enough to take it.

* * *

There is no better symbol of the squalid New Britain than the choice of Christmas to make the ‘morning-after pill’ easier to get.

Now this do-it-yourself abortion for people who are not just feckless but incompetent too is to be given out by post, in advance (surely it should be renamed the ‘night-before’ pill, in that case?). Under-age girls will easily be able to get it.

Like all such measures, it will be followed by more under-age sex and more abortions. And nobody will make the connection.

The Arctic was full of risk, Mr Robathan - as my father knew well

My late father spent two years on the Arctic convoys during the Second World War.

He would talk only about one moment - Boxing Day 1943, when his cruiser, HMS Jamaica, helped to sink the German raider Scharnhorst off North Cape. Otherwise he would not speak about it, suggesting various books that I might read if I really wanted to know.

Like most of his comrades on those convoys, he did not live to hear the words of Defence Minister Andrew Robathan on the subject.

I don’t think he would have been surprised, or would have wasted much anger on such a person. His generation of Servicemen were more restrained than we can imagine, and he had personally experienced the endless ingratitude of governments to fighting men, in many different ways.

But I am not so ready to let the slight pass. Mr Robathan, pictured, has suggested that a decoration for the remaining Arctic veterans would be comparable to the sort of joke medals issued by Colonel Gaddafi. He added that medals should be awarded only for campaigns involving 'risk and rigour', implying that these things weren’t involved on the Murmansk run.

Now he says he didn’t mean to cause offence. Doesn’t he know the old saying that a gentleman never insults anyone unintentionally?

Well, I wouldn’t myself be surprised, or specially grieved, were Mr Robathan to be upset by what follows. How is it that a man with a history degree and an apparently distinguished Service background should know so little about history, and even less about warfare? Maybe he has been concentrating too hard on claiming his rather generous expenses. Maybe he is too anxious to please the smooth civil servants who find the whole Arctic medals business a tiresome nuisance.

Let’s hope Mr Robathan isn’t ever awarded any decorations for the rest of his life, let alone a knighthood (Whitehall toadies quite often get such things), or some of us might remember that bit about 'risk and rigour'.

* * *

Astonishing pictures of a giant windmill exploding in flames - because there is too much wind - ought to seal the fate of these ugly, costly, futile intrusions into the landscape. But the Green Cult is immune to facts and logic. Instead, we will build more of them, and you will pay.

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Pension strikes: You might as well protest against rain

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

We are all going to get poorer and poorer for the rest of our lives. This is because this country long ago chose to live beyond its means, and the  blazing red Final Demands  are now cascading on to the national doormat.

What is it, exactly, that we do to justify our comfortable way of life? Is it our world-beating export industries, supported by wise energy policies and a modern transport system? Or our superbly educated population, whose knowledge and skills are sought worldwide? Or our renowned work ethic?

No, that’s somewhere else. We are living on a reputation we long ago ceased to deserve. All our luxuries are bought on tick.

But our creditors have run out of patience, and we cannot pay them, so the bailiffs won’t be long. They will take the shape of severe inflation, already getting under way.

My guess is that most of the pensions we are now squabbling about will be worth little more than a box of matches by the time they are paid.

That is why last Wednesday’s petulant, self-righteous strikes were daft as well as wrong.

Anyone with ears to hear has known since the great balance of payments crisis of the Sixties that we were in bad trouble (we solved that problem by ceasing to care about it. It’s worse by far now than it was then).

But, led by empty and self-seeking politicians from all three parties, we have hidden the truth from ourselves.

Unlimited credit? Yours for  the asking. Government borrowing? If we hide it in off-the-books fiddles, who’ll notice?  Launching stupid invasions of other people’s countries? Count us in. We’ll pay somehow.

Like all swindles, the fruits of this have been rotten ones. Oceans of money were poured into the NHS, and it still can’t keep its wards clean or look after its patients properly. 

And then there are all those Lego schools and ‘universities’, churning out mountain-ranges of certificates and diplomas which are for the most part direct tickets to the dole queue.

And in the middle of this there are actually people who are ready to go on strike because their pensions aren’t going  to be as good as they thought? You might as well hold a strike against the annoying fact that it’s colder and wetter in winter than in summer; or against the fact that the pound in your pocket is worth less with every minute that passes.

The real question is how much longer we can afford to employ so many people who don’t actually make anything that anyone wants to buy.  

Knowing in their hearts that they were striking against their  fellow countrymen, who will have to fork out if they win, the public-sector militants claimed that they were shutting down the schools, hospitals, crematoria, swimming pools and the rest because of a deep, unselfish desire to make these services better. Oh, please. And they talked as if they were morally superior simply because they worked in schools and hospitals. Is that so? Funny, if they do it so selflessly, that they accept payment for it at all, let alone squabble about how much.

It strikes me that a milkman who rises before dawn to deliver reliably to his customers is just as moral as a teacher or a hospital cleaner.

So is everyone who gives a fair day’s work in return for a fair day’s pay, the forgotten side of the ancient bargain on which all riches depend.

A joint effort to lie about dope...

Sex ‘education’ for children was followed by more sex among the young. What do you think will follow drug propaganda for children? 

Well, we shall soon find out. For now there’s a children’s picture book about dope, called It’s Just A Plant (so is tobacco, so are opium poppies, so is deadly nightshade). 

It’s full of the usual hogwash about ‘medical cannabis’, and the usual propaganda against the drug laws. It’s obviously aimed at irresponsible parents who, like so many modish British liberal elite types, smoke dope at home and want to lie to their children that this unpredictably devastating poison is perfectly safe, ‘soft’ like a soft drink. 

I say, let it go on sale, provided the author adds a scene in a mental hospital where one of the characters ends up irreparably insane because he believed the cannabis lobby’s selfish lies.

...as BBC backs a career in sleaze

A gruesome little film on the BBC website profiles Gemma Massey, pictured, who calls herself a 'porn star'. The horrible thing about this is that it looks like career advice. It treats her ‘job’ as if it were normal, like nursing, bus driving or accountancy.

With her curiously distended lips plastered in some sort of slime, Gemma, smilingly explains that she’s very well paid and that her plastic surgery costs are met. If she wants a new car or a new house ‘they’ will buy it for her. There’s even a discussion about sexual diseases. Apparently you are safer in ‘the industry’ than ‘if you go on a night out and pull somebody’.

As for her parents, they were shocked at first, but when she told them what she was paid, they said: ‘We get it now.’ Well, quite.

This is bad enough in itself, but why is the BBC using public money to display it on the web?

* * *

Yet again one of our TV stations is trying to make us sob over the death penalty imposed on a convicted killer  in the U.S.

I wish an American  TV channel would come over here and make a programme about one of the hundreds of people who have had to watch the murderers of their husbands, wives, sons or brothers being let off and let out. The BBC and Channel 4 never will.

* * *

Hague is dancing to the mullahs' tune

All of a sudden, the sad cargoes  of coffins from Afghanistan are increasing again.

I had thought that the Government, ashamed of this pointless war, had told the Army to keep its men safe from danger until they could pull them out. Plainly I was wrong. These new deaths are even more intolerable, now that our defeat has already been announced.

But it is worse than that. We seem to be preparing ourselves for yet another war – this time in Iran.

How crass. Iran’s nuclear programme is a game. Iranian technology would have difficulty in delivering a pizza, let alone an H-bomb. It is aimed at riling silly, ignorant warmongers in the West, like our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, pictured. I seem to remember  Mr Hague once mocking people who threatened more than they could deliver with the telling Texan phrase ‘Big hat, no cattle’.

Given that the Coalition has reduced our Armed Forces to little more than a couple of cabin cruisers, an old pushbike and a spotter plane, doesn’t he think this might now apply to him?

The mullahs who rule in Tehran are hugely unpopular with Iran’s young, enlightened and civilised people.

But if they can claim that they are standing up for their country against foreign interference, they can shore up their support. It’s a very old trick, but it still works.

Britain should be especially careful about poking its snout into Iran. Every educated Persian still knows about and resents MI6’s idiotic and short-sighted overthrow of the popular Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. It was this greedy and lawless action that led in the end to the  1979 revolution which put the ayatollahs in power.

We should be very modest and cautious in our dealings with  this proud and ancient people.  And we have sent quite enough  soldiers to their deaths in dubious interventions in the past ten years.

A period of silence from Mr Hague would be welcome.

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