A False New Dawn for Grammar Schools

It is being incorrectly stated by many media that a new grammar school is to open in Kent. That would be illegal, and the ‘new school’ is only allowed in the form of an ‘annexe’ to an existing school. In most of the United Kingdom, where academically selective secondary schools were vandalised and destroyed by egalitarian fanatics 40 or 50 years ago, this dodge is impossible. There is nothing to which to ‘annexe’. In any case, David Cameron and Nick Morgan (both privately educated)  are themselves opposed to academic selection. Mr Cameron himself (like many influential left-wingers who use exceptional and anomalous parts of the state system to preserve their political image) has managed to get his child into a wholly untypical and highly selective single-sex London secondary school, of a sort wholly unavailable to 90% of the population.

 

 

For a full explanation of the ‘selection by ability versus selection by wealth or public piety’ argument, please go to page 167 of this excellent Civitas pamphlet, where I ask 'Why is Selection by Wealth better than Selection by Ability?' and demonstrate that (though selection by wealth and public piety is the preferred policy of our elite) it is not better. 

 

http://www.alansmithers.com/reports/InsAndOuts.pdf

 

 

Election jottings: BBC Impartiality, the Syria Mess, and Hot Dogs

As I dipped in and out of the ‘election’ coverage, I was reminded quite strongly of the BBC’s outrageously biased handling of the 1997 election, in which they behaved like a partisan newspaper and turned their huge magnifying glass on any dissent about the EU inside the Tories, until by the end of each day some minor disagreement in an individual election leaflet in one small constituency  had assumed the proportions of a mighty ‘Tory split’.  

 

This would have been perfectly reasonable at the Guardian or the Daily Mirror (or the ‘Sun’ which I think was at the time a keen supporter of the winning side, for a change). But it wasn’t the job of the BBC, with its commitment to impartiality.

 

Similarly, by the middle of today they were reporting ‘confusion’ about Ed Miliband’s proposals on non-domiciled tax status. Well, there isn’t any, really. Mr Miliband, who is the party leader, favours a policy of withdrawing this status and has presumably persuaded his party’s leading councils to approve the speech in which he said so. No doubt some of them disagree with him. Likewise, no doubt, many senor figures in the Tory and Liberal Democrat parties have reservations about things that Mr Cameron or Mr Clegg say during the campaign.

 

But that’s for their enemies to exploit, as and when they can. It’s not ‘confusion’ if they do so – merely a fact of political life.  The job of the BBC , most especially during an election,  is to report these policies, to examine their implications and effects as fairly as possible and to report the reaction to them, using accuracy and proportion,  taking no position on them itself, and staying well clear of any attempt by the other parties to shout them down and muddy the waters.  It should then do exactly the same for the policy announcements of the other parties I do not think it is doing this impartially. I think it has, subconsciously, bought the anti-Miliband conventional wisdom of the rest of the media. One thinks of certain elements of the ‘debate’ in which Messrs Miliband and Cameron were supposedly given equal treatment in face-to-face interviews and audience encounters. In my view, they were not.

 

If these rules are properly observed, voters can then decide if they want to support the policy, or if they want to vote against it. It’s called straight reporting and, as an openly biased person, I can tell better than most when and how it is not being done.

 

But I digress. For me, the most devastating news of the day was an article here (in the Guardian newspaper) by Peter Ford, a former British ambassador to Syria. I have seldom read such a lacerating denunciation of a British Prime Minister by a senior diplomat who formerly served the British government. You may read it all here:

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/07/david-cameron-failure-fuelled-british-jihadism

 

For instance, were I to say :’ But if David Cameron had had his way, we could have been embroiled by now – more than we already are – in yet another Middle East war. As it is, his Syria policy has still backfired, contributing to the rise of jihadism in our own back yard’, the reader would assume that this was all in the way of business, that I had my own axe to grind, etc. But for a former ambassador to Damascus to say this is very damaging indeed.

 

When he adds : ‘If Cameron had had his way, the jihadis could be in control of Damascus by now. Where is the accountability? William Hague took the fall for the embarrassing failure with parliament – after a decent interval he was removed from the Foreign Office – but Cameron is the Teflon man here. Having got away with bombing Libya (with barely a thought for the poor Libyans, whose country is now a tragic mess) he must have arrogantly thought that Syria would make a nice encore’, I have to say I am astonished.

 

AS for his closing line ‘…it’s no good having a strong economy and a sound NHS if all this is going to be put at risk by a leader who bases his foreign, defence and internal security policies on little save arrogance, ignorance and wishful thinking’, a real, live election campaign would surely seize on such a statement from such a person, and propel it into the debate. But no, we are too interested in making Ed Miliband look goofy and rudderless.

 

Talking of which, have you noticed that in recent days Mr and Mrs Cameron have been seen eating a hot dog (him) and a bacon sandwich (her) with a knife and fork (!), which is surely as ludicrous as getting the whole thing snarled up in your teeth. Didn’t King George VI endear himself to the American people in 1939 by boldly sinking the royal teeth into a hot dog or ‘hot dog’, as he no doubt called it, at Franklin Roosevelt’s Hyde Park country home during that famous visit?

Politicians must stand up and be counted - even if only on TV

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Actually it does matter that the two main party leaders are forced to face each other in televised debates, each of them alone and cut off from the aides and scriptwriters who would otherwise whisper into their ears and make them look cleverer than they are.

Such events are the last faint trace of the raucous combative debate that politics used to be in this country.

It is incredible now to recall that, 51 years ago, the skeletal, hesitant aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home braved a furious 7,000-strong audience at the Birmingham Rag Market, a traditional ordeal for party leaders that he felt honour-bound to undergo.

His Labour rival, Harold Wilson, did likewise.

But can you remember when you last saw a major politician heckled? These days, audiences are screened to prevent it and offenders are dragged from the hall by heavies, as poor old Walter Wolfgang was when he dared to shout ‘nonsense’ – quite accurately – during a speech on the Iraq War by the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

And it is nearly incredible to note that, in quite recent Election campaigns, party leaders faced daily unscripted press conferences from an unvetted crowd of uncontrollable reporters.

These events had almost vanished at the last Election (I think David Cameron gave three in the entire campaign).

Entry to them required security vetting. Most of those who attended were members of the Parliamentary Lobby, that mafia of mutual flattery in which politicians and journalists eat so many lunches together that it becomes impossible to tell them apart.

Informal questioning is also discouraged. Back in 1992, Neil Kinnock (a gentleman when all’s said and done) had to rescue me from the clutches of his aides, who fell on me in large numbers after I tried to ask him an unwelcome question on his way out of the hall.

On the final evening of the last Election, I attended a tightly controlled meeting addressed by Mr Cameron, hoping to get in a question about his astonishingly lavish parliamentary expenses, still largely unknown to the public.

As he left, I slipped alongside him to pursue the matter but was shouldered brusquely aside by his muscular police bodyguard, who knew perfectly well that I was no physical threat to the Tory leader but took it on himself to guard him from unwanted queries.

And this is how a lot of it has happened. The excuse of ‘security’ has enabled our political leaders to hide within a series of concentric screens and walls, until they see almost nobody but flatterers and toadies.

There is no real chance to make them sweat in public (the worthless exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions do not count). These debates might just be such an opportunity. 

I am sure that is why Mr Cameron has used every trick and dodge to avoid them. Far from breaching their impartiality, the broadcasting organisations are doing their most basic duty by trying to get him to agree to a proper adversarial clash.

Finally a snap that shows the real Dave

Modern political propaganda makes great use of faked-up pictures of unlovely combinations on the steps of Downing Street, or of men in other people’s pockets.

Well, here’s a genuine picture of a very unlovely combination at No 10 (sorry, Mrs Cameron, I don’t mean you, but if you will keep such company…) , which I had never seen before and which seems to me to tell an important truth.

Anthony Blair is by a long chalk the most universally despised politician in Britain, rightly in my view, and mainly because of the Iraq War.

Yet all the vituperation and spite of which the world is capable is aimed at Ed Miliband, who opposed the Iraq War, beat his Blairite brother for the Labour leadership and who is loathed by Mr Blair and his allies.

And the main beneficiary of this sliming of Mr Miliband is… David Cameron, who once called himself the ‘heir to Blair’, who speaks often to Mr Blair on the telephone and who has several times invited Mr Blair to Downing Street. My photograph shows an occasion in 2012 when ex-premiers gathered there to meet the Queen.

Mostly, these events are not photographed.

A ‘source’ told one journalist in 2013: ‘Cherie and Tony have been round there for drinks. Blair and Cameron get on and they like each other. He [the PM] doesn’t like Miliband or Brown, in a personal way. He is very admiring of Blair, whom he regards as a nice person and has conviction.’

I see in this picture the ghost of a rather horrible future – a grand coalition of Blairite Tory, Blairite Labour and Blairite Liberal-Democrat, none of whom can win the Election on their own, but who can together combine against all the normal people in the country.

Why Lefties love a Right-wing buffoon

Jeremy Clarkson is a Left-wing person’s idea of what a Right-wing person is like (I wish this was my own coinage, but I owe it to Andrew Platt, a contributor to my blog).

That is why the BBC have for so long been happy to give him large chunks of prime time, and why the publishing industry gives him so much space.

If Right-wingers are all foreigner-despising petrolheads who hate cyclists and think smoking is a demonstration of personal freedom, how easy they are to dismiss. Nigel Farage is a sort of political equivalent of Mr Clarkson. 

The idea that Clarkson is the heroic victim of politically correct commissars is ludicrous. The petition for his reinstatement is grotesque in a world where there is so much real oppression. 

If you are in the mood for signing a petition for someone who is really being persecuted, please visit change.org and sign the e-petition for the release of my friend Jason Rezaian, locked up without trial and almost incommunicado by Iran’s secret state since July last year. You can sign it here  http://chn.ge/1LCNKfO

Mind the drunk trees

What is the reason for our hatred of trees? Local councils love nothing better than murdering lovely old trees in case they fall down all of a sudden.

I now see that the French government plans to massacre thousands of roadside trees because cars often collide with them.

I assume this is because the trees get drunk, rush out into the traffic and steer themselves into the cars.

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What do we threaten the Scots with next? Exploding haggises?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Actually if I were Scottish, I would be voting ‘Yes’ just to spite all the people who are trying to frighten and browbeat me into voting ‘No’. Anyone with any spirit must surely feel this way.

If ever we do get the much-promised vote on EU membership, the anti-British side will use just the same tricks and smears to scare us into staying in this miserable liberal German empire. I only hope that, if so, we will have the backbone to ignore them and vote for our independence.

Listen to it – the poor Scots are threatened with currency collapse, bankruptcy, irrelevance and isolation. There’ll even be a frontier, doubtless with barking dogs, searchlights and minefields planted with exploding haggises.

Well, what do you think we’re all going to get if we stay in the EU? The real scare story is that 40 years of EU membership and wild overspending have brought the whole UK to ruin.

The current strength of sterling is an absurdity and can’t last. George Osborne’s boom is the most irresponsible bubble since the 1970s, based entirely on ludicrously cheap housing credit.

 Roughly half the containers that leave our main port at Felixstowe contain nothing  but air, and quite a few of  the rest are crammed with  rubbish for recycling, because our real export trade has  collapsed, much of it throttled by EU membership.

The incoming containers are full, of course, of cars, clothes, gadgets and food – but how are we to pay for them?

As usual, the biggest story of the week was buried – the rise in our monthly trade deficit during July to £3.3 billion. That includes the famous ‘services’ which are supposed to make  up for the fact that we don’t manufacture much any more.

It is impossible to see how we can live so far beyond our means for much longer. Both Government and people are deeper in debt than ever.

So forgive me if I point out that it’s quite scary enough staying in the UK. The trouble with the ‘Better Together’ lot is that scares are all they’ve got.

None of the three party leaders – supposedly rivals, actually accomplices – truly loves the Union.

They all view it as an outdated, conservative idea and they much prefer the glinting Teutonic rule of Brussels  and Berlin.

They’ve been working night and day for decades to destroy British patriotism, culture  and history, and replace them with a tasteless, pasteurised multiculturalism.

Who can blame the Scots for wanting to stay Scottish rather than be processed into the  same greyish puree?

But David Cameron and Nick Clegg both correctly fear a ‘Yes’ vote will cost them their jobs, which they should by rights have lost after their dire results in the Euro elections  in May.

And Ed Miliband fears that  a ‘Yes’ vote will destroy his party’s chances of ever winning  a Westminster majority.  That’s all they’re fighting  for – themselves.

Having got used to the idea that Scotland may say goodbye, I’ve been thinking about possible good consequences. Setting aside the puncturing of David Cameron, one of the most over-rated figures ever to become Premier, there’s the strong possibility that, without Scotland, we will actually leave the EU.

I don’t presume to speak for the Welsh, but I  am quite confident that England on her own  can, if she wishes, be a happy and successful civilisation. In fact it might do us no end of good to rediscover ourselves.

But one thing we must stop doing – in fact it would be a good idea to stop it now. A nation  that has trouble keeping itself together has no business bombing other nations or peoples  to try to force them to do our will.

A peek at out leaders' secret past

I am pleased that a film – The Riot Club – has been made about spoiled young men who spend their time at Oxford getting drunk  and wrecking things.

Three of our most senior Tory figures belonged to such a club, and don’t seem to  me to have been either frank or especially apologetic about their behaviour.

On the contrary, very serious (and I would think expensive) attempts have been made  by unknown persons to prevent the publication  of pictures showing these future grandees in their drinking suits. One such picture has been mysteriously, if clumsily, doctored, presumably to conceal something important.

Given that the Tory Party has made such an effort to attack Ed Miliband for his inability to eat a sandwich, I think we are entitled to dwell on its leaders’ ability to get hog-whimperingly drunk in tailcoats.

Cameron's 'triumph' is Libya's disaster

More news of Mr Cameron’s  neglected triumph in Libya. As he prepares to dispatch RAF jets to pound yet another desert, our modern Churchill really should boast more about the outcome of his brilliantly directed overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.

For instance, did you know that the Libyan parliament, keystone of the ‘democracy’ Mr Cameron created  in Tripoli with British rockets and bombs, is now meeting in a requisitioned  Greek car ferry, moored to a dockside  in Tobruk? Tobruk, as some of you will remember from history, is the last stop in Libya before you get to Egypt.

It cannot, alas, meet anywhere else  in Libya because the rest of the country is under the control of rampaging Islamist gangsters, and people-smugglers who daily send hundreds more refugees in leaking boats towards Italy and, eventually, Calais. The mood on board the car ferry is said to be ‘sombre’. I should think so.

If the entire Libyan parliament turns up at Tilbury on the good ship Elyros,  I suggest that immigration officers direct them to the hills outside Witney, where Mr Cameron has a nice weekend home, paid for by you and me.

There, he and the Libyan MPs can wonder together where they went wrong.

A new study shows that teenagers who smoke cannabis are 60 per cent less likely to finish school or get a degree, compared with those who never touch it.

Daily users of the drug are also seven times more likely to attempt suicide than non-users.

These important facts could explain several worrying trends in our country. Yet the report was barely mentioned by most media – especially those who relentlessly plug irresponsible and wicked campaigns to destroy what’s left  of our drug laws.

A survey into the past and present drug use of Left-wing media executives might explain this strange reticence.  Time it was done.

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I’m so sorry... but I don’t mean it, it isn’t my fault and no, you can’t sue me

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Why won’t anybody say sorry properly any more?

The miserable behaviour of the police officers in the Plebgate affair, questioned by the Home Affairs Committee, is just the latest example of the strange apology crisis which has this country in its grip: too few of the right sort; too many of the wrong sort.

Nobody is ever straightforwardly sorry for what he  has done.

He may be ‘sorry if’ you were upset, or inconvenienced or offended. But listen carefully. This is just a way of telling you to stop being so sensitive. It is not an admission of fault. Watch out for the treacherous little ‘if’, that gives the game away.

He doesn’t regret doing the thing that angered you. But he hasn’t the courage to say so.  He just thinks it is tiresome that you are making a fuss about it, and wants to shut you up by faking contrition he doesn’t feel.

Then there is what I call the Railway Apology. There are now millions of these worthless things in circulation, like the old Zimbabwe dollar. They trickle out of station loudspeakers in an unstoppable, computer-generated flow.

They result from some long-ago market research, which showed that passengers thought they were due a bit of penitence for the lateness and unreliability they constantly suffered.

They did, and they do, but what they really wanted was some sort of readiness to put things right in future. It’s no good saying sorry for doing something you intend to repeat almost exactly, within a few hours, and then again and again for as long as you live, or as long as your franchise lasts.

It’s also no good getting a robot to do it for you. Real apologies stick in the throat, involve some shame and humiliation, and are intensely personal.

Perhaps it’s because the Japanese take apologies so seriously that their railways are so much better than ours.

Imagine the directors of some wretched rail company lined up in their suits at a big London terminus, bowing deeply to their customers as they promised to make amends for years of profiteering, cheeseparing and neglect. You can’t? Nor can I.

Some of this is of course the result of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s too little-known legal time bomb, the delayed action decision to allow American-style ambulance-chasing no-win, no-fee lawyers to operate in this country.

The 1990 Courts and Legal Services Act (Section 58) cleared the way, followed in 1995 by the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations. These, not ‘Human Rights’ or ‘Health and Safety’, are the source of the lawyer-infested culture in which we now dwell, in which a simple, decent and sincere apology has been turned into a dangerous admission of liability.

I am truly sorry about that. But it’s not my fault.

A lovely sign that Dave's in trouble

You can always tell when the Prime Minister’s poll ratings are in trouble, for photographs of Samantha Cameron, looking lovely, will soon appear in all the papers.

And this time she looked lovely in her sari, left. But is this sort of thing really wise?

Our Indian community are a great asset. But so are many others, from whom the Camerons might seek votes.

Will we see Mrs Cameron in a hijab, attending a mosque? And why is it only the womenfolk who go all the way?

How about the premier in a shalwar kameez?

Come to that, when things get really bad, will  we discover that our head of government has quietly slipped out of the back entrance in  a burqa?

I knew we were well on our way down the plughole when, aged nine, I watched our last battleship, HMS Vanguard, being towed out of Portsmouth to the breakers on a sultry afternoon in August 1960. She ran  aground on a mudbank, just  to make it worse.

Now poor old Pompey is to lose its shipyards. This is sad for so many reasons. That battered old city has suffered quite enough in the last hundred years. But there’s also this point.

Nobody is supposed to mention it, but defence contracts have always been a quiet way of protecting our own industries and jobs from foreign competition.

Everyone’s supposed to be in favour of free trade, though you can be sure the French, the Germans and the USA look after their own all the time. But we won’t do it. We abide by rules our rivals mock. And so the dole queues lengthen, and we lose the skills to recover.

How funny that we are being accused of spying on the Germans from our hideous new embassy in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse.

It reminds me of a much more interesting unsolved case, revealed by that mysterious but authentic writer of spy thrillers Alan Judd. He says a British diplomat was once caught spying on us, on behalf of the European Union.

The wretched traitor’s reward was to have his photograph secretly taken with Jacques Delors, then president  of the European Commission.

Australia's losing its past AND its future

I HAVE been spending a  few precious days in Australia (my first visit in  20 years) and New Zealand (my first visit).

It is still very moving for a British person to experience these two civilisations, which are rooted in our ideas of justice and liberty.

Would either place be so happy and free had they been colonised instead by China, Japan, France or Germany? I don’t think so. Yet the link is weakening.

Thrilling as it is for me to  see Australian warships flying ensigns very similar  to our own, and moving as  it is to see the Queen’s head on the coins, these things  are vestiges.

The British elements are all old, from the age of the floral clock, the war memorial, the silver sixpence, the domed Guildhall and the bowling green. Now they have kilometres and dollars, symbols of globalisation and of US influence. Political correctness has swept away the old tough male Aussie  ideal, as I learned in detail when I appeared on the local version of Question Time.

And in Sydney the other day, Rupert Murdoch urged mass immigration on Australia, much as he has supported it here. If he gets his way, Australia will become ‘the world’s most diverse nation’, though Britain under the same policy must be competing  for that dubious title.

I hope he doesn’t succeed. If Australia just becomes another money-making multicultural desert of concrete and plastic, its origins in our misty islands forgotten, it will lose much more than it gains.

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My Easter Day Column - The Full Version

Owing to a production problem, only part of my Easter Day column was placed on this site on Sunday. Here is the whole column, including all items:

 

The big black car swept straight through a red light and on to the pedestrian crossing, just in front of me.

It was only thanks to luck and providence that nobody was hurt or even killed. The steady green man, which is supposed to mean that it is safe to cross, was clearly showing.

I called out to the driver, who looked guilty but drove on.

Then I saw, 20 yards away, a red police van, containing three officers in uniform. I tried to get their attention. By the time one of these surly public ‘servants’ had grudgingly wound down his window, the offender was well on his way down the road.

‘We’re doing something,’ the scowling constable said, with the air of an important person diverted from his important duties. It was true. They were doing something. All three of them seemed to be sending text messages on their mobile phones.

As it happens, this was one of three instances of drivers jumping red lights at pedestrian crossings which I saw last week.

One was a toffee-nosed Kensington lady (no doubt a stalwart of the Conservative Party) who was angry with me for catching up with her and rapping on her window. ‘How daih you touch my cah!’ she shrieked. Not a hint of shame or regret. How were these people brought up?

I can’t for the life of me see any difference between her and the foul-mouthed White Van Man who (later the same day) ploughed heedlessly through a different pelican crossing and swore unoriginally at me when I simply pointed at him.

Pedetrian crossings (and traffic lights) seem to me to be rather wonderful things. By stopping at them, we recognise that we are all subject to the law, and that other people are just as important as we are. By not stopping at them, we scorn the law and assert that we are special.

And these days lots of people do not stop at them, and I think it matters a great deal.
 
We are slowly becoming barbarians, even in Kensington, but not just there. It was the same week in which a teenage girl was mauled to death by a pack of dogs that no civilised person could possibly have wanted to own. It was the same week when the actor Clive Mantle had half his ear bitten off in a Tyneside hotel. Why? He asked some people in the corridor outside his room to make less noise.

And it was the same week the Government came up with its solution for the problems of the NHS. Make nurses do some actual nursing (you know, washing the patients). Make it a rule that hospital staff tell the truth (!). And set up yet another Stalinist inspectorate to check up on everyone.

Of course it won’t work. Like the useless police, the inspectors will always be ‘doing something’. The rules won’t be enforced. More people will die in filth and pain.

Because there is only one thing that really keeps us safe, on the roads, when we are ill, everywhere – and that is conscience. Conscience is what makes us observe red lights, what makes nurses do the dirty, smelly jobs, and tell the truth, and look tenderly after the helpless, querulous beings that most of us will one day become.

And conscience is dying among us, among Tory ladies and foul-mouthed White Van Men alike.

By a strange coincidence, conscience is dying more or less at the same time as the Christian religion is dying, and Easter is becoming just another chance to shop. Are these things connected? I suspect they are. While you wonder, take care crossing the road and don’t fall ill or get old, or ask anyone to be quiet.

Now tell your husband who's to blame, Samantha  

NOW that Samantha Cameron  has seen the miseries of Syrian refugees for herself, she should use her privileged position to tell her husband that this terrible crisis is largely his fault.

 

It is because Britain and others have been madly urging on the Saudi and Turkish-backed Islamist fanatics in Syria that a formerly peaceful and prosperous country has been turned into Hell.

 

And for what?

 

If our supposed allies win, what sort of state will they create?

 

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

 

The colour's new, the madness isn't

 

 

LONG ago I lived in a mad country, where expensive bread was so heavily subsidised that it was cheaper than swill, and so fed to pigs.

 

It was called the USSR, and it was ruled by Red zealots. Now I live in another mad country, where Green zealots close perfectly good coalfired power stations in the middle of a fuel shortage.

 

It is like watching a dentist pulling out sound teeth, or a surgeon cutting off a healthy limb, and being able to do nothing to stop it.

 

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

WHO should we be angry with, when we see the convicted oaf Nathanial McIntosh jeering at us from his sordid holiday in Thailand, when he is, in theory, being punished for a crime?

 

I can't be bothered to be cross with McIntosh. He is only doing what our cardboard criminal justice system let him do.

 

When will people understand that this system, from the police to the judges to the prisons, is a deliberate fraud?

 

When will they grasp that every politician who talks about being 'tough' or having a 'crackdown' on crime and disorder is lying?

 

Parliament long ago disembowelled justice.

 

Even so, it would be fun to make Theresa May, Chris Grayling and David Cameron live next door to McIntosh for a few months.

 

It would also be justice.

 

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

SILLY anti-Russian prejudice led to suggestions that the unlovely plutocrat Boris Berezovsky had been rubbed out on Kremlin orders.

 

A much more likely explanation of his self-slaughter is the fact that he had recently begun taking 'antidepressants', which in many cases produce suicidal thoughts in people who hadn't had them before.

 

So, I might add, had the tragic Donna Oettinger, who stepped in front of a train with her small son in her arms.

 

She was taking a drug that has been linked in studies to an increased risk of suicide.

 

When will they join up the dots?

 

Coroners should be on watch for this.

 

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

A beautiful voice ... belting out the familiar tune of tyranny 

 

HAUNTING pictures of Peng Liyuan, China's beautiful, musical and militarist First Lady, tell us a great deal about China.

 

Most importantly, they tell us that it is not a free country, and not likely to be.

 

She sings on behalf of power.

 

We used to believe that only free countries could become rich.

 

China is ominous proof that this is no longer true.

 

And if that is so, how long will freedom survive when it has so many enemies?

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

 

We need genius, not a good giggle

 

 

LONDON'S Mayor Al Johnson (his real name) is not a 'nasty piece of work'.

 

Mrs Johnson may have some harsh things to say about him (and to him) but he is in most matters a generous and thoughtful gent, made more likeable by a fine sense of the ridiculous.

 

The really damaging truth about Al is that the laughter conceals neither a genius nor a gangster, but a dull and perfectly normal, boring Tory careerist with no original ideas about how to save the country.

 

If only people would stop laughing for long enough to see that, the bubble would burst.

 

As it is, I fear he will be swept to office on a wave of giggles, and only then be found out, which will be sad for him and us.

 

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

IT IS 50 years since Richard Beeching wrecked Britain's railways.

 

He was egged on by Transport Minister Ernest Marples, a shady and wicked man who profited personally from the building of motorways, which was the real reason for ripping up perfectly good train tracks.

 

Marples, as is not widely enough known, died abroad in disgrace, having fled the country to escape the taxman.

 

I was just 12 years old when the railways were ruined, and I knew at the time that this was a great and tragic folly.

 

All the grown-ups told me it was inevitable and necessary.

 

Now, after half a century, I turn out to have been right.

 

It's the story of my life, really.

 

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

 

YET again the top universities are accused of being unfair to state school pupils.

 

This is upside down.

 

The state schools are unfair to their pupils, by refusing to select on ability, by insisting on watered-down comprehensive schooling and by failing to tell the young that they need to take the tougher A-levels to get into the top colleges.

 

Why should good universities lower their standards to indulge this stupidity?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Odd People, Dad's Army and can UKIP rob the Tories of Victory?

Mr Slippery has been annoying UKIP again, calling them ‘Odd People’. Well, I can’t complain, having called them ‘Dad’s Army’ for some time myself, and jeered at one of their MEPs for saying women should clean behind the fridge. But then, I’m not trying to get UKIP votes, whereas Mr Cameron, at least theoretically, does want those votes.

 

Does UKIP want them? It seems to me that the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, doesn’t love his own members all that much. In an amusing and surprisingly sympathetic interview with Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian on Monday 7th January http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jan/07/nigel-farage-party-eccentrics-ukip, , Mr Farage comes pretty close to endorsing my view of his outfit.

 

Talking about the 1990s, she asked him : ‘But those were thankless, wilderness years – surely he must have wondered if the whole enterprise was mad? "Um, I didn't think the concept was mad. I thought the people, in many cases," and he starts to laugh, "were not to my taste”.

 

"UKIP in the 1990s, the people in it and who voted for it were in the main 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells'. I mean, you look down the membership list in 1994, anyone below a half colonel was a nobody," he hoots. "I used to say you could always tell it was a UKIP meeting by the number of Bomber Command ties in the room. It was that generation." Was it his milieu? "No! I was the odd one out. Which I loved, of course. I've always liked to be the odd one out, wherever I am."’

 

I wonder, myself, whether those members have all gone.

 

Interestingly, Mr Farage does a bit of back-pedalling on drugs, but it is so unprincipled that it doesn’t in any way soften my criticisms of him and his party. Here’s the passage. Ms Aitkenhead writes: ‘But his party's enthusiastic libertarianism goes out of the window when it comes to a pleasure its core members aren't so keen on – illegal drugs. Farage's own instinct would be for wholesale decriminalisation – which would almost certainly broaden UKIP's appeal among younger urban voters – but the policy isn't even up for debate. "It would be completely impossible for me to win that debate within the party. And a general doesn't try to fight every battle."’

 

But back to Mr Slippery and his ‘odd people’. From the point of view of a very rich, privately-educated stockbroker’s son, who is married to a wealthy sprig of the nobility and who has never suffered from inarticulacy or a feeling of inferiority in his entire life, any political activist is going to seem odd. People such as Mr Cameron have believed all their lives that those who have strong views about things are in some way eccentric and a bit barmy. His Eton schooling and above all his immersion in the Oxford School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics will have told him that it is only the little people, the excluded and the disappointed, who dare to care about politics, and engage their passions in it.  He has been taught that such feelings are beneath him, and that real commitment to any cause is mistaken and silly.

 

Party activists, from his Olympian position, can seem rather pathetic, odd and strange. Not for them the calm, opulent detachment of the elite. These are people for whom a new policy can spell bankruptcy, or penury , or wounded grief . Why, they feel their country’s woes as a personal pain.

 

 

In a world where normality means that the thrifty and hard-working end their lives in solitude and straitened circumstances, being ordered about by cruel care-workers, while the tricky, the violent and spendthrift are indulged by a complacent state, a bit of oddity is welcome.

 

To the disappointed inhabitants of New Britain , Mr Slippery and Michael Heseltine may seem unloveable, whereas more normal human beings, who have lived real lives of striving and disappointment such as Norman Tebbit, seem much more appealing (note how Lord Tebbit is still loathed and scorned by the liberal bigots).

 

 

By the way, I’ve noticed a growing tendency to suggest that in some way a vote for UKIP will aid a Labour victory at the next election. There is a very simple reason why people thinking of deserting the Tories for UKIP should not be influenced by it.   *The Tories will not win anyway*. This was the case at the last election, where even the wild, inflated campaign of nonsensical rage against Gordon Brown (who was in fact joint Saviour of the Poond Sterling, along with Ed Balls) could not get the Tories a majority.

 

Now that people have seen what the Tories are really like ( and spotted that , as Mr Farage says, the Liberal Democrats are not the reason for their failure, but a useful alibi for what they planned to do anyway) , they are bound to do even worse than they did in 2010.

 

Labour will form the next government, probably as a minority, perhaps with Liberal Democrat or even SNP support, though there is a faint possibility that they will get a majority and a chance that they will form a coalition with a purged Liberal Democrat party led  into the general election by Vince Cable.  

 

The old and usually reliable rule, under which a party  that can’t score 50% in polls in mid-term will not get a majority at the general election, seems to suggest that Labour will fall short of outright victory. But the Tories will do far, far worse. It simply won’t be possible to get people to loathe Ed Miliband the way they loathed Mr Brown. The idea of Mr Miliband as a hate figure is as unworkable as the phrase ‘feral guinea pig’ .

 

Last Sunday’s Mail on Sunday poll showed that, even without the UKIP surge, Labour would get a wafer-thin overall majority, if actual votes were based on current voting intentions. The idea that UKIP would therefore rob the Tories of a majority is not workable. The Tories have no majority of which they can be robbed, nor will they ever again achieve such a majority in the United Kingdom under anything approaching existing boundaries.

 

But  is the idea that we can get from the current mess to a revived British politics in the course of one election is equally unworkable. It’s a ten or 15-year project, which, alas,  has yet to begin. The real tragedy is that so many Tory tribalists insisted on voting for that awful, treacherous party in 2010, so postponing the necessary death of the Conservatives and their replacement. Let’s hope they are not similarly fooled again in 2015. 

It took a wide boy with a tax-haven tan and a big mouth to tell us what’s really going on

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Those of us who try to care about this country sink from distaste to disgust to revulsion, till in the end there is nothing left to do but laugh.

Every so often (it happened three times last week) someone says to me that I should find something cheerful to write about. They’ve come to the wrong shop. All the political parties employ battalions of professional liars who can provide you with all the happy falsehoods that you want.

And the power-worshippers and courtiers of political journalism proudly pass on this tripe as if it were their own work. Talk about having no shame.

Read them if you want that. What I write here is the sober truth, though during the past seven days it has not seemed that sober. Even in the fifth week of an alcohol-free Lent,  I felt intoxicated by the secretly filmed blabbering of the former Tory co-treasurer Peter Cruddas.

Here, thanks to the cunning behaviour of my wrongly reviled trade, was the real face of British politics – a crude wide boy with a flapping mouth and a tax-haven tan, fake mateyness wafting from every pore.

How I laughed. This person was the head waiter at Mr Slippery’s Secret Diner, holding out his fat hand for wads of £50 notes in return for Supper with Samantha. How very unlike the Clubland smoothness of Mr Slippery himself; but how very much more true.

Now, say you wanted to lobby Mr Slippery about the awful school your children have to go to, or the police-free streets of your town, or the mass immigration that has changed your city for ever, or the plans (they haven’t gone away, you know) to build over every hill and vale in sight.

Well, first, don’t bother. I’ve tried on your behalf (without paying, though it made no difference). Mr Slippery and his Cabinet view people like you and me as tiresome, boneheaded fascist nonentities, who have somehow failed to become as enlightened as them.

It’s easy to be enlightened in modern Britain if you are very rich. They ask, languidly: ‘What do you mean, crime? What do you mean, dirty hospitals? What do you mean, terrible schools? It doesn’t affect us. You’re having a Moral Panic. Now do go away.’

But it is harder for a poor and honest person to have his voice heard in the chambers of the powerful than it is for a JCB to pass through the eye of a needle.

Oh, no, I’m not against rich people as such. But I am against the current ghastly combination of wealth and self-righteous Left-wing opinions that is ruining this country more surely than any of its more honest and straightforward external enemies ever did.

What nobody seems to see about the Cruddas Crisis is this: our three elite political parties speak only for that elite, grossly undeservedly wealthy, morally tainted and happy to see the whole country the same way. It is only thanks to rules that guarantee them BBC airtime, thanks to the suborning of political journalism, and thanks to sacks of gold from dubious donors, that these parties even exist.

Left on their own, they would wither away unwanted, like a thousand other failed businesses that ignored their customers for too long. Donors (plus the BBC monopoly) suspend the rules of survival. It is as if British Leyland were still turning out Austin Maxis, and people were still buying them. The product is dreadful, but the advertising and the monopoly keep out any serious competition. You, of course, are partly to blame for this by continuing to buy the tatty, dishonest products pressed on you. When you stop, there might possibly be some hope. I’ll let you know if I see any signs of it.

Is Sam Cam taking us all for a ride?

I do wonder how those attractive pictures of Mrs Cameron riding her bike came to be taken in a week of embarrassment and fake panic over a fuel shortage that hasn’t even happened yet. So should you wonder.

Televise judges sentencing convicted criminals? Sure, if you also screen the hundreds of Crown Prosecution Service meetings at which so many criminals are let off before even being prosecuted.

I rather like George Galloway, not because I agree with him – I don’t – but because he says what he means and believes what he says. It is thanks to these qualities that he is a thrilling public speaker and devastating debater. I think that is what the people of Bradford liked about him, and what they never see in the official parties.

More pointless military deaths in Afghanistan mean more pious flannel from Mr Slippery – but no change in a futile policy. Why doesn’t he just admit he doesn’t care? Meanwhile, William Hague proposes to spend more of your money and mine stirring up trouble in Syria. People will die horribly because of this. Who does he think he is?

Locking up the wrong louts...

To avoid false accusations of ‘racism’ from the Thought Police, I have to make the following statement of the blindingly obvious: I think Liam Stacey, who made nasty comments about the collapse of a footballer, is a callous, foul-mouthed, drink-sodden moron. Is that clear?
Can I now go on to say that I don’t think much of a criminal justice system that sends him to prison for expressing his ‘views’ on the internet. The same system repeatedly leaves at liberty violent thieves and louts.

For example, Kazeem Kolawole, one of the gang who ruined the life of Thusha Kamaleswaran – the six-year-old girl shot in a shop in London – was free to do this evil only because he had been spared prison after  beating up a schoolgirl, and was on bail (of course) for carrying a knife. Now, if only Kolawole had made a racist remark he would have been safely locked up.

How many different things are wrong with  a country in which a little girl’s happy life is transformed in an instant into misery by a bullet flying through a suburban shop? How many of them are we even allowed to discuss in public without being howled down? Thusha’s ordeal has only just begun. As long as we have the sort of Government we now have, there will be more of these horrors.

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Psychiatrists snatching our children? That's Stalin's trick

I must continue to warn, as long as I can, against the threats to our freedom now massing on all sides.

My blood ran cold at the story of a psychiatrist who is alleged to have labelled parents with mental ‘disorders’ so that their children were snatched away from them. One has been exposed, and thank heaven for that. But how many others continue undisturbed?

Such ‘disorders’ are 90 per cent jargon and ten per cent guesswork. There is no objective test for them. If a qualified person says you have one, you have one, and goodbye to your children for ever. How can this possibly be permitted in a supposedly free country?

Like the secret family tribunals, in which parents struggle in vain against loaded accusations, from which they are not permitted to defend themselves, these are growing signs of the State’s power to burst in on private lives and wreck them.

The abuse of psychiatry is a symptom of tyranny. I have no doubt that many psychiatrists are honourable and thoughtful people. But their discipline, which largely lacks any objective measures, can all too easily be used to crush individuals for the purposes of the State.
If it can be deployed to snatch children, then there is not far to go before it is also used to terrify or subdue opposition.

The old Soviet Union employed it for this purpose. I once met (and I will always be proud to have shaken his hand) Dr Anatoly Koryagin, the fantastically brave Russian psychiatrist who spoke out against this perversion, and who was then himself locked away without trial in conditions so vile that his own wife could not recognise him.

When the USSR was still there, we always had before our eyes a great glaring warning of where the seemingly nice ideas of ‘progressives’ and reformers can so easily lead.

Since its collapse, we have assumed that the danger is gone. Far from it. Our homegrown revolutionaries were liberated by the fall of the Soviet Union. No longer were their weird anti-family, anti-patriotic views associated with treachery and oppression.

And so they fanned out into the schools, the Civil Service, the newspapers, the universities, the BBC and even the medical profession. And those of us who experienced Soviet power and remember it are endlessly reminded, in the politically corrected one-party state that is modern Britain, of that miserable place.

Gone to pot
Unsurprising facts from the non-existent ‘war on drugs’. Far more people are prosecuted for not having TV licences than for possessing cannabis. The number of offences is similar. It’s not that they don’t have the time to punish drug-takers. It’s that they lack the will.

How fitting... a joke uniform for a joke Navy
Is there anyone in the world who looks better with a baseball cap on his head than he does without one?

British policemen and women put them on when they wish to look tough, shoot people, or at least pose on rooftops with guns. I always hurry from the area when I see this. So should you.

Prematurely bald men seek to hide beneath them (a mistake. Perhaps this is why William Hague suffered his fatal headgear malfunction).

There was a period, happily past, when teenage boys seemed to have them surgically attached to their heads.

But now they are to be imposed on what is left of Her Majesty’s Navy. Captains on the bridges of destroyers have been photographed, looking understandably grim, in this revolting headgear.

It makes them resemble Florida boatmen, taking rich, fat New Yorkers on a shark-fishing expedition. This is not a good look for the heirs of Nelson, Rodney, Hawkins and Drake.

Once, I would have bridled at this deliberate humiliation of what used to be a great fighting service.
But now, as I accustom myself to being an exile in my own country, I just laugh. If Britain is a joke, it might as well look like one.

Who's the 'man who stole our pensions' now?
How's it going for you now, all the gullible ones who voted for the Useless Tories because ‘We have to get Gordon Brown out’?

Who now is ‘the man who stole our pensions’? And how are you liking the slow but steady emergence of 40 per cent as the new standard rate of Income Tax?

Sinking in Mr Slippery's sea of concrete
If any of us was challenged to explain the roots of patriotism, he would not think of flags or wars, but of some small, beloved landscape. It probably wouldn’t be anything special, much like the way Rupert Brooke described a friend’s sudden sense of England on the outbreak of war in 1914: ‘Grey, uneven little fields and small ancient hedges rushed before him, wild flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness, sedate houses of red brick, proudly unassuming, a countryside of rambling hills and friendly copses.’

Well, not any longer. In the midst of the Budget, Mr Slippery has slid through new planning laws that mean all that unassuming gentleness can be bulldozed by developers, to build nasty supermarkets and ugly houses for all the immigrants our Left-wing rulers keep letting in.

Old Slippery even boasts about it: ‘I can see the furious objections – the banner headlines – already.’ But he’ll ignore the sentimental old fools who want to save the countryside. ‘We will take difficult decisions, we will risk short-term unpopularity,’ he proclaims. How very brave. Well, I wish him long-term unpopularity, so that he is remembered for centuries to come as the man who concreted over Britain.

Mr Slippery speaks about ‘tough’ community sentencing. There is no such thing. The phrase is as absurd as ‘diet pizza’. If ever this man promises anything good, you may be sure it will not take place.

Ode dear, they just don't care any more
Each year the once-enjoyable quiz programme University Challenge becomes more politically correct and more boring, stuffed with kilometres, ‘Common Era’ instead of AD, and endless science questions nobody can answer. And each year, at the final, Jeremy Paxman argues the show is proof that education isn’t being diluted. Not this year, though.

Even he looked pretty tight-lipped when not one of the winning team from Manchester University could identify well-known lines from Keats’s Ode To Autumn, one of the greatest and best-known poems in the English language. To anyone properly educated, it is like not knowing that water is H2O, or that Paris is the capital of France.

Not only did they not know the poem. They didn’t know they didn’t know, and they didn’t care. It’s the not caring that pains me most.

Angry about gay marriage? Mr Slippery will be SO happy

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Hardly a day passes without someone ringing me up or writing to me to say that  they now realise that our Prime Minister, Mr Slippery, is a fraud.

Many say how sorry they are that they refused to believe me when I told them this, over and over again, before the last Election.

Well, as the Scottish pastor said to his wayward flock as they called up to him from the flames of Hell ‘We didn’t know!’, I reply smugly ‘You know now’.

Why it took them all so long, I don’t know. Mr Slippery’s shamefaced U-turn on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty happened before the Election, for all to see.

But people would keep telling me  that he somehow ‘really means it’ about  his (rather feeble) scheme to recognise marriage in the tax system and his claim that he would do something to curb the Human Rights industry.

They seem to have thought that one day he would rip off his suit and reveal himself to be ‘SuperTory’.  

Well, as for marriage, he now claims to be much more concerned about helping a few hundred homosexuals get married than about helping millions of heterosexuals to stay married.

This is, in fact, a wind-up. I shouldn’t think Mr Slippery cares even slightly about homosexuals, and I wonder what he used to say about them in private before he was beguiled by Samantha’s dolphin tattoo and her fake cockney accent, and learned how to be cool.

But he knows that driving homosexual marriage through Parliament will enrage the suburban voters he despises. He longs to be assailed by them, because it will make him look good among the Guardian-reading metropolitans he wants to win over.

As for ‘Human Rights’, do not believe the piffle about how the Liberal Democrats have somehow sabotaged Mr Slippery’s commission on this subject. Mr Slippery sabotaged it himself.

He packed it from the start with people he could rely on to make sure that nothing changed. Alas for him, he got one appointment wrong, that of Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, who had the integrity to resign when it was clear to him that he was taking part in a fake.

In one of the biggest political developments of the year (largely ignored by most of the political media, who wait for Downing Street to tell them what to write) Dr Pinto-Duschinsky revealed that the commission had been fixed.

Does anyone really believe the Prime Minister couldn’t have prevented this if he had wanted to? Well, anyone who believes that deserves what he is going to get. The rest of us don’t.

Anna deserves some genuine Fifties glamour

I see that the lovely Anna Friel is  to appear in a film about the Fifties,  a favourite period for movie-makers.

But what is it about? It is about  a squalid pornographer, the late  Paul Raymond.

Why do our film producers steer away from big subjects and concentrate on this sort of marginal, low tripe? A genuine drama could  be made (despite the BBC’s recent abject failure in The Hour) about the Suez crisis of 1956, if Fifties glamour is what they want.

 

Vanishing into the euro-gloom

Darkness is falling on this country in more ways than one. As free speech and thought are squeezed by ‘Equality and Diversity’ codes, our power supplies are threatened by Green lunacy and by our subjugation to Brussels.

An EU directive on ‘large combustion plants’ has set rigid time limits on the operation of coal-fired power stations. They are now running out of hours faster than anyone expected.

The first to be halted for ever will be Kingsnorth in Kent, a perfectly viable plant that must now shut in March next year. Many more coal-burning stations will be closed by order of the EU by 2015. Several nuclear plants also need to close soon.

Let’s hope that 2015 is very windy. If not, it could be the year we become the first cold country in the Third World.

It's not funny and it's not clever

Last week I had my first encounter with the alleged comedian Russell Brand.

Mr Brand,  co-culprit in the Sachsgate affair, was arguing (if that is the word for his technique) in favour of liberalising the laws on drugs.

I suggested that people like him are selfish kids pursuing pleasure at the expense of others.

I am afraid I teased him a bit (Why does he wear that hat? Why do people think he is funny?). 

He then gave an excellent imitation of a  tree-climbing rodent cheated of its nuts, using  a voice that sounded like a wonky hot-air  hand-dryer in a public loo.

The exchange can be found easily on YouTube.  I think it gives a pretty good idea of the difference between the pro and anti-drug causes.

Does the Prime Minister really need benefits?

If your Government sets out to restrict welfare payments to those who really need them, you do rather open yourself to scrutiny on your own claims.

The Prime Minister plans to take Child Benefit away from higher-rate taxpayers on the grounds that they don’t need it. He has also cut housing benefit so that welfare recipients cannot live better than people who work for a living.

Both these are reasonable steps. But  in that case, what do we think of the  fact that the Tory leader, who is by  no means poor, claimed Disability  Living Allowance?

I know, I know. All of us must sympathise with the Premier over the tragedy which befell his son Ivan. And  I, of course, do so.

But should that sympathy get in the way of a reasonable examination  of relevant personal behaviour  by our head of Government?

The fact that Our Leader claimed disability payments was revealed by him, in an answer to a Labour MP, Joan Ruddock, during Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons on Wednesday, March 7.

I have sought further information from No 10 Downing Street and at the time of writing have had no response. But I should say that for a couple as rich as the Camerons undoubtedly are, the sums involved (probably no more than £150 a week) cannot have been vital.

In any case, they do not compare to his enormous and still little-known claims for mortgage interest on his substantial country house near Witney.

I have always wondered whether he really needed to borrow £350,000, or indeed needed a house at all in a constituency only 70 miles from Parliament.

But I have absolutely no doubt that he did not, in any true sense of the word, need you and me to fork out roughly £1,700 a month in mortgage interest payments on that house, for eight long years. We might call this payment ‘Parliamentary Housing Benefit’. Worse than a duck house, any day, I’d say.

Is there a pattern here? I personally think this keenness to apply for other people’s money, even when he has lots  of his own, undermines claims about  ‘all being in it together’.

How rich is  he really? We do not know. But I think  he was rich enough to manage without filling in the claim forms.

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