'Conservative Woman' interviews PH on the Referendum and its Outcome

Some of you may be interested in this interview with Laura Perrins of the excellent 'Conservative Woman' website.

 

http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-laura-perrins-interview-brexit-is-a-chance-for-a-new-socially-conservative-party-says-hitchens/

 

Why We Need a General Election by mid-September

Out of the froth and fog of the last few days, something is beginning to emerge. I’m not surprised at all by the unlovely shape of it. You may not like the look of it. But first I thought I’d make a brief tour of some of the more interesting (and perhaps unexpected) commentary in this morning’s newspapers.

Let us start with this fascinating and (in my experience) wholly accurate article about the state of modern England – betting shops, payday loans, mobility scooters and all - from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/liverpool-london-brexit-leave-eu-referendum, a good piece of left-wing journalism in the tradition of Orwell’s ‘Road to Wigan Pier' and Priestley’s ‘English Journey’. The closeness of this devastation and demoralised despair to London itself will surprise many, who think it is confined to the West Midlands and the North. I fear it will surprise a lot more who have no idea that it exists anywhere. I think the destruction it records can be blamed on many other things as well as the thatcher era. But BBC Remain types need to read this, by one of their own(though perhaps he’s one of Jeremy Corbyn’s, I don’t know) .

They may then begin to grasp what happened last week, and even start to sympathise with it.

Next, from the same paper, is this typically perceptive analysis by Larry Elliott:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/26/brexit-is-the-rejection-of-globalisation

He correctly notes that Britain’s self-image as an economic success story is batty self-delusion, saying:’ To be sure, not all Britain’s problems are the result of its EU membership. It is not the European commission’s fault that productivity is so weak or that the trains don’t run on time. The deep-seated failings that were there when Britain voted in the referendum last Thursday were still there when the country woke up to the result on Friday. Evidence of just how unbalanced the economy is will be provided when the latest figures for Britain’s current account are released later this week. These show whether the country’s trade and investment income are in the black or the red. At the last count, in the final three months of 2015, the UK was running a record peacetime deficit of 7% of GDP.’

Then  he points out that the EU (the same is true of the post NAFTA USA) has failed to protect its working population from the ferocious downward pressures of globalisation: ‘In the shiny new world created when former communist countries were integrated into the global model, Europe was supposed to be big and powerful enough to protect its citizens against the worst excesses of the market. Nation states had previously been the guarantor of full employment and welfare. The controls they imposed on the free movement of capital and people ensured that trade unions could bargain for higher pay without the threat of work being off-shored, or cheaper labour being brought into the country.’

He adds : ‘Europe has failed to fulfil the historic role allocated to it. Jobs, living standards and welfare states were all better protected in the heyday of nation states in the 1950s and 1960s than they have been in the age of globalisation. Unemployment across the eurozone is more than 10%. Italy’s economy is barely any bigger now than it was when the euro was created. Greece’s economy has shrunk by almost a third. Austerity has eroded welfare provision. Labour market protections have been stripped away.’

He is very good on the implications of this for left-wing parties which have blithely backed open-doors immigration policies.

Many people, once they understand what free trade really means, are beginning to wonder whether protection is really quite such a bad idea as the modish economists keep telling them.

Finally there is this from the distinguished and original-minded Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the ‘Daily Telegraph’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/26/parliament-must-decide-what-brexit-means-in-the-interests-of-the/

The shape of a compromise, miles from what many in the ‘Leave’ campaign want, but acceptable to the current Parliament, is here very accurately and credibly set out. Something of this kind may very well happen. Just as we are not now fully in the EU, but pretend we are,  we could end with a position where we are not fully out of it, but pretend we are.

This is why anyone who seriously wants a thorough break with the EU that will restore our control of our borders needs to realise that a referendum was never going to be enough to achieve this.

Something – perhaps yet another petition – needs to be done to encourage and record public support (if there is any now people are beginning to realise what's at stake) for a swift general election,  held to cement and confirm the decision of the referendum. In my view, the referendum cannot possibly take full effect( and will have been waste of time) unless the composition and the balance of forces is irrevocably altered now in the Commons.

If an election is held soon enough (certainly before October) then all candidates can reasonably be asked to state without equivocation whether they support or oppose the verdict of the referendum, and how they will vote on the matter if elected. This must then be more important than their party allegiances. It will compel local alliances which could make almost all ‘safe’ seats unsafe. And it would also compel the elected members in such a Parliament to seek new allegiances, refusing the old Labour or Tory whips. It could be the first step towards the complete realignment our political system so badly needs. If it does not happen, then some sort of Norwegian arrangement under which we remain in the Single Market and lack full control of our borders, will be what we will get. It will resolve almost none of the problems described above.  Good luck with that.

.

No, we have not escaped from the EU - and we may not ever do so.

Please note: The United Kingdom has not left the EU. It is by no means certain that the United Kingdom will ever leave the EU.

As we now move into a new week, I felt I should go more deeply into the difficulties which face this country as it struggles to understand and act on what happened last Thursday. I do hope people won’t mistake my necessarily pessimistic thoughts for desires. I want Britain to leave the EU. I have wanted this for about 20 years, since the end of the Cold War exposed it as the key national issue of our time.

But as I warned some months back, here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/the-eu-is-our-own-hotel-california-we-can-check-out-but-well-never-leave.html , a referendum was a daft way to try to get out. And it may well not get us out.

Sure, the EU is playing tough and stand-offish now (but that, I guess, is just to try to scare us) .Unless its leadership is a good deal more stupid than I think it is, it will soon be seeking a compromise which will keep us in.

And the Bad Losers Alliance, with its petition for a second referendum and its emotional whimpering about how everything has been ruined and it’s not fair and so forth, and its media claque acting as if we’ve more or less gone Nazi overnight, is softening the ground for just such a development.

I am oddly reminded by present events of Winston Churchill’s weary comment on the resurgence of the Irish Question as soon as the First World War ended

'The whole map of Europe has been changed ... but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again.'

Similarly, after the greatest political convulsion of my adult life, the people in the media who decide what is important about politics have once again returned to the subject which has, I do not understate, obsessed them: the battle between Jeremy Corbyn and the Shadow Cabinet. Dreary steeples indeed.

When I was invited on to the BBC TV news channel on Friday afternoon, 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/ph-interviewed-on-eub-referendum-result.html

it quickly became clear that this, the Corbyn matter, was what they really wanted to talk about . I boggled. Here we were, facing a huge constitutional, diplomatic and political crisis. The markets, though not in the free-fall alleged by the panic-mongers of the Bad Losers Alliance (see above), were certainly pretty volatile.

The Prime Minister had resigned that morning. His Party was exposed as utterly divided, cloven from the nave to the chaps by discord. It was and is seriously proposing to leave the country to drift till October before picking a new leader ( see below for an analysis of why this is so disgraceful) .

A majority of the electorate, in a high turnout had specifically endorse a policy rejected and indeed sneered at for decades by both major political parties, plus the BBC and most of the media, the civil service and the whole establishment. They had done so after a fair fight, in which the other side had flung millions of pounds and a great deal of frightening propaganda at them.

* By the way, please note this little-noticed fact. Only after the vote was over did the Russian tyrant, Vladimir Putin, issue a statement objecting to the way in which our Prime Minister had tried to drag him into the campaign, claiming he wanted a British exit. President Putin's dignified and diplomatically proper response can be read here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/25/vladimir-putin-slams-david-cameron-over-eu-referendum/. It’s an interesting contrast with the naked intervention in our internal affairs, including actual threats, by the President of the United States. I note this because it may help some people understand my objection to the ceaseless characterisation of Russia as an aggressive, interfering and menacing power. No doubt Russia often behaves badly. But it is not unique in doing so, and there are many weapons other than tanks which great powers may use to try to get their way.***

And in the midst of all this the BBC wanted to talk about Jeremy Corbyn, and the presenter was clearly perturbed and discombobulated when I sought to talk about the future of the country instead. She was also puzzled. Surely Mr Corbyn was the main topic? Not for me.

This odd, faintly unhinged preoccupation is also noticeable among the battalion of establishment political commentators, who also seem to have little else to talk about. I say it is unhinged because it is a failure of proportion, for me the first sign that someone is losing touch with reality, probably deliberately.

The reason for this obsession is that one of the main functions of modern political journalism is to act as a sort of thought police. Anyone who strays from the 'centre' (an apparently objective term for a subjective opinion) is mocked, belittled, subjected to scandal and exposure, pictured looking foolish or eating messily, accused of ‘gaffes’ and ceaselessly the subject of stories about how he or she is being plotted against and is weak.

This supposed ‘centre’ can loosely be described as Blairism, a set of ideas which I won’t spend much time defining here because my readers have a pretty good idea of what they are – egalitarian, socially and morally liberal, opposed to the concepts of individual responsibility and national sovereignty alike. It is absolutely committed to membership of the EU. They are certainly not the 'centre' of anything, deriving as they do from the radical Eurocommunism (Communism adapted for the modern world, in the light of and learning from the failure of the USSR) which escaped into the Western mainstream at the end of the Cold War.

Mr Corbyn offends against this because he still openly defines himself as a socialist, something which the Eurocommunists are deliberately careful not to do. He is also, from the Blairite or Eurocommunist point of view, a foolish throwback, as he has not cured himself of the 19^th century socialist interest in state ownership and trade union power. And he has the usual embarrassing baggage of sympathies with various unappealing Latin American leftists. Deep down, this package makes him hugely suspicious of the Blairites, because he can see that supranational bodies such as the EU will favour the big corporations he despises against the attempts of left-wing governments (such as he dreams of heading), and that the destruction of national sovereignty means the extinction of his dreams. Only a proud and independent Britain could ever implement his desired programme. So, as Dominic Lawson rightly wrote a few weeks ago in the Sunday Times, he is like a paraded hostage, frantically signalling to those who watch him on TV, through demeanour and body language, that the things that come out of his mouth about the EU are not in fact his real sentiments.

The Blairites return the favour. They can’t stand him. But as we know they can’t easily get rid of him either, and if they do, they can't replace him with one of their own. Mr Corbyn doesn’t owe his election to them but to the Party members, who are also Europhiles but love Mr Corbyn’s old-fashioned positions so much, and reasonably enjoy his principled and unflinching political style ( as I do too) that they don’t care.

The mystery is this - what are the Blairites still doing in Jeremy Corbyn’s party anyway? They were elected on the wrong ticket. They have fulfilled the great 1990s dream of forcing the Tories to agree with them, and have belatedly discovered that the same Tories are better than they are at raising money, and at winning elections. It could be a decade before the Tories lose an election, if then. The billionaires are all on the Tory side and likely to stay there. Labour have also been cut off at the knees by the destruction of their party in Scotland, which was all their own fault, as they thought that devolution would defuse the Nationalists, when in fact it was the making of them. This loss, combined with a general weakening of Labour in the South of England, means Labour has little prospect of wining a majority ever again.

They know in their hearts they can’t win. They must also know that they can’t get rid of Mr Corbyn, unless they accept John McDonnell instead, which would be just the same if not worse form the Blairite point of view.

The whole lot of them, no more than professional career politicians, would be much happier in the Cameron Tory Party. But the mad irrational tribalism of British politics prevents them from doing this without being denounced as traitors (to what, exactly?) or ‘defectors’, as if they had gone over from one opposing ideology to another.

So, in yet another illustration of Kissinger’s Law, that the fighting is bitterest where the stakes are smallest, they occupy their long-honed political skills in undermining their own leader. This is a task in which they can probably never succeed, but they have come to enjoy it in the absence of any other purposeful activity. And the pitiful flock of political reporters, who can’t stand Corbyn because he won’t conform, are happy to join in. It's s much better than actually finding out what is happening to the country, or asking why the Tories plan to spend three months picking a new leader when they could do so in a week .

I’d got used to this Corbyn-obsessive rubbish, but for this to be the dominant strand of political coverage, three days after the momentous vote, is simply absurd .

Take this problem, for instance. Though the Remainers claim in tones of squeaky panic that we are in an economic meltdown, we have a lame duck caretaker Prime Minister and an even lamer duck Chancellor. We are expected to put up with this till October while the Tory Party rambles through its leadership process.

Surely this is a time for swift and decisive ‘action this day’. The Tory Party can act much faster than this, and actually did so in October 2003 after the media-sponsored coup against Ian Duncan Smith (the model for the current campaign against Mr Corbyn) removed IDS from office on 29^th October.

Eight days later, on 6^th November, Michael Howard was declared the new leader. All his rivals withdrew in the interests of unity and peace. There was no election among MPs, and the Party Board decided there was equally no need to ask the party membership what they thought. As far as I know, the rules are the same now as they were then. All we need is for Theresa May and that other chap to recognise that they have no hope, and that the country needs a new prime minister pronto, and Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson can be in Downing Street, chairing his first Cabinet, by Friday.

No doubt this was an urgent matter back in 2003, the security and continuity of the Tory Party being an important thing, at least to its members, if not to me. But surely the prosperity and integrity of the country are more important.

If ambitious rivals can stifle their ambitions for the higher good to save their party, how much more they should do so for the sake of the country. Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson plainly has a mandate, as he is the most recognisable Conservative in Britain, has just headed the most thumpingly successful political campaign in modern British history, is personally identified with it, has held major office as Mayor of London, has in fact conducted himself during the campaign in a sober and restrained manner despite great provocation. So there is an unanswerable argument for handing him the crown – a far more unanswerable one than there was for doing the same to Michael Howard in 2003.

Why is this not happening? Do the supporters of the EU truly accept their defeat? I think not. Do the EU high command themselves think and hope that the force and power of the referendum can be lost in the swamps and bogs of compromise and manoeuvre which now stretch for months ahead? I should have thought so. A leading Labour MP, David Lammy, is already calling for Parliament to frustrate the referendum. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-result-latest-david-lammy-mp-eu-referendum-result-parliament-twitter-statement-stop-this-a7102931.html . I teased him about this on Twitter, recalling Bertolt Brecht’s 1953 joke that, the people having failed the elite, the elite needed to elect a new people.

But Matthew Parris, in his Saturday Times column (behind a paywall) , mused similarly but more subtly about how few MPs actually support a British exit form the EU, and especially a British exist from the Single Market, which may well be the sticking point as the referendum made no mention of the single market. Then we have that petition calling for a second referendum which everyone is now saying has no force. Of course it hasn’t, now. But it could help the pro-EU faction later, when the referendum is months ago, the Leave campaign has long ago been dissolved and disbanded, ‘normality’ has returned and the EU has abandoned its current hard cop mode and begun trying to charm us.

That’s why we mustn’t let ‘normality’ return. ‘ll be explaining how we can act, soon.

An article for the US 'First Things' website

I wrote the following article

 

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/06/very-well-alone

for the US website 'First Things'. Some of you may wish to read it.

 

 

Boston, Lincolngrad: I saw the seething resentment. Now it is time to finish the revolution

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

They shouldn’t have tried to scare us. It is a sign of how little the Remainers understand or know about Britain, and above all about England, that they thought that would work.

I do sometimes wonder if these odd denatured shiny types, who actively prefer foreign rule to their own, ever visit their own country. Confined to glossy multicultural London neighbourhoods for most of the year, they then hurry abroad.

Most of them are more familiar with Florence or Barcelona than they are with the equal glory of Lincoln Cathedral, whose history, beauties and significance are alike unknown to them.

Well, they should have tried harder to visit Britain. They might also have learned to like it, its unspectacular difference from anywhere else in the world (I know, I’ve visited 57 other countries), its gruff reserve that masks much deeper feelings, and its ancient dislike of being pushed around.

Immigrant workers are pictured working the fields near Boston in Lincolnshire. The town voted 75.5 per cent in favour of Leave

The Remainers’ snobbery was their undoing. They believed they were superior to their fellow countrymen and women, when they were just luckier and richer. Judging from their response to the referendum result, many of them still do.

For instance, they refused to be aware of the quiet seething resentment about mass migration that I found in Boston four summers ago. The established parties ignored this, and the liberal thought police tried to claim it was bigotry.

But it was real, and this was reflected on Thursday night in a 77.27 per cent turnout and a 75.5 per cent vote to leave in that town. I do not see how these people could be clearer about their discontent over the enforced transformation of their lives. I am amazed at their patience. I strongly advise against ignoring them any longer.

Of course, it’s not just about immigration. A wonderful alliance, which I have long hoped for, has been forged in this campaign.

It has brought together two groups who had never really met before. The first group are the social and moral conservatives, whose views the Blairised Tory Party despised, while it still relied on their money and their votes. The second are the working-class families whose votes the Blairised Labour Party relied on, while it dismissed and ignored their concerns.

It is not just mass migration that worries them. They are also distressed about the decline in their standard of living, the pressure to get into debt, the way good state schools are reserved for the rich and cunning, the shrivelling of opportunities for the young, the unchecked spread of crime and disorder, the ridiculous cost of housing, and the general overcrowding of everything from roads to hospitals.

If it weren’t for old tribal party labels, these two groups would long ago have realised they were friends and allies.

They would have combined in a mutiny against the PR men and hedge-fund types who lounge arrogantly on the upper deck of politics, claiming that none of these problems exist – because they don’t experience them themselves.

For instance I, and millions of Tory voters, have far more in common with excellent Labour MPs such as Kate Hoey or Frank Field than I do with David Cameron and the weird, obedient, meaningless quacking robots with which he has filled the Cabinet Room and the Tory benches in the House of Commons.

But the ossified party system kept them apart until now. They could not and did not combine to defeat their common enemy. And so at Election after Election, those who merely wanted to live their lives much as they had always lived them, and were baffled and pained by the unending changes imposed on them, had nowhere to turn.

The parties they thought of as their own were in fact in an alliance against them. Blair became Cameron and Cameron became Blair, and after a while it was impossible to tell which was which.

It’s not just me saying this. As Janan Ganesh, a writer in the Financial Times, recently noted: ‘Conservatives and moderate adherents to the Labour cause share more with each other than with the rest of their own parties… Against them in this referendum is a party in all but name… drawn from the Tory Right and the Labour Left and incubated in the Leave campaign. These politicians are conservative and anti-establishment at the same time.’

Noting that people such as Labour’s Ed Balls and Chancellor George Osborne have much more in common than they like to pretend, Mr Ganesh says: ‘These politicians have the same basic orientation.’

He believes it would be ‘myopic’ for them to ‘remain separate out of fealty to a party system that was forged in the industrial age for an empire nation’. And he adds: ‘I hear the Tory and Labour moderates newly mingling in the Remain offices rather get on.’

I bet they do. That is why I don’t care who fills David Cameron’s place at the head of a Tory Party that long ago outlived its usefulness. There shouldn’t be any more David Camerons, thanks very much. In future, people like him should stand openly as what they are, globalist pro-migration Blairite liberals, and not call themselves Conservatives. So the important thing is that we do not miss this great moment when the people have joined together against a discredited and failed elite.

'Remainers refused to be aware of the quiet seething resentment about mass migration that I found in Boston four summers ago. The established parties ignored this, and the liberal thought police tried to claim it was bigotry'

What we need is for the Tory Party and the Labour Party to collapse and split and be replaced by two new parties that properly reflect the real divisions in the country.

Since both the old parties are empty and decrepit, with few active members and reliant on state support and dodgy billionaires, the collapsing and splitting bit should not be too hard. The replacement is up to us, the British people, who have now demonstrated our power if we unite.

But it can only happen if the next stage is a General Election, which is much more urgent than a Tory (or Labour) leadership contest.

Thursday’s vote shows that the House of Commons is hopelessly unrepresentative. The concerns and hopes of those who voted to leave the EU – 51.9 per cent of the highest poll since 1992 – are reliably supported by fewer than a quarter of MPs, if that. Ludicrously, neither of the big parties agrees with a proven majority of the electorate – and neither shows any sign of changing its policies as a result.

If we do nothing about this scandal, for it is a scandal, then how can we be sure we will get out of the EU at all? The elite is rallying and whimpering that the minority must be treated ‘with respect’– more than they would have done had they won.

Parliament is pro-EU. The Civil Service is pro-EU, the judiciary is pro-EU, the BBC is pro-EU and is now returning to its old bad habits after an admittedly creditable attempt at balance. Its 6am radio news bulletin on Friday said, falsely and dangerously, that the pound had ‘collapsed’ following the result and there will be a lot more of this foolish panic-mongering in days to come.

We have had only half a revolution. If we do not now complete it, we will have missed an unequalled opportunity to reclaim what is and always was ours.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

An interview with PH

I gave this interview last Monday afternoon, when the result of the referendum was not known. Look out for the bit where I threaten to pour water over the interviewer's trousers. 

http://www.newsredial.com/2016/06/peter-hitchens-death-conservative-party/

PH interviewed on EU referendum result

Some of you may enjoy this exchange on the BBC about the result of the referendum. Listen carefully and you can hear the bells of Westminster Abbey pealing in the background (though I am sure they are not in fact celebrating the event) 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0mj4Pbcw68

First Thoughts on the Referendum Result

I shall be writing in more detail and depth about this on Sunday in my Mail on Sunday column, but I feel I ought to make an immediate comment on the referendum result.

I have been saying for some weeks that ‘Leave’ would win . I freely admit that I was wrong at the beginning of the campaign to predict that the electorate would shy away from such a vote. What changed my mind? The creditable efforts of the BBC to be impartial, which I absolutely did not expect; the number of newspapers which came off the fence in favour of independence, as they had never done before; and perhaps above all the clumsiness and folly of the ‘Remain’ campaign, which turned out to have nothing in its locker, overplayed a weak hand and in the end became a joke. Stand by now for a plague of frogs.

I also came to realise, mainly through some lucky conversations, that the working-class Labour vote had swung heavily towards ‘Leave’. I thought a combination of this group with the pre-existing anti-EU vote would create a majority. Which is why on June 6^th I began to speculate on the constitutional crisis which I thought would follow a majority for ‘Leave’.

Mass immigration was obviously a huge influence on the vote. ‘Sovereignty’ was always an abstract, but the visible loss of control of our national borders revealed to millions that it is in fact a tangible thing which affects their lives. Even so,  do not underestimate the role played by  generalised discontent about everything from absurdly high housing costs, unchecked crime and disorder, the transformation of education into a privilege for the rich and influential, diminishing wages, the impossibility of maintaining standards of living without getting into debt,  overloaded health services and miserable opportunities for the young.

Regular readers will know that I don’t like referenda. I didn’t vote in this one, though I did not advise anyone else to follow my example, or expect anyone to do so. This was not and is not my chosen route out of the EU. I am still not sure it will get us out.

The referendum achieved, by a dangerous short cut, something I have been hoping for and arguing for and seeking for many years – an alliance between the social conservatives trapped and ignored in a liberal Tory Party and the social conservatives trapped in a liberal Labour Party. I had long believed (since the isolated example of a November 2004 referendum on regional government in the North-East) such a combination would throw the ghastly forces of Blairism into the sea.

The problem is that this potent temporary alliance has dissolved now that the referendum is over.  What actual body or power survives to enforce its outcome, to drive it through a hostile Parliament, civil service and judiciary,  and overcome the redoubled propaganda of a pro-EU BBC now released from its temporary straitjacket of impartiality? WE're already being told that the winners must 'respect' the 48% who lost the vote called by their own side to crush anti-EU movement once and for all. Well, no doubt we must be nice to them, and not gloat too much, but it is for them to respect the majority they did not expect.

 

They would certainly have expected the 'Leave' side to respect a 'Remain' victory, had there been one.

 

But the undying resentment and conviction of the Remainers shows us why the referendum short cut is so dangerous. It has raised he expectations. Will it now be able to fulfil them?

We are now back to party politics. The conditions which allowed Gisela Stuart, Kate Hoey, Frank Field and similar admirable Labour figures to share platforms with Michael Gove and Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson – and which also allowed Tory and Labour Blairites to collaborate openly with each other – have abruptly ended. In fact, none of the front rank Tory leavers are especially socially conservative, or well-equipped to work on wider matters with these Labour figures  - and I remain puzzled by the real motives of both Mr Gove and Mr Johnson.

People have begun asking me who I think should or will become leader of the Tory Party. I reply that I don’t care. This is the wrong question.  Why are people so anxious to reduce politics to personal gossip? This vote has shown that both Tory and Labour Parties are dead, do not represent their voters, and no longer reflect the real division in this country. Both should have been wound up years ago. Neither ought to survive this.  This vote has been a vote against the existing political system and elite, and against the two political parties which have arrogantly misgoverned the country for decades.

 

The thing we most need now is the dissolution of a Parliament which has been shown to be absurdly unrepresentative of the population on the issued which matter most to it. But would an election be capable, at such short notice, of creating the new political alignment we so badly need? I am not sure.

Mr Frum's Retraction - well-hidden but a retraction all the same

Here http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/06/christopher-peter-hitchens/488291/

My old unfriend, Mr David Frum, responds to my criticisms of his recent article in ‘The Atlantic’, here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/banging-the-frums-of-war-again.html

and here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/generosity-kindness-and-forbearance-more-about-david-frum-.html

 

Crucially, he withdraws the word 'bitter' to which I particularly object (see below) and admits to (and regrets) having made a significant error of fact. 'Where Peter Hitchens is correct, and I was mistaken, is that I described Christopher Hitchens’ 2005 article [w]as his first published response to Peter. Peter Hitchens directs my attention to this 2003 letter to the editor in Commentary. And indeed, Christopher Hitchens’s words there are very harsh. I was unaware of the 2003 exchange, and I regret the error.'

Even so, it is a pretty slippery thing that Mr Frum has produced, dabbled in squid ink and bile, and needs to be handled with care.

What runs through it is the overriding partisanship and complete lack of generosity which seems to me to be Mr Frum’s approach to almost any subject.

He seems to view my relationship with my late brother Christopher as a sort of football or hockey match in which he roots for one side.  He should consider it possible that it was no such thing. And he seems unable to resist the temptation to attribute strong emotion to others (while apparently believing himself to be forensically cool).

Thus my fact-based, persistent and teasing response to him is described as ‘very intense’,  a description I find quite baffling. Personally, I thought it reasoned, factual and restrained, given that a prominent journalist, writing in a major and respected publication,  had made a damaging claim about me that does not bear examination, and then shown himself to have failed to check the most basic facts about the subject under discussion.

Of course I don’t enjoy the many attempts to misrepresent me, which I face from critics who prefer this method to straightforward argument.  And I am annoyed by any failure to correct such misrepresentation, when challenged and corrected. Apart from anything else, it is irritating that educated and intelligent people think such an approach will succeed.  It’s like watching deliberate cheating and professional fouls in sport. The spectator asks ‘Why does he think he can get away with that?’ But I am used to them. 

Mr Frum’s riposte (although it actually contains a well-hidden retraction and an even better-hidden admission of error) begins with yet another whopper, this time funny rather than nasty.  Writing of Larry Taunton’s memoir of my late brother (about which I have decided to say nothing at all, now or later) , Mr Frum hilariously declares: ‘He (that’s me) was the only member of the Hitchens family to speak to Larry Taunton’ (I hear in these words a faint bat-squeak of disapproval, as if this was in some way defiance of an agreed boycott, which it wasn’t).

Well, no, actually, I wasn’t the only member of the Hitchens family to speak to Mr Taunton.  The whole basis and point of the book is that my late brother spent several hours on two lengthy road trips, conversing with Mr Taunton. That’s the whole excuse for his book. So there were *two* members of the Hitchens family who spoke to him.

Mr Frum, with admirable understatement, then notes in some puzzlement that it ‘bothered me’ that he described my 2001 article  http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/13th-october-2001/18/o-brother-where-art-thou

as a ‘bitter published attack’ on Christopher. I really cannot see what is bitter about it, and would be interested to know which passages in it ever justified the use of the word, in Mr Frum’s considered opinion.

So it does ‘bother me’. It would bother anyone in the same circumstances (the trick, as Mr Frum should grasp, is to imagine yourself in the other person’s position).  My brother is dead, after a long and often very painful illness, but before that dismal thing happened, he and I spent some time and care getting back on to reasonably good terms. It wasn’t especially easy for either of us, but we did. I have described this process in part here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075133/Christopher-Hitchens-death-In-Memoriam-courageous-sibling-Peter-Hitchens.html

For that reason I really don’t appreciate an outsider and stranger not merely revisiting and exhuming the buried quarrel, but inaccurately describing it  to suit some thesis or other of his.

Almost imperceptibly, so surrounded is it by bilious reflections and pseudo-psychological theorising on my supposed folly and lack of proportion in even raising the matter, Mr Frum has withdrawn the word ‘bitter’. He confesses ‘I am no mind reader. If Peter Hitchens insists that “bitter” is the wrong word to describe his state of mind in 2001, I cannot gainsay him.’

Well, taking these things in order, no he is not a mind reader; yes, I do insist. No, the word isn’t true or justified. And no, he is quite right to conclude he cannot gainsay me.

Mr Frum continues: ‘I hereby withdraw the word and instead submit the article in question to the reader’s judgment, to be characterized as the reader will.’

I’m very happy with that. I cannot see any bitterness in it, and I am sure that Mr Frum would have reproduced any evidence of such bitterness in his defence, if he could find any.

Mr Frum (who, I note once more, might think differently about the importance of the matter had *he* been the one assailed in public in this way) seeks to minimise the problem and to sneer at me for making a fuss at all. He says  ‘I feel that even this much exposition has already occupied more space than can be justified.’ 

He then goes on:  ‘There is no dispute that Peter Hitchens's 2001 article triggered an angry and protracted quarrel between the brothers.’

Well, not exactly. I was never angry about it, though I was grieved.  Nor was it protracted by my desire . This is one of the reasons why the exchange of letters in ‘Commentary’, which I reproduced with permission in my second reply to Mr Frum, is so important. It shows (using published sources available to him)  that his description of the event is plain wrong. Whatever happened, on this occasion, to the platoons of fact-checkers who are supposed to infest every North American magazine and newspaper office? They do exist. I have met at least one, and rather like him.  

I had no desire to prolong it, and certainly did not use such terms as ‘fool’ or ‘fanatic’ in public correspondence. I will not detail my various attempts, rebuffed or ignored, to bring an end to the quarrel. But I did make such attempts. Mr Frum, who admits he was mistaken about the timing and nature of my late brother’s response to the 2001 article, might profitably ask himself why he made this mistake.

 

He had no need to mention these things. Once he decided to do so, it would not have been that hard to check the facts, and find he was wrong. I would never have chosen to mention the thing again, had he not decided to plaster his inaccurate allegations all over a major American publication and the World Wide Web. Why, he might even have got in touch with me. It is not hard to do.  

So when Mr Frum writes, in an attempt at patronage: ‘I remain amazed that more than a decade after the quarrel ended—and almost five years' after Christopher’s premature death—Peter Hitchens feels the need to insist that he was wholly in the right and his late brother wholly in the wrong. Clearly, there were psychic injuries inflicted on both sides, but … yikes.’, he is once again falling victim to that complete failure of human sympathy which characterises his whole approach here.

I can only respond that I have insisted no such thing. The person who has dragged the matter out of the cupboard of the yesterdays, and put it back on display, incorrectly labelled, is Mr Frum. I have gone to the records so that anyone interested may know the demonstrable truth. It is astonishing that Mr Frum imagined he could so such a thing without receiving a response.

I have produced, to rebut and in my view refute his words, the actual evidence of what happened and incidentally the long-ago 1994 C-Span encounter which shows that the ‘Horses at Hendon’ story was not a new thing between us, and that Christopher accepted at that time that there was some force in the point it illustrates  (‘‘I feel I should clear my name on the Red Army watering the horses (smiles faintly).  It’s certainly true that I used to quarrel with Peter a lot about it. I regard and regarded the United States as at least morally a co-founder of the Cold War and more than a co-founder of the arms race. I didn’t think of it as a battle between democracy and an evil empire and I don’t in retrospect think so either.’(my emphasis)). I, by the way,  did think of the Cold War as such a battle, and still do.

I know this aspect of my brother’s political development and thought disconcerts some of those who later came to adopt him as a hero of their cause. But it’s a heck of a lot more interesting than their own thinking. It’s also more interesting than the ‘deadening hagiography’ he always despised (I borrow the phrase from one of his early books, on the Paris Commune) but which some of his admirers now seek to impose on his memory. He’d have loved to have known that he was still causing arguments, nearly five years after his death. 

 

The Charmed Life of Ruth Davidson MSP

I am fascinated by the charmed life, in image, media and political terms, of the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson. For example :

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/22/ruth-davidson-star-wembley-nicola-sturgeon-kezia-dugdale

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a critical article about her in the press. Mysteriously, this Scottish politician who has never held a Cabinet Post or even sat at Westminster was the leading Tory pro-EU voice on the BBC’s bizarre Wembley EU debate on Tuesday evening, matched against the Exit campaign’s biggest artillery, Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson. I haven’t been able to stomach the entire rather nasty event, but what I have seen was pretty banal.   She was praised for her part in the Scottish referendum campaign. Then she was praised for ‘pushing Labour into third place’ in the recent Scottish Parliamentary elections. In fact, Labour’s collapse, now an avalanche, and the similar collapse in the Scottish Liberal Democrats reshuffled the order and size of Scotland’s powerless and irrelevant minority parties, all of them hopelessly outvoted by the Scottish Nationalists. I doubt if Ms Davidson’s talents at being photographed with pints of beer had much to do with it.  I’ll return to the strange position of Scotland’s Tory Party later.

I might add that Labour’s collapse (now probably irreversible in Scotland) was actually caused by David Cameron’s handling of the post-referendum crisis, when he turned the ‘pledge’ of more devolved powers into an aggressive attempt (‘English Votes for English Laws’) to exclude Scottish MPs and voters from influencing national UK decisions. Scottish voters revenged themselves on Labour (which had been prominent in the pro-Union campaign). It provided many with the excuse which they had long needed to abandon the dying Labour Party and switch to the SNP.

But what does the Tory party in Scotland actually stand for? What, most interestingly of all, would happen to it if Scotland became fully independent from London ( as I think is inevitable) , and accepted formal direct submission to Brussels on its own account, rather than via London,  thus abolishing the formal, if forgotten, reason for the Scottish Tory Party’s very existence?

I think it would survive, as a political business, becoming perhaps a sort of Scottish Christian Democrat Party, sharing power from time to time with the SNP in a proportional Parliament, providing a safety valve for those Scots not wholly captivated by the SNP’s  increasingly unmistakable cultural, moral and political leftism. Indeed, maybe the SNP, its main purpose achieved, would split into leftish and rightish wings.

 In the last Scottish Tory leadership campaign, one candidate,  Murdo Fraser, said (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Conservative_Party_leadership_election,_2011 )

 ‘that if elected leader, he would disband the party in favour of setting up a new centre-right party that would be fully autonomous of the UK Conservative Party, but would take the Conservative whip at Westminster. Fraser states that this would be carried out in order to 'de-toxify' the party in Scotland, stating that it would have a distinct Scottish identity, represent Scottish values, support devolution and decentralisation, and fight to maintain Scotland's place within the United Kingdom.’ He also suggested the name ‘Conservative’ should be ditched. He lost, but his suggestions show the state to which the Tories have been reduced in Scotland, where (incredibly) they once held a majority of Parliamentary seats. In fact, in 1955 and 1959, the then Unionist Party wonn an outright majority of votes in Scotland.

The Unionist name was very important. The Scots were not voting for English Toryism, but for a specific form of Scottish Unionism, now quite dead. The closest comparison that can now be made is the various sorts of Unionist in Northern Ireland, many of whom would be Labour supporters in England, but who ally with the Tories at Westminster for national reasons.

Scottish Unionism was specifically opposed to Irish independence, rightly fearing that it would presage a break-up of Union and Empire. It was careful not to call itself ‘Conservative’ because of the strength of Liberalism among Scottish Protestant voters (whom it particularly sought to attract, in a country once nearly as religiously divided as Northern Ireland is now). But in 1965 the Unionists merged with the English and Welsh Tories. They were duly punished, especially in the Thatcher era (though in fact she was in many ways more Liberal than Tory, as was her father, the unforgettable Alderman Roberts). By 1997, they won no Scottish seats at all and were down to 17.5% of the vote. Since then, with many of their voters despairing of Unionism, abandoning the religion of their forebears  and switching to the SNP (which offers a new ‘union’ with the EU) ,  they have been searching for a role.

It is an extraordinary fact that the Daily Record, now seen as the Scottish equivalent of the Daily Mirror, supported the Unionists until 1964, when it switched to Labour (it is now suspected of flirtation with the SNP). There must be a lot of Scottish people who have, in their lives, voted Unionist, Labour and SNP.

Just as in England, the Tories appear to have shed any sort of political baggage to become a political party seeking office for the sake of it.

The FT’s account of the Scottish elections contained this interesting reflection on the nature of Ms Davidson’s party:  ‘One of the two Tory candidates elected on the Glasgow list was Adam Tomkins, a law professor and a one-time advocate of abolition of the monarchy. The other was Annie Wells, a food retail manager and single mother with a working-class accent who told one campaign rally how she had won over a sceptical voter who started their conversation with the comment: “Ah’m no a Tory, hen.”’

I think even a casual observer must be able to see that whatever is going on here is not conservatism as most of us understand it. Ms Davidson, after a BBC career where she was no doubt exposed to the strong ideology of that organisation, joined the Tory party in 2009 because she liked the look of David Cameron. Interestingly, she says that her decision to join the military (sadly frustrated by serious injury during training) was sparked off by the sight of British troops in the former Yugoslavia,  the anti-Sovereignty prototype for our later catastrophic intervention in Iraq. 

But one thing Ms Davidson certainly does believe in is continued British membership of the EU. This belief is actually very profound among most of those, especially the university-schooled professional elite,  brought up since 1960. It touches on the most fundamental creeds – internationalism, egalitarianism, the worship of modernity for its own sake and an active rejection of the past as a source of lessons for the present  -  of the new establishment uniting, whether they like it or not, Ms Davidson with Stephen Kinnock, and possibly Jeremy Corbyn, and David Cameron with my late brother. The great, deep switch from Protestantism, the 1688 settlement and a belief in national sovereignty , to secularism, disdain for sovereignty and a far greater affinity for France in 1789 to England in 1689, has more or less taken place. And enthusiasm for the EU is its badge and banner.