This student interviewer
http://mallarduk.com/peter-hitchens-hh0916/
....was so diffident that he hesitated for months before publishing his account of a conversation with me.
He needn't have been. The result is creditably honest. Some of you may enjoy it.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column
Imagine a country that isn’t very successful, but wants to boost its image in the world. Its economy is rocky, its cities grubby and run-down. Its education system isn’t much good.
So this country spends huge sums of scarce money and great effort to find young men and women who can win medals in international sporting competitions.
It carefully chooses sports where the competition is weak. It relentlessly drives the chosen athletes. And it works. At home and abroad, its image is transformed.
Its national media go into hysterics over each medal.
The people at home forget for a moment the dreariness of their lives.
The anthem plays and the flag flies high.
The country I am thinking of is East Germany, the self-styled ‘German Democratic Republic’. You may remember the superb figure skater Katarina Witt, who won Winter Olympic gold medals in 1984 and 1988, and a pile of other awards for her ghastly country in the years just before it collapsed in a cloud of rust.
What did her triumphs prove? Nothing much, except that state power can achieve sporting success. In which case, what is so joyous about it?
If sport is about anything, surely it is about individual achievement, not plans, budgets and political prestige.
What could be further from the burning individual talents and grit celebrated in Chariots Of Fire than some Ministry of Sport fulfilling its medal plan?
But what, deep down, is the difference between this episode and Sir John Major’s dash for Olympic gold which has now paid off in Brazil?
In fact, I think our state-sponsored medal programme may be worse in some ways than East Berlin’s because, as a free society, we had the power to question it and we didn’t.
It might also be worth recalling that Sir John’s much-praised initiative was financed mainly by the Lottery – in which a British government for the first time actively encouraged gambling, especially among the vulnerable poor, the main payers of this tax on false hope.
Indeed, Sir John’s legacy of gambling and debt, forced on students in the universities he so wildly expanded, may be his main memorial.
You may say, quite rightly, that I am jaundiced because I couldn’t care less about sport. My sympathies in Rio lie mainly with the empty, wet seats, which beautifully sum up my view of the Olympics.
But even if I were an enthusiast for Underwater Motorcycling, Bovine Ballet or Synchronised Sunburn, or whatever it is we currently lead the world in, I’d still have the same misgivings.
This is what failed and powerless countries do to make themselves feel better.
It is an illusion, and when it ends, things will be worse than they were before.
Tragic Victims of our deal with the devil
Who can fail to be moved and grieved by the sight of a small child in distress? But please do not let your emotions stop you thinking.
The picture of the shocked Aleppo survivor, Omran Daqneesh, like that of the drowned child Alan Kurdi last year, should not be allowed to enforce a conformist opinion on the world.
The death of Alan Kurdi did not mean that it was wise to fling wide the borders of Europe (as Germany’s Angela Merkel now well knows).
The rescue of Omran Daqneesh should not make us side with the bloody and merciless Syrian rebels.
Why is Aleppo a war zone in the first place? Do you know? I will tell you. Syria was a peaceful country until it was deliberately destabilised by Saudi Arabia and its fanatical, sectarian Gulf allies, consumed with hatred for the Assad government and, above all, its ally Iran.
Worse, this monstrous intervention was supported by the USA, Britain and France, all sucking up to the Saudis for oil, money and arms contracts.
In the hope of bringing down Assad, we made a devil’s bargain with some of the worst fanatics in the Middle East, people who make Anjem Choudary look like the Vicar of Dibley.
We know of Britain’s role for certain because of the very strange case of Bherlin Gildo, a Swedish man accused by British authorities of attending a terror training camp in Syria. His trial collapsed in June 2015 because his defence lawyers argued that the terror groups he was accused of supporting had been helped by British intelligence.
The Assad state, as you might expect, defended itself against its attackers, helped in the end by Iran and Russia.
And the war which followed was the ruin of Syria, whose innocent people found their peaceful cities and landscape turned into a screaming battlefield, as it still is.
If you are truly grieved by the picture of poor little Omran, just be careful who you blame.
Anjem Choudary, broadcasting’s favourite Islamist loudmouth, was and is a vain, bloviating, blowhard fraud, another boozy drug-taking low-life posing as a serious person. He found a role and fools to indulge him, many in the same media who now queue up to rejoice at his imprisonment.
But I do not feel safer from terror now that he is locked up. Worse, I feel less safe from Chairman May’s sour-faced surveillance state, which takes a dim and narrow view of free speech and liberty. Choudary has been locked up not for what he did but for what he said. Claims he influenced anyone into crime are thin. Even the sneaky wording of the Terrorism Act, in which he was charged with ‘inviting’ support for IS, is suspicious.
It sounds like ‘inciting’, and is meant to, for incitement to terror and murder is a real crime, even in free countries. But it isn’t the same as ‘inviting’, a much weaker word. You may gloat that Choudary is eating Islamic porridge. But be careful what you gloat over. A law as loose as this could easily be used against anyone the state doesn’t like. I predict that it will be, too.
By the way, I spent several hours last week circling Government offices trying to find out how many such charges there have been – the CPS sent me to the Justice Ministry, they told me to call the Home Office, who sent me back to the CPS. This pathetic pass-the-parcel evasion suggests they don’t care much. This stuff is propaganda, not genuine security.
******
A few days ago I took part in a recorded BBC debate on prisons, What Point Prison?, which will be transmitted on Radio 4 at 8pm on Wednesday
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pj2pk
There was a startling exchange on capital punishment between me and Erwin James, a penitent convicted murderer much admired by liberals, who has now become a distinguished writer on prisons. You may be surprised at what he said.
Some of you may enjoy this post-match analysis of the recent debate on the death penalty at Stationers' Crown Woods Academy, by my main opponent, Toby Pereira.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSq3go3bXFQ&feature=youtu.be
Here those who wish to may watch the opening segment of a debate on the death penalty in which I recently took part, at Stationers' Crown Woods Academy, a school on the South-Eastern fringes of London
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fsjo4jry9Y
Gluttons for capital or other punishment may watch the whole thing here
Link to playlist- http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY4JQ3kcsI_sB-umwmgJDEsBlO62Yvig-
Link to video 1/4- http://youtu.be/6fsjo4jry9Y
Link to video 2/4- http://youtu.be/pj081BXdEvo
Link to video 3/4- http://youtu.be/prKOhySyY1I
Link to video 4/4- http://youtu.be/5pT8cOHgSqk
I noticed a couple of statistical announcements last week which received less attention than I think they should. I am, before the Thought Police detect any secret hidden message, saying no more than that they are all interesting, tending to undermine conventional wisdom. I am emphatically not connecting the slackening of law enforcement on cannabis with the rise in homicides.
The first is an extract from a story last Thursday in ‘The Times’
‘ The number of murders committed in England and Wales has risen for the first time in five years,
There were 573 murders last year, 56 more than in 2014 — an increase of 11 per cent. Incidences of gun and knife crime also jumped … figures released by the Office for National Statistics yesterday showed. Recorded rapes were up by 30 per cent, to 34,700 David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, said: "It is not just murders that are going up, it is the kind of murders that are happening and the way people are being murdered. They are often much more violent, in ways that are shocking." Incidents of violent crime recorded by police jumped by almost 200,000, a trend which some analysts suggested could be linked to having fewer officers on patrol, and the recovering economy allowing more young men to drink too much.
(By contrast ….’figures released by the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which bases its estimates on interviews with members of the public about their experience of crime. It reported that, overall, crime fell by 7 per cent in 2015, from 6.9 million incidents to 6.4 million.)’
And the in the Daily Mail of Saturday 23rd April, soon after a story on 5th April showing that arrests for cannabis possession had fallen by almost half between 2010 and 2015 ( ‘The number of cannabis users arrested by the police has fallen by almost half in the last five years amid claims the drug is being decriminalised by the back door. Police in England and Wales recorded 19,115 arrests for cannabis possession in 2015, compared with a high of 35,367 in 2010 - a fall of 46 per cent.), more news of the ever-slacker aopproach of police to the possession and now the growth of cannabis:
‘PROSECUTIONS for growing cannabis have plummeted - while the number of young people using the drug has rocketed.
Shocking figures reveal that the number of people hauled to court for cultivating marijuana fell by 84 per cent between 2011 and 2014 - from 944 to just 127 - while arrests for possession have almost halved.
But a fifth more 16 to 24-year-olds admitted using cannabis last year than two years before.
Critics said the figures show the authorities are turning a blind eye and that drug possession is being decriminalised 'by the back door'. And medical experts have renewed warnings over the harmful effects of the Class B drug.
A total of 1,025,000 people aged 16 to 24 admitted using cannabis in 2014-15, compared with 849,000 in 2012-13, a rise of 21 per cent. Some 2.2 million adults aged 16 to 59 used the narcotic - up by 7 per cent. (PH asks: How can these figures possibly be arrived at?)
The number arrested for possession fell from 35,367 in 2010 to 19,115 last year.
And the statistics, uncovered in a Parliamentary question from former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, showed prosecutions for growing cannabis in England and Wales fell from 944 in 2011 to 319 in 2012, 214 in 2013 and 127 in 2014, the latest figures available.
Despite increasing warnings over health problems linked to cannabis, police chiefs in four forces last year signalled that cannabis users and growers were no longer a priority, and Sara Thornton, head of the National Police Chiefs' Council, admitted forces had given up investigating small-scale cannabis farms. Keith Vaz, Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: 'This is a huge drop in the number of prosecutions for cultivation. It seems either the police or the Crown Prosecution Service have decided that this is not a priority. Those involved should be hauled before the courts. We will be pursuing this matter with the Home Secretary.' Lucy Dawe, of anti-drugs group Cannabis Skunk Sense, said: '[The police] have decided cannabis is not a big issue for them. But unfortunately a lot of young people who end up in the courts have cannabis somewhere in their stories.
There is increasingly a tacit acceptance of cannabis use but many do not understand the true dangers of it - the risk of mental illness and the strong connections with acquisitive crime and violence.' David Spencer, of the Centre for Crime Prevention think-tank, said: 'This is a worrying development and raises urgent questions for the Government to answer. Is it a result of the police wilfully ignoring the law they are there to enforce, or has the Government authorised such changes, in which case this appears to suggest the creation of legislation by the back door.' Academics warn that cannabis is highly addictive, can cause mental health problems including psychosis, leads to violence and is a gateway to harder drugs. Earlier this month international drugs experts said the risk of mental illness was so serious it warranted a global public health campaign.
The Home Office said the proportion of users aged 16 to 59 has fallen from 9.6 per cent in 2004 to 6.7 per cent last year. (***How can they possibly know, let alone be so precise? PH) Bill Jephson, the National Police Chiefs' Council cannabis spokesman, said: 'We are committed to tackling the criminals at the source of wholesale cannabis cultivation...We will continue to enforce the law in a practical and proportionate way.' Guidelines for sentencing say someone growing nine plants for their own use should be let off with a fine. Those who grow it on a larger scale can be prosecuted for production of cannabis, with a maximum sentence of 14 years.’
In some bafflement, I watched on Sunday night the opening episode of a new BBC-TV series ‘Undercover’. I had been looking forward to it, as I am most interested in its theme. This is the terrible error of infiltrating undercover police officers into protest movements. Several of these men have actually lived with and fathered children by the people they were spying on.
I find this inexcusable in a free society, and cannot begin to imagine the betrayal felt by those involved, when (as must always happen) the treachery is uncovered.
It is an excellent subject for a drama.
So I was puzzled to find the action beginning on Highway 110, so-called, in Louisiana. I wondered if I was watching the wrong programme, as it seemed to be about the US death penalty, not British undercover police officers. I also think highway 110 may have been the wrong road, mistaken for a similarly-numbered route that leads from the state capital, Baton Rouge, to the Louisiana State Penitentiary (known until recently as Angola).
This prison was made famous in a tendentious Hollywood propaganda film, 'Dead Man Walking’ starring Susan Sarandon as a dedicated nun opposed to the death penalty, and Sean Penn playing an unquestionably guilty rapist and murderer.
Following the good Sister’s intervention, Penn has a character transplant and becomes regretful, after many years of denying his crime.
Both murderer and nun are based on real people. You can look it all up. No doubt some readers will think the nun is doing good. I think she may have misunderstood the gospels.
As I recall, heavenly choirs warble as a (finally repentant) Penn is melodramatically lifted on high in a semi-crucified position, strapped to a gurney, during his lethal injection (a largely fictional depiction of what is in fact a surprisingly dull and totally horizontal event, as I can testify, having witnessed one such in Huntsville, Texas).
Anyway, back to the BBC: The series heroine, played by Sophie Okoneda, was obviously in some way connected to an execution, which was being gloated about in a hateable Southern-fried voice on her car radio .
Then her phone, on the empty front passenger seat, started to trill.
If I were on death row in Louisiana I am not sure I would want a lawyer who responds to this by accidentally dropping the phone on the car floor, groping for it, then slamming on the brakes and taking the call while her car stands askew in the middle of a main road ( a giant truck bears down on her as this happens).
Nor would I want a lawyer whose phone battery starts to go flat (as it later does) during a crucial last-minute appeal to the State Attorney General. Didn’t she know it was going to be a busy day? Now would I want an advocate who leaves her car in a field with the door open. Is it still there? We weren't ever shown her going back to find out.
If I were the State of Louisiana (which is clearly identified in this programme) I would… well, I’ll come on that later.
But first, here are some interesting extracts from the unpopular newspaper reviews of the programme:
Daily Telegraph: ‘We first met Maya fighting desperately to get a stay of execution in Louisiana for a falsely convicted Death Row client about to die.’
Guardian:’ In two hours' time, Rudy Jones, who has been on death row for 20 years for a murder he did not commit, is about to be executed. The woman behind the wheel is his lawyer Maya … an impassioned and embattled London barrister on her way to make a last-ditch attempt to save him.’
Times : ‘She was introduced as a John Grisham hero, racing to rescue, then console, her Louisiana death-row client, Rudy… as the seconds ticked away to his execution.
Independent: ‘Only it opened in the US, where she was defending death row convict Rudy Jones …, a man falsely imprisoned for murder.’
Very interestingly, the reviewer for the ‘Independent’ went on to note: ‘If I hadn't read the episode synopsis before I watched the programme, I think I would still be clueless about 90 per cent of what happened’.
I’m not sure what synopsis she means, but could it be a special one, given to TV reviewers when they preview programmes? Because I hadn’t seen any such synopsis and, while not wholly clueless, it did take me some time to grasp what was going on. I could have done with a synopsis myself.
And how else were we supposed to know that the convict was wrongly-convicted? We were told nothing of the alleged crime, the trial or the case. Anti-death-penalty campaigners (as I have observed for myself) are quite ready to use all available means (including the sobbiest of sob stories) to prevent the executions of convicted killers they know or at least strongly suspect to be guilty.
I think we were supposed to assume he was innocent, to assume that the American justice system (which is undoubtedly flawed) is a seething mixture of redneck prejudice and insouciant racist callousness (the condemned man was portrayed as Black), against which civilised and enlightened multicultural Brits struggle in vain with the feeble tools of justice.
Is this so?
In New Orleans alone, the biggest city in Louisiana, there were 200 murders in 2011. I think there are about 500 killings a year in the whole state.
So presumably, if the BBC’s idea of reality is true, the execution chamber at Angola is busy day and night prejudicially killing unjustly convicted Black citizens in defiance of the evidence.
Well, not exactly:
Louisiana has executed 28 murderers in the last 40 years. But it has something in the region of 500 murders a year, around twice the murder rate in New York. Yet it hasn’t held an execution of anybody, just or unjust, botched or unbotched, Black or White, since January 2010.
On 10th January 2010, the major local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, reported ‘State’s death penalty becoming a rarity ; Bordelon’s execution was first since 2002’
‘Thursday's execution of Gerald Bordelon, happened only because the convicted killer waived his appeals, hastening his death by many years. His was the first execution since 2002, when Leslie Dale Martin was executed for the rape and murder of a Lake Charles woman in 1981.
'The dramatic decline in Louisiana executions since 1987, when the state briefly led the nation in that statistic, comes at a time when, nationally, both executions and the imposition of new death sentences have waned significantly.’
Bordelon, by the way, had strangled his 12-year-old stepdaughter, after kidnapping her at knifepoint and forcing her to, well, I won’t go on, it’s too distressing, look it up if you must. There was no doubt of his guilt. He showed police where he’d put her poor defiled body. But the crime was committed in 2002, and he was convicted in 2006. And he waived his right to appeal. And in the period during which his was the sole execution, approximately 5,000 murders were committed in that state. Call that a death penalty? Call it a deterrent?’
Since others appear to wish to make skin-colour an issue, I will note here that photographs of Bordelon, easily viewable on the Internet, show him as not being black.
There have, as far as I can discover, been no executions in Louisiana since Bordelon’s despatch. I can find no record of any botched execution by lethal injection there, either.
Before Bordelon, the last to be executed had been Leslie Dale Martin (also white, or pinko-grey, if photographs are anything to go by). He was executed in May 2002 for the rape and murder of Christina Burgin. The details of this crime (which took place in 1991) are too revolting for me to record them here.
Since the introduction of lethal injection by the state in 1991, 25 years ago, eight persons have been executed. Not such a good story, I know, but is it right or responsible for the BBC to portray the USA as it did on Sunday night? People take its dramas seriously, especially when they are based on real life events.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column
Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn. Labour’s Blairites lie dead and dying all over the place because they made that mistake. Tory Blairites such as David Cameron might be wise to learn from this, especially given last week’s dismal, shrinking manufacturing and export figures, which were pushed far away from front pages by other stories, but which cast doubt on the vaunted recovery.
If (like me) you have attended any of Mr Corbyn’s overflowing campaign meetings, you will have seen the hunger – among the under-30s and the over-50s especially – for principled, grown-up politics instead of public relations pap.
Mr Corbyn reminds mature people of the days when the big parties really differed. He impresses the young because he doesn’t patronise them, and obviously believes what he says. This desire for real politics isn’t just confined to the Left. Ken Livingstone is right to call Mr Corbyn Labour’s Nigel Farage. Ukip appeals to a similar impulse.
Millions are weary of being smarmed and lied to by people who actually are not that competent or impressive, and who have been picked because they look good on TV rather than because they have ideas or character.
Indeed, ideas or character are a disadvantage. Anything resembling a clear opinion is seized upon by the media’s inquisitors, and turned in to a ‘gaffe’ or an outrage.
Actually, I dislike many of Mr Corbyn’s opinions – his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists and his support for the EU. Oddly enough, these are all policies he shares with the Tory Party.
But I like the honest way he states them, compared with the Tories’ slippery pretence of being what they’re not.
My hope, most unlikely to be realised, is that a patriotic, conservative and Christian equivalent of Mr Corbyn will emerge to take him on, and will demonstrate, by his or her strength of conviction, that there is an even greater demand for that cause than there is for old-fashioned leftism. In any case, I think any thoughtful British person should be at least a little pleased to see the PR men and the special advisers and the backstairs-crawlers of British politics so wonderfully wrong-footed by a bearded old bicyclist.
On Wednesday the BBC marked the moment when the Queen became our longest-reigning Monarch by broadcasting (on Radio 4’s The World Tonight) a weird, portentous three-minute republican diatribe by the idiosyncratic feminist Beatrix Campbell, who in 2009 accepted an OBE from what she called a ‘horrible imperial regime’.
The attack was personal as well as political, criticising the Queen as a parent and accusing her of ‘deceiving and disrespecting’ her daughters-in-law. No doubt Ms Campbell has a legitimate point of view which ought to be heard. But an uninterrupted harangue during a flagship news programme? How can the BBC claim to be impartial when it does this sort of thing?
Death by drone is not justice
I would cheerfully bring back the death penalty tomorrow, as long as it came with unanimous grown-up juries and a restored right to silence.
But I’d never seen David Cameron as an ally in this. When it comes to defending us against actual heinous murderers in Britain, Mr Cameron (like most politicians) is an excuse-making anti-gallows liberal softie.
How does he square this with his enthusiasm for executing people without trial in the middle of someone else’s desert, using a remote-controlled chunk of high-explosive?
No doubt the victims of this are not very nice, though nothing resembling evidence has been produced against them. But that shouldn’t blind us to the principle involved. If we think killing people we don’t like with drones in other countries is legal and OK, we have licensed everyone else to do the same, even to us, here.
It is all part of a confused and delusional policy towards Syria and ISIS. George Osborne, the Chancellor, still seems to want to attack Syria’s President Assad, whose army is now one of the main barriers against an ISIS victory.
Last week he said Parliament’s vote not to bomb Assad in 2013 was ‘one of the worst decisions the House of Commons has ever made’.
On the contrary, if we had bombed Assad then, we would have helped the people who soon afterwards became ISIS. Given this confusion at the highest level, Parliament should be very careful not to allow Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron to make the same mistake again.
**
The people who want to make life coarser never, ever stop. A bookmaker has just got away with using a partly-asterisked F-word in a newspaper advertisement. The gutless, useless ‘Advertising Standards Authority’ rejected a complaint, saying it was ‘light-hearted’. It won’t be long now before the whole word is allowed, everywhere. Those of us who think that is a pity will be derided for caring. And so the cultural revolution goes on.
Feminism has many faces. Compare and contrast Charlotte Proudman, the censorious Thought Policewoman who publicly denounced an internet bore when she could have slapped him down in private, and the singer Chrissie Hynde.
Ms Hynde lived the entire dream and nightmare of 1960s liberation, and is impressively honest about the bitter depths to which this took her, and the sadness this caused her parents.
Last week she was questioned on this by the high priestess of po-faced British feminism, Jenni Murray. The exchange didn’t go quite as Ms Murray expected. Chrissie Hynde’s thoughts about feminism and knicker-displaying rock stars have been much publicised. But this was the bit that really impressed me: ‘I don’t think it’s liberating at all to think that you can behave like a man… When this false commodity of sexual liberation came along which made us think that we could act like them – actually women don’t act like men and they also respond emotionally very differently to men. It took me a long time to find out, and I don’t think it was any kind of liberation. I think it was more enslavement.’
Jenni Murray immediately changed the subject.
A glancing reference to the death penalty received more responses than almost anything else I wrote in my MoS column on Sunday. Here and on Twitter people were astonishingly anxious to disagree with me, to trundle out ancient arguments on the subject that have many times been exploded here for anyone who was really interested. Most especially I have disposed of the deeply tedious evasion about unintentionally killing an innocent person, which (as any thoughtful person knows) is not in reality considered an obstacle to any other policy whose general effects are considered good.
Why is it that one’s opinion on the execution of a few heinous murderers has become (more or less) the supreme test in our society for who is and who is not a civilised person? There is not the faintest possibility of the death penalty being reintroduced in this country unless and until it becomes a left-wing despotism (it is in such polities that execution is most widely used as a penalty in the modern world – Cuba until recently, the Chinese People’s Republic and Vietnam for example, and of course the USSR ).
It is simply not a live issue in our politics and is most unlikely to become one. As I freely admit the conditions under which I would find it acceptable no longer exist in this country, especially proper independent juries whose verdicts must be unanimous.
I only state my support for it because I refuse to pretend that I accept the feeble, unreasoning, ill-informed and emotive arguments deployed against it, and because (as a former abolitionist) I changed my mind through the study of facts and the exercise of logic. It would be an act of self-betrayal and cowardice to keep my position secret just because it was generally despised. The only parallel is abortion, but the fury on that subject has subsided since the most fanatical pro-abortionists (young men terrified they might actually have to take responsibility for getting a girl pregnant) realised that the chances of this happening are now virtually nil. The ritual choruses of women claiming that killing unborn babies is a human right don’t ever have quite the same urgency as the adolescent male’s fear of the nappy, the mother-in-law and the shotgun wedding, now vanished.
Asked a little while ago why I described myself as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’ on Twitter I explained that this was because it is in fact the case that quite a lot of left-wing persons (who often have the sketchiest idea of who I am or what I think) do regard me as a hate-figure. Asked to explain why this might be, I concluded that it was because I do not act or speak as if I were ashamed of being a moral or social conservative.
I am not apologetic about holding these views, nor am I embarrassed. I regard myself as having a coherent, defensible moral position. I am also quite familiar with the techniques of mockery and raillery used by the left against their opponents, and am happy to use them (rather more fairly and in a more measured fashion) against the Left. Why shouldn’t I? If I did nothing else but act, speak and think as if I believed what I do believe, and wasn’t ashamed of it, my very existence would still be ‘offensive’ to my critics. I suspect some of them (who say this on Twitter from time to time) genuinely wish I was dead.
For the modern Left is not just about holding left-wing opinions and propagating them in the hope of achieving a socialist society. It is a sort of secular state of grace, in which the person who adopts the full set of ‘correct’ opinions regards himself or herself as morally good, simply by the act of embracing those opinions. It is, I think, a caricature of the Evangelical Protestant belief in Salvation Through Grace Alone, about which I have always had some doubts (well expressed in the General Epistle of St James, especially the Second Chapter, which I once heard read at a memorial service, and which struck me, that day, so hard in the heart that I could barely think about anything else for some time afterwards). In fact, it is the Left-Wing attitude of ‘Salvation by Correctness Alone’ which has made me wonder all the more about it. But I digress.
There’s another religious parallel to this, which is the status known as ‘Dhimmitude’ under which Christians and Jews were in the past permitted to live in Islamic countries. Though much relieved by the Ottomans, under pressure from Western Christian empires, the rules of the ‘Pact of Umar’ persisted in the Muslim world for many centuries
I won’t go into the full details of its past enforcement, of dress codes, doorway height, permitted mounts, inferior legal status, the carrying of weapons or the exaction of special and punitive taxes, sometimes accompanied by a ritual public slap in the face. Apart from anything else it varied a great deal from place to place, and many of its victims have left scanty records.
Perhaps the most striking restrictions enjoined by this form of tolerance were bans on the repair of existing churches or the building of new ones, or on making noise during funerals. I believe that bells were also removed from churches, and church towers pulled down, to avoid any kind of challenge, either to the call to prayer from the muezzin or to the height and magnificence of the mosque.
Under these conditions, forbidden to convert or to appeal for help from co-religionists abroad, the Christians of the region were permitted to remain in humble existence, quietly and apologetically practising their rites and ceremonies in crumbling buildings. This was, as anyone with an imagination can work out, a very effective way of seeing to it that the non-Muslim monotheisms shrank and shrivelled under Islamic rule. No wonder few people now realise that Christianity predated Islam in the Middle East , and was once dominant there.
The parallel is of course not at all complete or exact, and I would rather by far be a moral and social conservative in modern Britain than be a Christian living in the mediaeval Levant or Maghreb under the Pact of Umar.
But there’s still an interesting similarity. Both systems claim to be tolerant, and (to the extent that they do not actually employ violent persecution) they are tolerant. But both in practice require an acceptance by the dethroned belief system that it acts at all times as a defeated and humbled thing, not worthy of respect.
Thus it becomes harder and harder simply to express certain opinions, once universal, such as favouring lifelong marriage over divorce, serial marriage or cohabitation, or (come to that) Christianity over any other religion, or academic selection, or the freedom of parents to exercise authority over children, or national independence, or secure borders, or the blazingly obvious wrongness of abortion on demand.
But the death penalty is by far the greatest of these. And I think the reason for this is simple. It is the keystone of the arch of an former legal and moral system, which regarded people as wholly responsible for their own actions.
The stated purpose of the pre-1914 Prisons Commission, for instance, was ‘the due punishment of responsible persons’ . Nobody would dare say that now. Prisons hesitate to punish at all, and the punishment is said to consist solely in the deprivation of liberty, which is why the prisons, being chaotic much of the time, are in many cases far more terrifying than they were when they believed in punishment. Responsibility has been abolished. And a lot of people are very glad, and hope it will stay that way. Even the faintest hint that it might return disturbs and unsettles them.
I recently gave an interview to the Polish website Prosto Z Mostu
My Polish-speaking readers may see it here
http://prostozmostu.net/swiat/hitchens-cameron-chce-unii-do-gor-ural
But those of you without Polish may see the English version below:
***Very much so. I had believed the Conservative Party was so decrepit that it could never win another election. I’ve also found that opinion polls are usually broadly right, if you read them carefully. I was wrong. I’ve tried to explain, in various blogs, why I think I might have been wrong, but I think the very careful targeting of certain seats, and unscrupulous propaganda uncritically swallowed by most of the media achieved this unlikely victory. The first of these was made possible by very successful fundraising among the super-rich, as big money can keep alive parties which are otherwise dead. Since 1997, there has been a tendency on the part of the great bulk of the British media to approve of one party, which is awarded the title of ‘the centre’. This title was granted to the Conservatives after they adopted a broadly left-liberal, pro-EU, politically correct programme under Mr Cameron. Labour *might* have won it back had they chosen the establishment candidate, David Miliband, as leader. But by choosing Ed Miliband, who actually dared to have some opinions, they lost all chance of media backing.
****FPTP is good in two ways. It allows strong decisive government and tough discipline opposition from a second party which knows it could be the government tomorrow and so is forced to be realistic about its opposition. And it allows the electorate to throw out an unpopular government. Neither of these things is possible in PR systems. I think they suit our country, with its strong adversarial tradition in law, debate and politics, and its potent class system. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone else. I think UKIP’s support for PR is baffling and opportunist. To get a British exit from the EU, they need an overall majority in the Commons. With PR, they will never get this. With FPTP, they might, or a future party might. Perhaps they have been diverted from their political aim by the joys of official recognition
***Of course not. The Conservative Party has from the start been in favour of British integration into the European project. All its major leaders since Macmillan have been keen supporters (including Margaret Thatcher for most of her political life) David Cameron wants an EU extending to the Urals, and has said so. Some Tory MPs feel the need, from time to time, to pretend to be patriotic. But it’s just posing, and not to be taken seriously.
***Indeed they are, but so what?. A ‘Eurosceptic’ is a person who criticises the EU when he is out of office, or at elections, but supports it when he is in office. It is a silly expression anyway. What is there to be ‘sceptical’ about? The thing exists. You can be in it or out of it, and that’s the choice. You might as well be ‘sceptical’ about breakfast, or the Moon.
***Because plebiscites (except in Switzerland where voters rather than the state decide the question, the timing and the conduct) are devices by which governments legitimise with votes what they want to do anyway. They are never fair, or fairly conducted. If by any chance they go wrong, they are soon afterwards re-run and reversed. This referendum is a baited trap. Once it has happened, and the pro-EU side has won, opponents of the EU in Britain will be told that the issue is now settled for good.
***I cannot imagine how the Tories, in practice one of the most socially, morally, educationally and left-wing parties in Europe, manage to sustain this image. It’s much as if people still expected London to be full of people in bowler hats, groping around in smog. One visit to Britain should be enough to dispel this outdated rubbish. The Tory Party has always been a cynical organisation for gaining office at all costs. At times this may have given it a conservative appearance, but surely not in living memory? The Thatcher era was one of economic and social liberalism, not conservatism.
***Labour’s original welfare agenda was long ago accepted by all major parties, and it is left with very little to say about this, apart from making false claims that the Tories are dismantling the Heath Service and the welfare state, which fewer and fewer people believe. It has become the party of the metropolitan bohemians, but again, their sexual, social and educational politics have now been adopted by the Tories.
*** More or less .Increasing state funding of political parties, supported by broadcasting rules which favour existing parties and discriminate against new ones, plus the huge donations of the super-rich, have enabled both these parties to survive long after they had lost any reason to exist. They are now just career-ladders for professional politicians. If either of them tried to raise money by collecting it on the street a)they would not have enough people to do the collecting and b) nobody would give them anything. Each British election is a sort of street theatre in which the electorate are persuaded to legitimise one or other of these unrepresentative, internally dead organisations. The ballot box is one of the few sacred things left in our culture. Truly sacred things are scorned.
***In a dialectical way, they fuel each other. And don’t forget the economic collapse as well.
***You’ll have to read the book. I can’t summarise more than 300 pages here. But our lunatic entry into the First World War is probably the single greatest cause.
***I’ve no objection to female clergy, some of whom are conservative and much-valued. Same-sex marriage is a tiny non-issue, set beside the general acceptance of divorce and of remarriage after divorce, and the almost total collapse of lifelong marriage. The church’s failure to defend marriage (described in detail in ‘Abolition of Britain’) was the thing that utterly destroyed it. Penitence-free new liturgies and baby-talk Bibles, plus modern music, are awful, but they are symptoms of a deeper loss.
***So should the Archbishop of Canterbury have been. The 39 Articles of the Church (Article 37 specifically) support the execution of heinous murderers ( as does the Roman Catholic catechism, the last time I looked) , and Ingram was a heinous and unrepentant murder, whose guilt was in no doubt at all.
***Because I am English, and of my generation, and Roman Catholicism seems to me to be wholly foreign, also because, while I regard Roman Catholics as friends and allies in the struggle against the modern world, I personally find aspects of Roman Catholic worship and doctrine difficult to accept or support. I think the Anglican compromise between the Catholic and the Reformed versions of our faith is actually a very sensible and thoughtful one.
***Try as I may, I cannot become a Chesterton enthusiast. On this, as on many things, he seems to me to have been wrong. But he wrote some good poems.
***That would depend on where you were. The USA, where Muslim immigration is small, tends to have many neoconservatives who are very militant on the subject, and their allies in Europe are the same. The trouble is that neo-conservatives are also supporters of open borders and unrestricted immigration, so, in Europe but not the US, they are ensuring the growing power of Islam in formerly Christian societies. I think this may be why they are so obsessed with terrorism and the Islamic State. They can give themselves the illusion of being ‘tough’, while actually supporting the very process that will (in my view) eventually make Islam supreme in much of Europe, quite peacefully and legitimately – the growth of the Muslim population.
***I think British people are worried about all mass immigration. The problem is that they have understood the nature of the problem far too late. It has happened. I suspect it is easier for UKIP to talk about migrants from Europe because they can then not be accused of racial bigotry.
*** I think I’ve said quite enough, thanks.
They seldom, if ever, think. They know no history. They are fiercely resistant to any facts that might upset their opinions. They take no trouble to find out what is actually happening.
Here is an example. Ian Austin MP, a member of Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee, last week extruded the following opinion: ‘The police’s number one job is to catch criminals so they can be convicted.’ He was objecting to a scheme that gave priority to contact with the public.
I am pretty sure the same dim view is shared across Parliament, in every police HQ and in most media outlets in the country. Yet it is utterly, totally mistaken. Every arrest and prosecution is, in fact, a failure by the police. It’s necessary, but it’s also secondary.
Their job, the reason we hired them in 1829, was to prevent crime and disorder. That’s what the constable’s oath says, and they successfully did prevent huge amounts of crime and disorder for more than a century, by patrolling on foot.
And so it continued until the country went mad 50 years ago in the first heady years of the Age of Mistakes in which we continue to live – the era of instant mashed potato, Jimmy Savile, Watney’s Red Barrel, tower blocks, comprehensive schools, votes for teenagers, inner ring roads, the Common Market and Dr Beeching’s railway massacre.
What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he can do first aid?
Most of those errors were made in public view, cheered on, as usual, by the political and commentating classes who invariably mistake novelty for progress.
But the decision to abolish police foot patrols went unnoticed at the time. It was only afterwards that British people of a certain age wondered where the police – once visible everywhere – vanished to.
For the decision was taken in secret, by an unknown body called the Home Office Police Advisory Board, on December 7, 1966. It was adopted by new, unwieldy and unresponsive merged police forces that were created soon afterwards.
Since then, the police do not prevent crime or disorder. They wait for it to happen, and then come rushing along to the scene of their failure, accompanied by loud electronic screams and wails and flashing lights.
What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he can do first aid? He cannot unstab, unshoot, unburgle, unmug or unrape the victim.
Nothing he does can bring back what has been lost. The chances are that he cannot find or catch the culprit – and if he does, the miscreant will get off anyway, and skip, laughing, down the steps of the courthouse, as two did last week.
If you wait for people to commit crimes before you do anything, you will never, ever be able to build enough prisons to hold them.
It’s obvious if you think about it. It’s not obvious if you don’t.
Proof the Tories stand for nothing
I suppose if a Left-wing political party sought cash from pornographers, it would make a kind of sense.
The Left, after all, cheered on the liberation of pornography by ripping up the obscenity laws and deriding poor old Lord Longford when he tried to warn against this.
But if a party that calls itself ‘Conservative’ readily seeks the money and friendship of such people, it robs itself of its right to use this name.
If conservatism doesn’t stand for faithful marriage, unselfish love, constancy and modesty, then what does it stand for? Anyone who still deludes himself that the Cameron Tories offer any hope to the country will deserve what he gets.
We should pick our 'friends' with a bit more care
Here is a Chinese billionaire, Liu Han, being hauled away by the police. He looks terrified, and with reason. He is now dead, having been executed a few days ago. He may be shouting: ‘I’ve been framed!’ He certainly did so during his sentencing hearing.
Because China has no independent courts, no juries, no presumption of innocence, and because its press is not just unfree but chained to the state, I have no idea if he is guilty of the charges of gangsterism laid against him.
This is interesting because this country and its leaders have good and close relations with China, whose government famously massacred its ‘own people’ in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and got away with it. It seems we send a trade delegation there every week, begging for business and stifling misgivings about the appalling lack of freedom.
In the same way, we are still on good terms with Saudi Arabia, a heavily armed and secretive despotism which bans the practice of Christianity, stages public beheadings and sentences polite and cautious dissidents to murderous floggings. Yet we snarl and snap with righteous moral outrage at Vladimir Putin’s Russia, supposedly a unique demon among nations.
This is silly, and if we do not grow out of it we may find ourselves in a futile and dangerous war in Ukraine, no affair of ours anyway, under the delusion that it is some sort of crusade.
I should point out here that Ukraine is no angel. To say it is corrupt is like saying that the Atlantic is a bit damp. Its leader, Petro Poroshenko, threatened to impose martial law last week. A Ukrainian journalist, Ruslan Kotsaba, was detained last week for protesting against highly unpopular (and widely ignored) efforts to impose conscription, which have led to a temporary ban on foreign travel for men of military age.
Poroshenko is not in full control of the piratical ultra-nationalist militias which are doing much of the ‘pro-Western’ fighting in and around Donetsk.
In fact, I suspect he fears to make peace on sensible terms in case these people violently overthrow him – as they did to his predecessor Viktor Yanukovych.
To those who persist in making out that this is a simple conflict between good and bad, I can only say: Grow up.
There's a serious gap in the regulation of charities. What are we to do when worrying questions are asked about the running of much loved charities that do a great deal of good?
We want to be sure our money is being effectively spent. Last week, The Spectator magazine raised questions about Kids Company, run by Camila Batmanghelidjh.
The Charities Commission, which most people assume keeps an eye on such things, has limited powers and is reluctant to use them.
The best solution, for charities and the public, would surely be a new body with the power to conduct a wholly independent audit of any charity.
Now that the baseless campaign against cream and butter has at last been exposed as the rubbish it was, can we please see the end of the tyranny of skimmed and semi-skimmed milk, horrible in tea or coffee, and probably bad for you.
Amazingly, many coffee shops don’t even stock or use whole milk. Boycott them till they end this stupid policy.
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