PETER HITCHENS: Don't make an 'Islamist conspiracy' out of a few cannabis-crazed losers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

Why do our politicians and media talk so much drivel about Islam?

We react like superstitious peasants to anything connected with this religion. As a result, we completely miss the point of what is going on.

For example, we imagine that the horrible killings by cannabis-crazed drifters, of Lee Rigby by Michael Adebolajo (right) and Michael Adebowale here and of Nathan Cirillo in Canada, are evidence of some vast secret Islamist conspiracy masterminded from a cave by a robed villain with a beard.

This is partly because a long and expensive international PR campaign has fooled a willing elite (many of them drug abusers themselves) into believing that cannabis is safe when in fact it is one of the most dangerous drugs there is.

So we shut our minds to all the evidence of the terrible harm it can do – even highly publicised killings by cannabis abusers.

It is also because our politicians are even more useless abroad than they are at home.

Here, they try to persuade us that they alone, armed with surveillance and huge police powers, stand between us and a terrorist peril that is a far smaller threat to life than the motor car.

Abroad, they seek to pose as modern-day Churchills, never happier than when pictured among soldiers or climbing into helicopters.

Having destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular state in Iraq, and boosted Islamist fanatics against the secular Assad state in Syria, and urged on the plainly dangerous ‘Arab Spring’ with rhetoric and bombs, they now claim to be surprised and horrified that Sunni fanatics are close to taking over the Middle East.

At home, they spent years actively encouraging Muslim migration to this country, and apologising for our remaining Christian laws and institutions.

Yet they act surprised when Muslim parents want their children brought up in their own faith in British schools.

Our growing secret police forces go on high alert. Plans are made to nip ‘extremism’ in the bud, and even make it illegal, even though the word means nothing and such a law would be a tyrant’s charter.

These plans are so absurd that last week they exploded in the faces of those who advocate them. A private Christian school was actually reprimanded because it had not been ‘inclusive’ enough.

Rules supposedly devised to curb Islamic ‘extremism’ were used to warn this school that it would be downgraded for failing to bring a Muslim imam to preach to its pupils. Could there be anything more ludicrous?

Actually, there could. The very people who are loudest in their alarmism about the Islamist menace are – almost without exception – the people who are keenest to abandon serious migration controls.

My guess is Britain – and Europe – will become Muslim in a century or so, without anyone needing to fire a shot or explode a single bomb.

We’ve given up our own faith, and left the door wide open. Why be surprised by such a change?

We can all learn from Dame Judi

Dame Judi Dench learns something new every day – a poem or a word – to keep her mind active.

And she is praised for it. Is it possible that the long sneer against ‘learning by rote’ (or ‘learning by heart’ as I call it) is coming to an end?

I learned – and have forgotten – huge chunks of Tennyson and other great English poets. I can sometimes dredge fragments out of memory, and hope that when I get really old it will all come back, as I forget newer things and uncover the buried layers.

But if I’d never been taught, the muscles of my memory would not have developed.

Pity those who have never learned anything by heart.

A final salute to my father's valour

Last week, just in time for Trafalgar Day, I received a medal that should have been given to my father nearly 70 years ago.

It is the Arctic Star, the decoration issued far too late to the survivors of the Russian convoys, one of the most terrifying and merciless campaigns of the Second World War.

It is so far out of its proper time that – though new-minted – it bears the Royal cypher of ‘GRI’, George VI, King and Emperor. Unlike my Great Uncle Harry’s 1914-18 medal, grandly (and mistakenly) inscribed with the words ‘The Great War for Civilisation’, it bears no noble sentiments.

I should think not. The only thing that could be justly engraved on it would be ‘Sorry for taking so long’.

My father died in 1987. Most of his shipmates from HMS Jamaica had taken the long voyage home by then, and they’d given up their occasional dinners because they’d become too small and sad.

He would, I think, have smiled wryly at the little trinket, so hard-won, so long in coming, issued in the name of a dead king and a dismantled empire. I’m not even sure he would have wanted it.

But I think his grandchildren ought to know that he was a man of valour, who endured hardship and danger mainly from a sense of duty – he did not much approve of the politics behind the mission, and would certainly have refused the rival medal which Moscow issued long before London did.

He was never entirely sure we had won the war in which he lost so many friends and saw so many terrible things. Nor am I.

That high-pitched hum you hear is the sound of spin-doctors spinning the Prime Minister’s choice of school for his daughter.

We’ll learn in March – on ‘National Offer Day’ – exactly what is happening. And since this is two months before the Election, that means it will be an elite state school of some sort (if he loses office, maybe she’ll discreetly switch to a private school later).

You’ll be told how brave he is – the first Tory premier ever to send his child to a state secondary.

I ask you to wonder, when this happens, why this is so good. As far as I know, the Tory Party has not (yet) become so totally socialist that it wants to abolish private schools, so why not use one if he can afford it?

Why deprive a poorer family of a place at a good state school? Where is the virtue in that?

The best state schools are just as socially exclusive as the best private schools. They select by house price, by sharpness of parental elbows, by parents’ willingness to appear to be religious (I am told, shockingly, that some people lie about their faith).

When the Blair creature, and Harriet Harman, and a long list of other liberal hypocrites, did the same thing, they were rightly mocked for it. Why then should the Camerons be praised?

We are told that the Blair creature ‘has told allies’ that he ‘believes’ the Tories will still be in power after the Election (even he can’t believe they will actually win a majority, a mathematical absurdity).

What this actually means is that Anthony Blair wants his own party to lose because he rightly regards David Cameron, not Ed Miliband, as his true heir and successor.

Whatever he wants, you shouldn’t want.

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Once Again, nobody cares that a killer took illegal drugs

As I always do, when I hear of rampage shootings such as that in Ottawa on Wednesday, I wondered how long it would be before the shooter turned out to have been taking some sort of mind-altering drug.  This is almost invariably the case in such events. As the authorities and mainstream media are never interested in this aspect of these killings (if they were they’d have to do something about it) , it can take a while, and sometimes some digging on my part.

 

No such effort was needed today.

 

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, as he called himself after changing his name,  twice came up against the law on marijuana charges .

 

See here  http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/10/23/alleged_gunman_michael_zehafbibeau_had_long_list_of_runins_with_the_law.html

 

He must have been pretty persistent to have this experience, given the reluctance of modern police forces to bother with this drug unless it is smoked under their noses (and not always then). Nothing of any significance happened to him as a result, of course ( despite the alleged draconian ‘War on Drugs’ under whose brutal dictates we supposedly groan).

 

Though not ill enough to be detained (since the Western world shut its mental hospitals by the dozen, preferring  the neglect known as ‘ care in the community’ this is nowadays a very high bar, and few are) , his behaviour was clearly ‘erratic’, and the mosque he chose to attend didn’t seem very keen on him.

 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/suspected-killer-in-ottawa-shootings-had-a-disturbing-side/article21252419/

 

But I suspect a great deal will be made of his Islamic conversion, and nothing at all of his drug-induced, er, instability. The same was true of the killers of Drummer Lee Rigby, whose ‘erratic’ behaviour during their crime and afterwards has barely been mentioned.

 

It is my opinion that fanaticism cannot be prevented in any free society, but that drugtaking can be. Thus, if we wish to see fewer such horrors, we should worry more about drugs than about fanaticism.

 

I am accused of trying to excuse these people by mentioning this. I’m not. Those who deliberately take mindbending drugs are in my view  responsible for the crimes they commit as a result.  I’m also accused of trying to minimise the influence of Islam. I’m not. I do not wish this to become an Islamic country. I just think we should be more aware of the grave dangers of living in a country where the state only pretends to enforce laws against dangerous drugs. There are quite a few such countries .

 

A recording of the Bath University Debate on religion

Some of you may wish to watch this recording of the debate on religion in Bath, in which I took part last week.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubxewhu8NV8&feature=youtu.be

 

Some of you may not wish to do so.

So how long will it be before we invite the IS jihadis to a white-tie dinner?

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

While we rage and fret about the terrorist outrages of today, how quickly we forget the horrors of the recent past. 

I can’t see why. The grief, loss and pain don’t diminish as the years go by. For those who survive, they deepen.

And I admire Lord Tebbit for his unfashionable refusal to forgive the IRA murderers who tried to kill him and his wife, and who did them terrible harm (as well as slaying or maiming several others) in Brighton 30 years ago.

One of the grisly monsters responsible for this, Patrick Magee, now walks about in freedom, thanks to our surrender to the IRA, a national shame we bury in denial and pretend never happened, sometimes even kidding ourselves that we were the winners.

Well, if we won, how is it that Magee is free and apparently living a happy and contented life, while his victims lie in their graves or suffer daily pain and disability?

He was supposed to serve a minimum of 35 years and actually served 14. He still, disgustingly, claims that he had 'no choice' but to use the weapon of murder.

He has had the nerve to try to get his victims to 'understand a bit better what motivated me'.

Some of those victims have, in my view quite mistakenly, forgiven him. Lord Tebbit says with simple dignity: 'I am often asked if I can find it in my heart to forgive the creature, Patrick Magee, who planted the bomb.

'That is not possible, for Magee has never repented.'

Quite. I do not think the Christian religion instructs us to forgive the unrepentant. Nobody in any age but this could possibly imagine that we are supposed to forgive those who don’t seek our forgiveness. 

Forgiveness without repentance is like a door without a doorway, or a key without a lock. The one implies and demands the other.

This is something that also needs to be understood by the Blairite bag-carrier Jonathan Powell, who took an active part in the surrender talks with the IRA, and who has just written a book saying we will always have to talk to terrorists in the end.

Actually, this isn’t true. We always have done so, but that is not because we had no choice.

We did it because we are weak and have lost our will to survive as a civilisation and a culture. If they knew we would never talk, and that we would crush them utterly, we would have many fewer of them.

As it is, terrorists decide the destiny of much of the world. The more militantly our leaders condemn them now, the more you can be sure that they will be inviting them to a white-tie dinner at Windsor in a year or two.

Mrs Clooney is right: we have to lose our Marbles

I back Amal Clooney in her battle to get the Elgin Marbles sent back to their home in Athens.

We rescued them from the Ottomans. We’ve guarded them well. But now their home is safe again, and we have had them for long enough.

They are one of the glories of human civilisation, and that is exactly why it would be right and generous for us to let them go back to the place they were made in and for.

It is the civilised thing to do, without bargains or conditions.

I never really understood this until, in an American museum, I saw a sculpture that had once stood in Lincoln Cathedral.  

I was enraged. Why was it not still there, where it belonged? But it was nothing like as important as the Marbles.

There can be no rule or precedent about this. There is only one Parthenon and only one Acropolis.

That is why an act of selfless generosity is the best way of ending the quarrel.

Dave can’t stop deceiving – even after he’s caught

How funny the ‘Conservative’ Party has become. 

Not only are its would-be candidates for the Rochester by-election sternly asked in public if they, too, plan to defect. 

One end of it doesn't know what the other end is doing. Last week the Mayor of London, Al (‘Boris’) Johnson, said the 2010 Tory promise to limit immigration was a ‘big deception’. This is quite true.

David Cameron must have known perfectly well that he had no power to fulfil this pledge as long as Britain stayed in the EU.

After this Ratner moment, in which a very senior party member openly admitted his party had lied to win votes, you might expect a pause before they did it again. But no, Mr Cameron started raging about an ‘emergency brake’ on immigration. 

No details were given, because there weren’t any. Again, no such brake can be applied without leaving the EU. So Mr Cameron contrived to sound as if he was on the verge of favouring a British exit, when in real life he’s almost as Europhile as Jean-Claude Juncker.

Is it just me, or are people at last beginning to see through this amazingly transparent man, who resorts instinctively to dishonesty, as a weed in a dingy backyard climbs towards the light?

Let us hope that his attempt to drown the truth in money, in the Rochester by-election, fails. 

Voters might ask themselves why the oligarchs and sharks who wrote cheques to the Tories at their semi-secret ‘Black and White Ball’ should be so keen to see Ukip beaten. 

I don't think the Labour Party actually wants to win next May’s General Election. Given that government is far more enjoyable and better rewarded than opposition, why is this?

Some of Labour’s Blairites do actually prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband. Mr Cameron boasts of being the ‘Heir to Blair’ and follows Blairite policies at home and abroad.

And the supposedly ineffectual Ed Miliband had the nerve to beat his Blairite brother in a fair fight, for which he will never be forgiven.

But I think it’s even deeper than that. Labour’s leadership can see there’s a huge economic crisis coming soon, and don’t want to be in office when it happens.

If they exert themselves, the polls show they could get a narrow majority.

If they don’t exert themselves, the Tories can’t get a majority (this is an arithmetical impossibility) but they might just be the largest party.

They’ll have little or no power, but they will take the blame for the coming crash.
It explains a lot, if I’m right.

At this time of year, how I long for the clocks to return to proper Greenwich time. 

The mornings are ridiculously dark. So-called ‘daylight saving time’ (which does nothing of the kind) must have been devised by people who get up late, to torment those of us who get up early. 

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Lionel Davidson Revisited

Some years ago I wrote a little about the late Lionel Davidson http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/11/goodbye-to-a-fine-author.html , an author who continues to give me great pleasure.

 

Having just re-read two of his books for perhaps the fifth or sixth time (I had been feeling a bit under the weather, and thought (rightly) that a voyage into the land of imagination would make me feel better) , I thought I’d try once more to communicate my enthusiasm for a writer who really ought to be better-known and more widely read.

 

The books concerned were ‘The Rose of Tibet’ and ‘A Long Way to Shiloh’ (published in the USA as ‘The Menorah Men’ because there are so many places in the USA called Shiloh, and it’s not about any of them) . I tend to turn to ‘The Rose of Tibet’ when I’m feeling a bit out of sorts,   because it makes normal life feel so blessed. Like all accounts of wild and dangerous encounters with extreme cold, pain and fear, it intensifies the comfort and cosiness of an armchair in a warm, softly-lit room in a peaceful and ordered land.

 

But this is not just a formulaic shilling shocker, but an astonishing work of imagination, mixed with politics, history, satire and moral commentary.  It features some of the most gruesome violence in literature, but the killing is surprisingly easy to accept, since almost any reader will regard it as just punishment for the victims. Davidson hated writing it (by his own account), and never visited the landscapes he describes so movingly and with such power. I’ve never been closer to Tibet than Bhutan, which is quite a lot lower but similar in many ways, and from what I know he got it right.

 

The book begins in a publisher’s office in London, and I’m told it’s a severe satire on the particular publisher involved, if you know who’s involved. The discovery of the manuscript on which the book will be based is very, very funny about old age and infirmity, if you can bear to laugh about such things ( I think it’s good to, myself) and the accelerating process through which the hero finds himself plucked out of normality into a world of exotic surprise is beautifully done.

 

At what point in this strange journey does it become inevitable that he will cross the high Himalayas, guided only by a hopelessly mistaken map and an inexperienced but movingly courageous Sherpa,   into Tibet and become entangled in the fate of nations? There are several moments, each beautifully described.

 

On the way he must spend many weeks in Kalimpong, a real place alluringly described (I was reminded of it, years after I had first read the book, by a sojourn in Thimphu, the tiny capital of Bhutan. Every sensation is enhanced by the thin clear mountain air, thousands of miles from normality and seemingly designed to lift the spirits). Davidson plainly loves mountains, the way they exhilarate, the way they seem to close in on you as dusk comes down, the way the really huge ones fool you into think they are clouds, until you realize that actually they are solid. The flights to Bhutan go past the Himalayas, which I described at the time as resembling a great frozen storm, and I have seen few such moving sights in all my time on earth.

 

It is in that frozen storm that the book sets an adventure as marvellous as anything Rider Haggard ever wrote about, only very definitely in the modern world . To describe it too carefully would be to spoil it, but imagine a grown-up adventure featuring secret passages, she-devils, sacred treasure, and a terrible chase across the beautiful empty lands of Southern Tibet, and you’ll get the idea. People get very badly hurt, thousands of miles from medical help. It is unsparing about that, and desperately sad about Tibet.

 

‘Shiloh’ is almost as good. Long before Indiana Jones, it casts an archaeologist as a hero in a very dangerous hunt for a scroll which will reveal the whereabouts of, well, something very old that a lot of people would like to find. The setting is Israel a few years before the 1967 war, and the old border, and the crude division of Jerusalem of the time, play a significant part in what happens. Davidson is especially good at being realistically funny without in any way losing the tension or the fear. If his heroes do brave things, they do them believably, as urban cowards would do them if they had to.  Tiny allusions to the past lives of his heroes (which you could miss very easily if reading too fast) are extraordinarily telling.  There is drinking. There is extra-marital sex (though Davidson never regards this as uncomplicated or free of moral problems, rather the reverse, but his heroes don’t necessarily shy away from it). But I can’t imagine any other thriller writer whose hero solves half his conundrum by listening to an old man’s Sabbath speculations on the Torah, and then the other half (amid a stormy night) by studying the text of a beautiful old Bible, part of the collection of an army officer marooned in a desolate oasis in the wilderness of Zin. A good map of the region makes this book even better.

 

I won’t here dwell on his first success ‘The Night of Wenceslas’ (read this if you are planning a visit to Prague) or on the curious, wistful ‘Making Good Again’, which isn’t really a  thriller at all. I’ll just note, as I think I did in the original article, that Davidson had an astonishing childhood, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants to Hull, who taught his own mother to read English, served as a submariner in the 1939 war, and then became an office-boy at the ‘Spectator’.  Would such a person now have any chance of becoming what he became? I rather doubt it. I picture him, as a child in Hull, perpetually seeking solace in books in a cramped and chilly family home in that fishy, remote city, and finding much more than solace.

What If Harold Wilson Had Lost on this day in 1964?

So Harold Wilson Day comes round again, now the fiftieth anniversary of Mr Wilson’s appointment by Her Majesty as Prime Minister. I can remember the day, and this is odd because 16^th October 1964 is as distant in time from me (as I now am) as 16^th October 1914 was from me (as I then was).  Even then, the first year of the Great War seemed impossibly distant, a separate age in which men and customs were hardly recognizable. Half a century was far wider than the widest ocean.   I could not have begun, as a 12-year-old boy at a boarding prep school on the edge of Dartmoor, to imagine my present self, the country and the world I live in or the things I would have done and seen. The distance is vast in both directions. Life is not short at all. It is astonishingly long.

 

On that wet and rather puzzling day, we lived otherwise, thought otherwise, spoke otherwise. We had different hopes and fears, we dressed and looked differently and saw the world in completely different way. Many of those changes began when Mr Wilson took office. 

 

A rather good BBC Radio 4 programme, transmitted last Saturday, explored that odd election, and for the moment you may listen to it here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04kzz6g

 

I seem to recall that the early morning broke without a clear result, and it was some hours before we knew for certain that Labour had won.

What if they hadn’t?

As readers here ought to know, the Tory party has never been a  great defender of tradition, despite its pretence to be such a thing. But before Mr Wilson’s six years in office, the Tory party did not feel as anxious as it now does to fit in with the times, to assist and accelerate radical change.

 

Nor was its leader of 1964, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a particularly left-wing figure as Tories go.  

 

I don’t think a Douglas-Home government would have allowed, let alone encouraged, the raft of largely ‘private’ Bills which lunched the British Cultural Revolution . I wonder how the BBC and the rest of the ‘satirical’ new establishment would have reacted to yet another Tory government. Would grammar schools have been reprieved for a while, or saved for good? Would the railways have been butchered more or less (Probably more, though Labour, in the end, cut them pretty savagely) ? Would the death penalty have survived into the 1970s? Would the Wootton Report have ever been published,  let alone implemented. Would British troops have been sent to Vietnam?

 

Actually I suspect Labour would have been in power by 1967 anyway. If Sir Alec had won, he could only have done so narrowly, and would probably have needed ( as Wilson did) to call a new election fairly soon. There was, alas, a ‘mood for change’ which wasn’t rational and which would have had its way.

 

And yet some things in history do depend on very narrow decisions. As the event was so close, I’m surprised that I, for one, have never seen any serious attempt to write a counter-factual speculation on the possibilities. 

Why Isn't Labour Trying Harder to Win the Election?

As the world economy shudders and jolts on its tracks, and the markets plunge, it occurs to me that there’s an explanation for the generally feeble nature of Labour’s campaign for the May 2015 election.

 

The Tories, as we know, cannot hope for a majority next May, whatever happens. If UKIP were abducted by aliens, it would still be the same. All the sordid and unprincipled Tory weapons - pretending to be hostile to the EU while favouring it, dishonest immigration policies they don’t mean and know they can’t implement, referendums they don’t want and won’t have the power to call,  post-dated cheques written on empty accounts, unfunded tax cuts, panics about terrorism,  claims that they have rescued the economy when they have in fact loaded it down with even heavier chains of debt, personal smears of Labour leaders, drenching marginals with money – can only serve to keep the Tory party on life support. The thing will still appear to be alive, and might just possibly be the largest single party if the complex constituency arithmetic falls that way. But too many of its habitual voters have deserted forever, or passed away (and so deserted for even longer than forever) for it to obtain a majority at Westminster.

 

Labour, by contrast, can actually win. It’s unlikely, especially now that the SNP is chewing up Labour support in Scotland,  but a fierce and vigorous campaign might achieve an absolute majority. The Parliamentary boundaries allow it. Labour’s unchanging lead over the Tories in all serious opinion polls (confirmed recently by ICM after a spate of incredible claims of a Tory lead following Mr Cameron’s laughable tax cut speech in Birmingham) allows it. Despite attempts to pretend that UKIP is as great a threat to Labour as it is to the Tories simply aren’t true. UKIP did  *not* beat Labour at last week’s by-election. It did beat the Tories, and by a huge margin. The Tory vote collapsed in both Clacton and in Heywood and Middleton.  Labour’s vote collapsed only in Clacton. They held their share in Heywood and Middleton and will do so in the higher poll of the general election. I doubt if UKIP will win the seat in May.

 

So why aren’t Labour trying? Why isn’t the Labour establishment rallying round to grasp the victory which is within reach? Blairite sulking over the (deserved) failure of the undistinguished and weirdly overpraised David Miliband to beat his brother really has run its course.  What is supposed to be so great about David, who somehow became Foreign Secretary without even knowing that Britain had knighted Robert Mugabe? If they’d wanted to get rid of Ed, they should have done so years ago. They haven’t. It’s too late now, unless some wholly unpredictable cataclysm forces him to resign.

 

All professional politicians normally prefer office to opposition. There’s more fun, more money, more chance of cashing in afterwards.

 

I think Labour knows something which the Tories (who perhaps believe their own propaganda about the economy) don’t know or can’t believe.  They can see that George Osborne’s housing-based bubble cannot last and must burst with a loud bang pretty soon. They can see that higher employment has only been achieved though the creation of huge numbers of ‘self-employed’ jobs which pay so little that the supposed employees earn too little to pay tax.  They know that the City is full of foreboding and that the deep faults of  uncontrollable, unaccountable debt which caused the last crash have not been put right. Far from it.

 

 

 I think Labour fears to be the party in power when the coming economic storm, long in gestation, finally breaks. I think whoever is in power when that crisis comes will be out of office for a very long time, if not wholly broken. And that we may well end up with a grand coalition as we try to pick up the pieces afterwards. So why try now?

A Day in the Rain, in Bath

I spent most of Tuesday in Bath, in the rain. I was due to speak that evening in a debate about religion, and decided to make a day of it.  I’ve never especially liked Bath, finding it dispiriting and soggy. And while I enjoy this sort of architecture in small doses in the countryside (see below) , this great concentration of it in long, crumbling terraces always feels to me like some vast mausoleum. Here was a chance to try again, and perhaps persuade myself to like it. But I still don't. How odd it has always seemed to me that Bath of all places is the only English town that has been classified as a World Heritage Site. 

 

Not York? Not Durham? Not Oxford, Not Cambridge? How strange. 

 

What is it that I don't like, apart from the feeling of being in a large and well-ordered cemetery full of tourist shops and cafes?

Is it that it is, unlike the rest of unplanned England, it is so concentrated, uniform and orderly? It is by far the most concentrated outcrop of Regency architecture in England? I can't really like this era of dandies, boozers and politicians such as Charles James Fox, so terribly fooled by the French Revolution. Classical architecture, though pleasing in a mathematical sort of way, somehow makes my heart sink, unless it's softened by a woodland setting.  

 

In the end, I suppose, its fundamentally pagan character is intensified when you see so much of it, over and over again. Also it was originally conceived for Mediterranean landscapes, cypress trees , vineyards and olive groves. Recreated amid the soggy wooded hills of Somerset, it is even more melancholy – the final years of paganism must, I think have been full of weariness, cynicism and disappointment, all those pointless mysteries, those temple basements full of the rotting offal from thousands of useless animal sacrifices, the beautiful but ultimately lifeless idols  (Eyes, that see not, ears that hear not, mouths that speak not, hands that handle not - They that worship them, as the psalm sneers, are like unto them)  or why did Christianity sweep all before it so easily?  

 

As I roamed around I had the usual odd experiences which minor celebrity brings. People think they know you, but can’t remember how or why. At the Abbey a nice lady half-recognized me and said she was sure she had once known me in Hong Kong (she certainly hadn’t, but this made a change from the gentlemen of a certain age who are sure they know me from the Golf Club, a claim so impossible that it is hard to know how to reply, except gently).

 

The main lesson I take from such encounters is that  ‘More know Tom Fool, than Tom Fool knows’, and that it is wise to behave very well indeed, for any misbehaviour will quickly become public. This is actually quite good for me, and  I suppose I am no more constrained by it than any dweller in a village or small town (where nobody needs to be well-known to be recognized) would have been in the days when we were a smaller and more settled society. Vain as I am, it’s not vanity that makes me assume that there’s a good chance I’ll be recognized. It’s caution.

 

Then I walked up to the University, up a long, steep hill with occasional superb views of the town below. As usual, one enters a another world when one arrives on any British University campus, a kingdom of youth where even quite recent events and ideas are alien, and the modern is completely triumphant. Some of the buildings looked to me as if they were survivors from the 1970s, or even possibly the 1960s, that heavy waterlogged look that really old concrete has.

 

But even that era (still very much alive in my memory) was impossibly long ago in the bustling world of new things, where I couldn’t even get full-fat whole milk to put in my tea. One of the strangest features of modern life is the absurd misconception that fat is bad for you, and the insistence on serving skimmed milk (once reserved for convicts and workhouse inmates who had no choice) as a health benefit. Hilariously, it is usually accompanied by vast quantities of sugar and starch, which are very bad for you,  and consumed by people whose lives are deprived of exercise by motor cars,  lifts and all the other anti-exercise devices which fill our lives.

 

I also noticed (and filed for a possible jest later) that the Student Union lavatories resembled those of a maximum security prison, solid stainless steel without any movable parts. I am fascinated by the assumption in so much modern design that people no longer know how to behave -  the public loos of my youth were ornate affairs of porcelain, glass, brass and wood, now they are increasingly Spartan, armour-plated, unbreakable and unadorned. It’s the same trend that has led many pubs to serve drinks in plastic containers rather than glasses, and that has installed CCTV cameras, those symbols of mistrust and surveillance, everywhere I go (except, interestingly, former East Berlin, where the people have already experienced what happens when we get the balance between privacy and security wrong).

 

We cannot be trusted to behave in a civilized fashion, so we must have our hands kept away from dangerous materials, we cannot be allowed to have breakable or delicate facilities in public places and we must be watched and recorded. What’s more , our testimony cannot be trusted any more unless it is backed up by filmed records. One of the most unexpected effects of CCTV is that it has now set a standard of evidence far higher than the one which previously existed, and the absence of any CCTV records of an alleged crime will usually cause the police to lose what interest they had in the first place (not much, you will rightly say, but you see what I mean).

 

Weary of the standard fare of religion debates, I thought I might as well make this collapse of trust and self-restraint a central part of my necessarily brief attempt to defend faith and absolute  morality against those who argue that we would be better off without it.

 

The first speaker for the anti-religious position astonished me by fully conceding Christianity’s role in the foundation of literacy, science and society as a whole, perhaps putting me off my stroke. I felt the need to point out that my side’s principal point had been made, but I suspect it didn’t have the effect I’d hoped for. If this is so, and I think it demonstrable, it’s surely absurd to say that society would be better off without religion, for without religion, a society capable of discussing this issue wouldn’t exist in the first place.

 

But the real argument is of course always about something else, whatever the formal wording of the motion. I suspect that many of those present care little about how society came to be as it is. What they are interested in is ensuring that it ceases to pay any attention to, or give any authority to religious absolute morality. The desire for total autonomy in their own bodies is the strongest driving force in their lives, and religious rules about sex and drugs are infuriating and absurd to them.

 

Even so, they suffer from a fear that there might just be something in the claims of religion, which is why – whenever I go touniversities to discuss the subject - the audiences are bigger and more engaged than they are for debates about any other subject.  As I so often say, believers and unbelievers both fear that God exists. Believers also hope He does. Unbelievers hope He doesn’t.  

 

***Note to religious bores. Comments directly relevant to the above are of course welcome,. But attempts to turn this into a Bible-quoting esoteric row will be frowned upon, and severely discouraged.

That Old Sweet Song 'I want for your children what I want for mine'. Sorry they can't actually have it.

The following is made relevant by a ‘Daily Telegraph’ story on Saturday, in which it is suggested that the Prime Minister may follow the example of his friend and former Education Secretary Michael Gove and send his daughter to a highly selective (though of course not *academically* selective, that would never do) single-sex Church school, rather than to one of the ‘academies’ or ‘free schools' which his government recommends so fervently to the common people.

 

As with Mr Gove, this possibility is spun as a bold decision by a privately-educated Tory to use the state system, a spin which has worked amazingly well, judging by the dim and ill-informed comments which have appeared beneath the story:

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11154466/David-and-Samantha-Cameron-look-to-send-daughter-to-inner-city-comp.html

 

The story itself portrays his daughter’s fate as being a ‘contrast’ with his ‘privileged’ education at Eton. Yes, Eton is indeed privileged. But so is Grey Coat Hospital. Does the writer really not know that access to schools such as Grey Coat Hospital is one of the most prized and elusive privileges to be found in our society? Most parents in the UK can only dream of it, and they can no more hope for it than they can hope to pay fees of £35,000 out of taxed income.

 

In most parts of Britain, such schools simply do not exist, or if they do, are so oversubscribed or have such tiny catchment areas that many are called, but very few are chosen.

 

 

Joshua Wooderson apparently doesn’t know when to give up. He responded to a recorded discussion in which I attacked Mr Gove’s personal schools policy in front of an audience of privileged public schoolboys who don't know how lucky they are (featured in the post ‘ A Debate at Radley’).

 

He asserted that Michael Gove’s decision, when Education secretary, to spurn, for his own child, a school he had repeatedly praised in print and from public platforms, was not proof that the Tories had done nothing for the children of the poor (while pretending to have done so much for them, as New Labour did).

 

I had said that Mr Gove plainly didn’t believe his own propaganda, and couldn’t have shown his disbelief more clearly.

 

The school he spurned, Burlington Danes, is a short walk from his London home. The school he chose for his daughter instead, a highly selective single sex former grammar school with a complex admission policy, whose uniform supplier is Peter Jones of Sloane, Square, Chelsea,  is miles from his home.

 

It is exactly the sort of school many parents long for, but which  has been whisked out their reach by the mass abolition of grammar schools.

 

In other words, in his actions Mr Gove agrees with me that the best state schools are selective , single sex and traditional. In his rhetoric, he doesn’t.

 

Mr Wooderson wrote ‘I don't entirely understand how it follows from the fact that Michael Gove didn't send his children to Burlington Danes that his party has done nothing for the children of the poor. If you think, as I do, that parents have a right - perhaps even an obligation - to provide their children with the best education possible, then Mr. Gove ought to send his children to whichever school he thinks best, whether or not that school is one he has personally championed. He may well believe that Burlington Danes is a testament to the success of his reforms, but that doesn't commit him to believing it to be the best school available, particularly given that his reforms are comparatively recent, and so may bear fruit only in the long term. By analogy: if selective education were reintroduced (as I believe it should be), thereby improving the education of the poor, would anyone who championed it be obliged to send his children to the local grammar school, rather than a superior independent school? Even if one thinks Mr. Gove should have to suffer (or enjoy) the consequences of his own policies, surely his children shouldn't.’

 

*** Well, start with this: Mr Gove has been unequivocal in his praise of Burlington Danes – see here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/06/if-this-school-is-so-good-why-doesnt-michael-gove-send-his-daughter-to-it.html

 

He has certainly not suggested that his reforms have yet to bear fruit there, or are still waiting to take effect.

 

As for his vew of grammar schools, his government continues (as it has from the start) to enforce the Blair/Blunkett School Standards Act, which makes it illegal to open any new grammar schools.

 

This is not just neutral inertia. Mr Gove himself is far from enthusiastic about reversing the destruction of the grammar schools, as I described here when Mr Wooderson was obviously absent:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/05/more-details-of-michael-goves-attitude-towards-grammar-schools.html

 

 

Mr Wooderson was (in my view rightly) challenged by the Wiki Man, who weighed in thus:

 

‘Was your comment a wilfully tongue-in-cheek missing of the point? A politician defending a schools policy - his own schools policy - by lauding a nearby school operating according to that policy and who then sends his child to a more distant school not operating to that schools policy, and in fact to all intents defying it, is rightly open to the call of hypocrisy. (The distance issue is in fact a red-herring. The distances could be reversed and it would still be hypocrisy.) The hypocrisy would be lessened somewhat if comprehensive schooling was run alongside grammar schooling as a competitively alternative system. Instead of course new grammar schooling is forbidden. Aggravating the issue in respect of Mr Gove is the role of perception in giving political policy credibility. If Mr Gove is advocating an egalitarian schools policy over which he hopes to establish credibility he must be perceived outwardly to be adopting it in the case of his own children. This used to be called 'leading from the front'.’

 

Mr Wooderson then responded : ‘Well, I wasn’t in fact defending Mr. Gove from the charge of hypocrisy, but from the accusation that, because he doesn’t send his own children to a nearby school that operates according to his schools policy, he obviously doesn’t believe in his reforms or care about the children of the poor.’

 

To which I will reply ***What, then, is his defence? There is no doubt that Mr Gove has done this. If he believed these self-styled academies were as good as he says he does, how can he possibly justify spurning Burlington Danes? Unlike the Wiki Man, I do not think it is anything to do with ‘leading from the front’. Mr Gove may send his children wherever he likes, if he can get them in. I just think it is a matter of flat, unmistakable hypocrisy. The question Mr Wooderson still has to answer is ‘If Mr Gove genuinely believes Burlington Danes and the other academies he praises are so good, why, given the ideal opportunity to do so, does he not back up his statements with action?’

 

There can be only one answer, can’t there? And there’s no defence. The Tory MP in the discussion makes the same obtuse non-defence of Mr Gove, pretending not to see any connection between Mr Gove’s claims for ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’ and his actual very different choice in practice.

Mr Wooderson continued : ‘As far as hypocrisy is concerned, I don’t know to what extent he’s responsible for, or supportive of, the ban on opening new grammar schools (a ban that was put in place by a previous government, if I’m not mistaken). But suppose he is opposed to selective education. Might he not say in his defence that in an ideal world he would send his children to the sort of non-selective school he champions, but that, the world being imperfect, and there being grammar schools which are better than the schools he champions, it would be wrong for him to give his children a less-than-optimal education in the name of ‘leading from the front’, given that they of course have no say in how the education system is or has been run?’

 

***Mr Wooderson should see above (*the Gove/ grammars link) and also below. The legal ban on new grammar schools was indeed put in place by a  previous government. But Mr Gove's Pary never showed any enthusasm for getting rid of it. Not only did they fail to reopen or build a single new gramar school in 18 years of office between 1979 and 1997.   David Cameron, Michael Gove’s friend and patron, was challenged by backbenchers such as Graham Brady to oppose and overturn this ban in 2007. He acted firmly as Leader of the Opposition to quash any such idea, even when he still thought he might have the power to overturn it. Mr Gove accepted his appointment as Education Secretary in full knowledge of his leader’s views.  See:

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6701877.stm

 

 

I note that the Prime Minister, discussing his children’s education in the ‘Daily Mail’ this morning, praises his daughter’s ‘brilliant state school’ (without at any stage acknowledging how incredibly rare such schools are in the state system, nor explaining precisely how she happens to be at this heavily-oversubscribed establishment so far from either Downing Street or the Camerons’ West London home).

 

If it is true, as he writes , that ‘We have made good progress, with rigour in the curriculum, discipline in the classroom, and well-respected qualifications on exam certificates. Because these aren't just letters on a piece of paper - they're our children's ticket to a better, brighter future.’ , then it is hard to see that he needs to worry about which of the many London secondary schools within reach of either place his daughter now goes to.

 

But, do you know, I think he can still see the difference between Grey Coat Hospital and the others, just as Harriet Harman did in her time, and just as the Blair Creature saw the difference between Islington’s comprehensives and the London Oratory, another exceptional state school. And I think if he really had to accept the National Offer Day decisions which most parents have to face, he'd get out his cheque book pretty quickly.  

 

The interesting thing is that after 17 years of alleged reform (on top of decades of alleged reform by pre-Blair governments) , the difference is still just as clear between the exceptional and the bog-standard.

 

 

History does repeat itself quite a lot. Mr Cameron actually writes : ‘I want for your children what I have for my own’ … adding ‘ because no child in Britain should be born to have a second-rate education’

 

Well, pulling down from its shelf my treasured and dog-eared copy of New Labour’s 1997 Manifesto (adorned with many pictures of the Blair creature looking sincere, human , noble ( and on occasions slightly deranged from oversmiling), with Nelson Mandela, with John Prescott, with Jacques Chirac, with Bill Clinton, with a nameless tot, in a crowd, with some soldiers (!))

 

I find on page 3:

 

‘What I want for my own children I want for yours.’

 

Neither of these statements can possibly be true. There simply are not enough lovely, nostalgic C of E primaries, enough Grey Coat Hospitals, enough London Oratories, for all those parents who want their children to have good, orderly, disciplined education. And there never will be, until we bring back selection by ability at 11 or 13 (we never got rid of it at 18, did we?, but by that time the fates of most are already decided).

 

I really have no idea why Mr Wooderson, or anyone, should wish to defend these people, who grab what they can get, which is natural if unlovely – but then pretend to be bountiful philanthropists the while, which is just nauseating.  

Huge Story Breaks, nobody pays any attention

A senior figure in a major party openly admits that its last manifesto contained  a ‘great deception’ over one of the central issues of our time. This is an astonishing story, a political Ratner moment of huge proportions.

 

Major Party’s Top Figure Admits ‘Deception’ About Immigration Control’.

 

And almost nothing happens.

 

The media had plenty of Sunday to check the quote (spoken on the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme quite early on Sunday morning) and follow it up, and seek reaction to it, and organise informed comment on it. Until Mr Alexander ("Boris") Johnson made his amazing and damaging confession, none of the Fleet Street papers had an especially strong story with which to carry on coverage of the most extraordinary political upset of modern times.

 

Here are the core words ; ‘I think there were two big deceptions. The first was when Blair took the brakes off in 2004. Other countries kept their borders sealed and we didn’t. That was a mistake. And the second thing was saying that we could control the numbers when we couldn’t.’

 

Actually the Blair creature actively wanted the migrants in 2004, as Andrew Neather revealed in his famous outburst. The other EU states could only lawfully have kept their borders ‘sealed’ for a limited time. In the end they had to open them as well, and (controls being what they are in the borderless EU) they couldn’t really limit them even then. Our shambolic monitoring of foreigners once in the country, our vast army of unemployable comprehensively-‘educated’ young people who shun low-paid work, and our non-contributory benefits system make us a greater target anyway.

 

The real core remains the words : ‘saying that we could control the numbers when we couldn’t’.

 

But by Monday morning the confession/condemnation had sunk into obscurity. The Blairite ‘Daily Telegraph’, whose readers ought to be wholly baffled by their habitual newspaper’s cultural revolution, hilariously led on a supposed call by Mr Johnson for ‘ quotas on EU immigrants’ which sounded to me remarkably like the very thing he had just denounced – a promise to do something he had no conceivable power to do.

 

This is like calling for air traffic control on flying pigs, as Mr Johnson knows perfectly well. EU law absolutely prevents any such quotas. To suggest that this measure is any more possible now than it was in 2010 is to repeat the deception for which he has just castigated his own leader on national TV.

 

Mr Johnson penned a bizarre article in which he says that the answer to the revolt against David Cameron and his dishonest party (a party Mr Johnson has just explicitly admitted was wholly dishonest in its 2010 migration pledge ) is …vote Tory again.

 

SARCASM WARNING HERE: Generously conceding that not all UKIP voters are racist (how kind!) , and that to be worried about immigration is not necessarily to be personally hostile to immigrants themselves ( my goodness, how magnanimous!) Mr Johnson then recounts the history of his revolting, gazillionaire-infested party’s opportunist lying on the subject, so very similar to the lying done by the other revolting, gazillionaire-infested Blairite Party, New Labour.  

 

You can read the thing in full here

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11157515/The-answer-to-the-Ukip-anger-is-simple-vote-David-Cameron.html

 

He says : ‘The electorate was told that we could reduce the numbers of immigrants – when in fact it was legally impossible to do so.’

 

See, now here we are in the passive again. The electorate ‘was told’ Who told it? Why, the Tories told it. So why not say  ‘We Tories told voters that we could reduce the numbers of immigrants – when in fact it was legally impossible to do so.’

 

Is it because he still chokes and gags on the admission, like his party?  And if so, why?

 

Could it be that the Age of Deception is not over?

He even admits : ‘There is no way, under current UK law, that we can stop people entering this country in large numbers from all 28 EU countries, including those where wages and benefits are very much lower than our own. The voters aren’t fools. They have spotted this incoherence..’

 

Well, if we’re not fools then why does he then make this laughable claim a few lines further on?

 

‘There is only one man who has both grasped what needs to be done and who is in a position to do it, and that is David Cameron.’

 

I defy anyone to identify a solitary syllable of truth in this assertion. What is Mr Cameron (who pretended he could act in 2010 when he couldn’t) going to do, exactly?

 

What sort of fool would believe it?

 

Well, here’s your answer, uncrammed with practical or legal detail:

‘Only David Cameron can conceivably deliver those changes, since he is the only leader who can lead reform of the EU.’

 

So here we are in the wonderful territory so well summed up by the old chants: ‘with a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the houses in between’  . Or ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs’.

 

If we had some ham…Mr Cameron has to win a parliamentary majority in May 2015 (arithmetically and politically impossible even if UKIP sank to the bottom of the ocean tonight). If we had some eggs….He then has to persuade the EU to reverse the ’acquis communautaire’ (its irreversible ratchet under which all powers conceded to it by nation states remain forever in the EU’s hands) .

 

Then, after viewing the Hackney Marshes with his imaginary ladder and glasses, except for the problem of the houses in between, and after cooking and eating his imaginary eggs and ham,  he will deliver phantasmal changes to our relationship with the EU (changes which I for one am by no means sure he or Mr Johnson actually want anyway).

 

Serious people have to keep asking the Tories why they never actually say what their attitude is towards EU membership. They hint, they bluster and blow hot and cold, they leak, they allow people to speculate on certain lines, but have you ever heard any significant senior Tory say ‘Yup, we have to leave if we are to get our borders back, and we will’.

 

No. Nor will you. Because, while they know perfectly well thus is true, they will never leave the EU . But you *will* with increasing frequency hear statements designed to look as if the person is saying this, when he isn’t.

 

The Tories are and always have been the party of the EU. All they have learned from the past 30 years is how to pretend to dislike the thing they support. That’s why we will have to get someone else to do it, if we want this job done.