Leninism and Lennonism aren't that far apart. Some thoughts on the Rolling Stones in Cuba.

One of the most enthralling events of the last few days was the Rolling Stones concert in Havana on Friday night.  I once went to one of these strange events , as a work assignment, in Washington DC, and thought I had been clever to take binoculars  so that I could get a good view of the caperings of Mr Jagger and Mr Richard (as people of my generation still think of him). Alas, the sound was so worryingly powerful (loud won’t do as a word, the first wave from the banks of speakers actually seemed to strike me in the chest like a light but definite blow),  that I had to spend the whole evening with my fingers jammed into my ears to preserve my hearing. So I could only take brief breaks from this to use the field glasses. If I ever go to one again (Heaven forfend) I aim to take earplugs *and* binoculars.

I reckon they are some sort of pagan celebration, a pre-Christian manifestation like football matches, in which people willingly take leave of their reason in return for feeling they are part of something greater than themselves.  In my view this something is not very nice, and I find it rather frightening. Why is it that men lose their reason in crowds so much more than they do alone?

Soccer and rock music both leave me cold, but I have been tempted by this mass emotion once or twice on big demonstrations (I recall feeling a twinge of it at Easter 1966 in Trafalgar Square, my first CND ban-the-bomb demonstration and the culmination of a couple of days of mass politics, which had included sleeping on the hard wooden floor of a church hall in Kentish Town and a lot of foot slogging and shouting). It was coming on to drizzle, there had been some ritual scuffles up towards South Africa House,  and we were singing a parody of 'Jerusalem' the only line of which I recall being '...and that the bland shall lead the bland'.  

 

But I didn’t like the loss of control involved and held that part of myself back. I hope I always will. People like me fear unreason. I’m fairly sure that in any but a very advanced society I would have been clubbed to death quite early in life, for the serious offence of not being one of the crowd. School bullying is a modern instance of this which does sometimes end in death, though usually in the form of suicide.

But I digress. In this moment in Havana, Cuba did a sad thing. It went straight from the depths of Castroism into the new neo-liberal world (I use this expression consciously and deliberately to annoy a conservative friend of mine who says that the use of the term is an invariable sign of hopeless stupidity. I simply don’t agree. In fact I think this is a very good example of why it is a useful formula. Capitalism has not defeated communism in a triumph of Christian conservatism. It has merged with Communism in a bizarre synthesis of Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping, in which it is glorious to get rich, personal morality is more or less irrelevant, the state monitors minds and regulates all, but yet takes no responsibility for anything,   and the freedom of the  market entails no freedom of thought, but there are lots of consumer goods and self-indugences to make up.

 

Cuba was admittedly never all that Christian, thanks to the great power of Santeria, a distillation of African pre-Christian faiths. But Christianity was certainly one of the things the Castro despotism strongly discouraged in its early, murderous years, when the Guevara monster was supervising mass shootings at La Cabana, and smirking at lawless show trials, and Huber Matos was, as he delicately put it, having his genitals pierced by Mr Castro’s torturers, for daring to criticise his old comrade.

And Pope Francis, interestingly, tried and failed to get the concert switched to another day because (like me) he reckoned that raucous, sexually-charged and far from reverent event such as this shouldn’t really be held on Good Friday in any part of the world where the Christian faith is widely practised.

I’ve given up trying to explain to most people why this is important. Perhaps I should mention the role of a certain rather famous raucous crowd on the first Good Friday, to give you some idea. But so few people now recall Good Friday as a solemn day of penitence and reflection (though we’re happy to respect similar days in the calendars of other faiths) that it is more or less useless to suggest that it matters. Of course this mixture of indifference and scorn is reserved for the Christian faith, the one we’re all trying so hard to escape because we’re afraid its strictures might in some way apply to us and load us with obligations we dislike.  I  wonder how the Rolling Stones management would respond to a similar request to avoid performing during a solemn commemoration in a Muslim or Hindu location.

But back to the concert and the coverage of it. There was a lot of talk about how rock music was *once* banned in Cuba, as if it was seen as subversive by the Castro despotism. In fact (the use of the word ‘once’ is a rather feeble nod to this)  this has not been the case for many years.

The Guardian, in an excellent report on this event http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/25/rolling-stones-cuba-historic-concert-diplomacy  noted ‘Very little rock music was played on the [Cuban] radio and TV until John Lennon released the politically driven Power to the People, which was approved by the Cuban government and heralded a change that continues. (Lennon now has a park named after him in Havana, as well as a statue of him sitting on a bench)’. That statue was unveiled 16 years ago.  And Wikipedia records that ‘Power to the People’ (check the lyrics for yet more evidence of John Lennon’s famously stupendous poetic talent)  was released in March 1971, 45 years ago.  

So perhaps there are other reasons why the Stones have not performed in Havana before , apart from the alleged subversiveness of rock music (which is in my view not at all subversive in Communist states, since the things it attacks, family, conservative culture, self-restraint, etc, are not things such states value). Could it be that money and logistics played a part? 

I was interested by this part of the Guardian story : ‘Funding was the next problem. With average salaries of about $20 a month, the vast majority of Cubans are unable to afford even a cut-price ticket, let alone the usual sky-high fees for a Stones gig. The answer was to stage a free concert, a throwback to the band’s reputation-making gigs at the end of the 1960s...

'...In Cuba, they have managed to put on a free concert thanks to the sponsorship of Gregory Elias, a 62-year-old entrepreneur from Curaçao.’

This is also interesting

http://www.rollingstones.com/2016/03/01/the-rolling-stones-announce-free-concert-in-cuba/

Also note in the Guardian story that Gorki Aguila, a Cuban musician not beloved by his country’s authorities because he is very rude about them, had his doubts  : ‘Although he is a fan of the Stones, he feels the British rockers are being used. “If I could speak to them, I would tell them they are disrespecting the rights of artists in this country who are not able to express ourselves,” he said. “The tyrants here are trying to portray an image of Cuba as an island of happy people. If the Rolling Stones don’t talk about what is going on here [in terms of human rights violations], then they are indirectly serving as collaborators with the Cuban tyranny.”'

If The Rolling Stones did mention political liberty during their concert, I have not seen a report of it (Has anyone? Please let me know if so). Barack Obama certainly did, most emphaticall,  mention this issue, on live Cuban TV as far as I can find out, though the state newspapers did not mention this. He also pointedly met dissidents at the US Embassy in Havana.   Just before he arrived Cuban police arrested (yet again) the ‘Women in White’ whom I once saw outside the Church of Santa Rita in Miramar, making their extraordinarily courageous peaceful demonstration against the imprisonment of their husbands for political dissent .

Cuba always locks up dissidents on what it says are normal criminal charges, and thus denies having any political prisoners. It’s an evasive lie. I remain deeply perplexed by the strange death in a supposed road accident in 2012 of the late Oswaldo Paya, an utterly principled opponent of the Castro state who pointedly sought no support from the USA and was opposed to neoliberalism. Look it up and see what you think. 

The Sunday Telegraph reported that senior officials of the Castro police state (its ‘Committees for the Defence of the Revolution’ monitor the lives and thoughts of the people in every street and block of flats)  had been present at the concert.

I’m not surprised. I imagine they’re as indifferent to Good Friday as the Stones were. That common, shared indifference to what was once the most solemn day in Christendom is an interesting symbol of the fact that the formerly Communist states seem always to go straight from Communism to the most ultra-liberal, secular form of society, well symbolised by the Stones and their hymns to self-rule.

On Missing The Point

In one of his latest comments, Mr Charles writes : ‘PH entirely misses my point. I was not arguing for the rights or wrongs of Grammar Schools. I was asking him to tell us how he would sell their reintroduction to the voting public.’

But I dealt precisely, in detail and at length with that issue. I only mentioned the possibility that he really didn’t grasp that grammar schools were better, in case this was his problem.

I do sometimes wonder if people such as Mr Charles make any serious effort to  read what I write here. For likewise Mr Charles says : ‘ If PH really believes that those of us on the left believe we have had things “our way” for so long, he is monstrously deluded. Every Labour government since Attlee has betrayed its founding principles.’

But I didn’t say the left *believed* it has had things all its own way. I said (emphasis added by me) : ‘They *have* had things their way for many years now.’

The Left’s strange ability to believe that it is still an outsider rebel faction, far from power, long after it has taken over the establishment, is one of the principal features of the argument I have been making ever since I published ‘The Abolition of Britain’ (and ever since my critics started not reading it, while thinking that they had) in 1999.

I recall particularly making fun of the fact that the horrible Fidel Castro regime in Cuba, one of the most repressive state apparatuses on earth, has an official radio station called ‘Radio Rebelde’ (Rebel Radio) . This seems to me to be a good metaphor for the Left’s difficulty in taking responsibility for, and taking satisfaction from, its accession to power. A few years ago the editor of the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme paid me the great compliment of delaying the 8.30 news Bulletin, so that I could continue my debate with Lindsey German, of the ‘Socialist Workers’ Party’, in which I tried (yet failed) to explain to Ms German that she and her comrades had much to be pleased about in modern Britain.

The fact that the Secretary of State for Defence (himself a not-very-apologetic ex-member of the pro-Soviet Communist party)  had just quoted Antonio Gramsci in an interview (and only I, of those in the studio, had realised this) seemed to me to be a good example of how it takes an ex-Bolshevik to grasp what’s going on. Things have surely changed a bit, if Britain can have an ex-Communist, Gramsci-quoting Defence Secretary.

If The Left don’t like the anti-sovereignty, liberal intervention policy of the Blair and Cameron governments, then they haven’t understood the founding principles of their own movement. Or perhaps they just don’t like the look of the ‘abolition of national borders’ when they see it being done. Actually this has often been the problem for sensitive leftists.

They will the end of a socialist, secularist, internationalised, egalitarian society – but they dislike the means necessary to bring about this Hell-on-Earth, when they find out in too much detail what they are. The charming Nikolai Bukharin was quite happy for all kinds of repression to be used against non-Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. But he was surprised and shocked when the same thing was done to him by Stalin a few years  later, in the same cause.

I can, by the way, think of few British governments of modern times which have fulfilled their manifesto commitments more fully than did the Attlee Cabinet of 1945-51. For better or worse (and often for worse) they did what they said they would do, and did it so thoroughly that Churchill himself didn’t dare reverse it in 1951. Similarly, the 1964-70 Wilson government conducted a moral and social revolution of vast dimensions. And the Blair-Brown government likewise hugely expanded taxation and the public sector, shrivelled our national independence, adopted liberal interventionism on a large scale and blanketed the country in political correctness. If, after these three eras of profound change, a leftist person thinks himself betrayed or ignored, then I can only imagine he doesn’t understand politics, economics or diplomacy has no interest in culture or morals, or is simply half asleep. But as we see here, there are such people.

One of the many things to be said for my brother Christopher is that at least he is prepared to look the consequences of his beliefs in the face, and acknowledge them as essential to what he desires.

And so he thinks (though he still hesitates over several points).

The problem with most Leftists is that they are in the grip of a dogmatic faith, and therefore cannot think. And so they must twist reality to suit the dogma, for they would be bereft if they had to accept that their dogma is wrong. That is why they all believe this self-serving fantasy that they are poor, sad excluded minority figures, when in fact their ideas dominate the country.

Mr Gibson says ; ‘I went to a comprehensive. I achieved straight A grades at A level, went to get a 1st class honours degree, Master's with distinction and a PhD. Stop generalising!’

Two points. In a devalued education system these grades and qualifications do not necessarily mean what they would have meant in a system that was not dependent on comprehensive state secondary schools, and hadn’t needed to lower its standards to conceal the decline in quality, as we have done (see John Marks, ‘The Betrayed Generation’).

Indeed, were Mr Gibson a regular reader here he might know ( see *index*!) that the devaluation of all examinations, all grades , including  A levels and University degrees is often discussed. Thus his experience proves nothing. Second, while I have no doubt that comprehensives destroy the educational hopes of many who go to them, some people have such natural gifts, and such strong backing from home, (and attend one of the comprehensives that is less bad, less disorderly and less hostile to learning than the majority) and can therefore obtain a reasonable education in spite of being forced to attend a bad school.  It is Mr Gibson who is generalising.

If Mr Wooderson can direct me to research showing that secondary moderns were worse for social mobility than comprehensives, I will examine it and comment on it. I have not heard of it. In fact I am often struck by how little is written about these schools ( some of which, by 1985, were offering A level courses and getting pupils into University) . But I would point out that secondary moderns were not *designed* to achieve social mobility. That was the job of the grammar schools.  It would seem to me that you would have to take both sorts of schools together, and compare their joint results with those of comprehensives.

On the question of private tutors, etc, I have no doubt that some parents will always use private tutors. The financial incentive for a parent in a grammar school area is huge.  Mr Anthony Blair, for instance, did so, even though his sons were at one of the best state schools in the country. I believe many other socialist politicians do the same, rather than admit that comprehensives are inferior to selective schools. This is only one of many hypocritical actions they undertake, to conceal this truth from themselves and others (a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The House I Grew Up In ‘,  featuring Toby Young’s recollections of his education, under the influence of his egalitarian anti-grammar school father Michael, provides an example of this which is both poignant and infuriating).

But if in every area of the country there were grammar places available to between 30 and 40 per cent of children, obtained not by a single exam but by (as I advocate, see *index* !) the German system of mutual agreement between parents and teachers, with second chances at 13 and even 15, I doubt if it would happen very much. I don’t think it does in Germany. Perhaps any Northern Irish readers might wish to comment on whether such tutoring is common there. I have no idea. But my guess is that, while it happens, it is not remotely comparable to what goes on in Kent and Buckinghamshire.

Tutoring was not unknown in the days of the eleven-plus, and it will not die out entirely if we reinstate a national grammar school system covering the whole of England and Wales. But the current situation where heavily oversubscribed grammar schools, within commuting distance of the capital, are overwhelmed by demand, is a result of the *abolition* of selection in neighbouring areas, not of its existence where it survives. It gives no indication of the operation of a national selective system.  This too has been discussed many times before (see *index* !).

Jesus vs Che Guevara: A man who laid down his life for us ... or a murderous ‘rock-star’ rebel? We know which the Wakefield Cross persecutors will worship this Easter

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

We now have to be pleased that a man has not been sacked from his job for putting a small cross on the dashboard of his company van. Please forgive me if my joy is muted this Eastertide. The real meaning of the Wakefield Palm Cross Affair is not specially happy.

Colin Atkinson would have been fired if it hadn’t been for the might of this newspaper – and the dogged courage of a union official, Terry Cunliffe. Many unions are keen on ‘Equality and Diversity’ codes, and wouldn’t have taken the case.

And as it’s Easter, I’d like to focus on the fact that the manager involved, Denis Doody, had a picture (perhaps I should say ‘icon’) of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara on his office wall.

Interesting. Why? Well, what we recall at Easter is the show trial and judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth. A mob is manipulated into calling for his death.

The judge, who knows he is innocent, feebly gives in. Such things are common in the real world, to this day.

The resurrection, which some of us still celebrate today, symbolises the ultimate defeat of cruel and cynical human power by a far greater force. Among other things, Easter enshrines the idea that what we do here matters somewhere else, that there is an absolute standard by which our actions are judged.

Down 20 centuries, this idea has restrained the powerful. They do not like it. Never have. Never will.

The worship of Christ, victim of a lynch mob and a crooked judge, is dangerously radical.

What about the cult of Comrade Guevara, embraced by Mr Doody? It claims to be radical too. But its devotees are the power-worshipping generation that now dominates our culture, using their slogan of ‘equality’ as a bludgeon to flatten opposition.

Guevara was an evil killer, the exact opposite of Jesus. There is no excuse at all for revering him. He personally slaughtered alleged traitors to his nasty revolution.

One of these was Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide. Guevara himself icily recounted: ‘I fired a .32 calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died.’

Later, when the rock-star rebel ‘Che’ was in power, he would lie on top of the wall at La Cabana prison, jauntily smoking a cigar while he watched the firing squads below punching bloody holes in the victims of his kangaroo trials.

Guevara’s view of justice was typical of the smug Left, which knows it is right because it knows it is good. ‘Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary.’

There you have it, rather neatly expressed – the two rival forces that compete for supremacy in what was once a Christian country – the Gospel of Che, hot with hate and splattered with other people’s blood and brains in the pursuit of a utopia that never comes, and the Gospel of Christ, a life laid down willingly for others.

Care to choose?


Did Cameron vote for Labour in 1997?

David Cameron said on Friday that it was a good thing Labour won the 1997 General Election, something that a remotely awake media would have blazoned across the sky in vast headlines, but which they buried instead.

His words, spoken in Bedford, were: ‘I think we know in 1997 the country needed change.’

Do we know that? Did it ‘need’ the ‘change’ it got – 13 years of political correctness, stupid wars, tax and spending? I hardly think so.

Generally, the Prime Minister pretends at voting time that he didn’t like the Blair-Brown junta. But if it turned out that he’d voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

Mr Cameron, in full election mode, is now banging on (as he would call it if anyone else did it) about drunkards and illegal drug abusers claiming benefits for being drunk and drugged. He doesn’t mean it. He regards types like me, who think that you can stop drinking too much if you want to, and that people take heroin because they like it, as horrible reactionary brutes.

But unless you accept that people are fully responsible for their own actions – and modish liberals like Mr Cameron spend half their lives denying this – then the logic leads - inexorably to paying them ‘incapacity benefit’.

Likewise his opportunist moaning about judges making privacy law. They do this because Parliament (under his beloved Blair) gave them the power to do it. He knows perfectly well that this is the case.

How can I begin to tell you how much this man and his party do not deserve your support? And how much they laugh at you when you give it to them?


Lewis and a drugs cover-up

The issue of psychobabble versus common sense – linked to the dangers of antidepressant drugs – is increasingly important.

If you think that people are unhappy because bad things have happened to them, and that giving them mood-altering pills is wrong, you find yourself viewed as a heartless monster.

In last week’s episode of the occasionally enjoyable TV police series Lewis, the detective, played as an increasingly ill-tempered and crusty figure by Kevin Whately, started out being hostile to a tricky pill-dispensing doctor. So did his funky underling, James Hathaway, played by Laurence Fox.

But the real message was different. Their boss told the younger man: ‘You’re supposed to be bringing Lewis out of the Stone Age, not joining him there.’

And lo, by the end, the seemingly nasty psychiatrist was revealed to be a saintly and honest character.

I find these days that even asking questions about the huge prescription of antidepressants in modern Britain gets me into trouble. Actually, that’s why I keep doing it. The twitchiness of the pill-popping faction suggests they are hiding their own grave doubts.


Mr Parris civilised? I’ve got news for you

Some of you may have enjoyed my cameo appearance on Have I Got News For You, in which I was filmed sneering lengthily at the presentation of an award to the slippery ex-MP Matthew Parris.

What got my goat was the description of Mr Parris as ‘civilised’, after he had gravely misrepresented my views on a public platform and refused to make amends for this cheap behaviour. As civilised as a rattlesnake, I’d say.


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As the Libya policy goes wrong, the nation’s brakes have failed. Where is the high-level criticism? Where the questioning? The Prime Minister was interviewed at length on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and even managed to give some (duff) racing tips but, incredibly, was not asked about Libya.

Parliament has not been recalled – did you know that only the Government can do this? The main effect of our intervention has been to prolong a civil war, and the futile carnage in Misrata is largely our fault. Having intervened supposedly to prevent a massacre in Benghazi, we may be causing one in Misrata.

The only truly humanitarian course now available is to provide an evacuation fleet to get non-combatants out of that city as soon as possible.

If it's all right for Cuba to have the death penalty, why can't we have it too?

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

I was struck last week by the treacly response given to the retirement of the grisly old monster, Fidel Castro. In so many leftist media, from the BBC to the Guardian, we were offered the usual muck about Cuba's supposedly excellent schools and health care, by people who referred to the pensioner tyrant by his Christian name, 'Fidel', as if he were a personal friend rather than one of the remotest and most inaccessible dictators in the world.

They also pretended that Cuba's 'National Assembly' was a real Parliament rather than what it is, an appointed chamber of toadies and puppets, and - though they claim to be outraged by the powerless British monarchy being handed on from father to son -  they were un-outraged by the handing over of real supreme authority from brother to brother. Vertical inheritance is all wrong. Horizontal's cool. Republicans, they're so ridiculous, can you beat them?

What would these people think of someone who referred to General Pinochet as 'Augusto', or if he had handed over power to  his  sibling?  And why - I'll come to this at length later - is Castro allowed to maintain the death penalty, and to keep his popularity with the Left , whereas if I say I'm in favour of it, I'm a pariah from one end of Islington to the other?

By the way,  I think all these pro-Castro ( sorry 'Fidel') people should be compelled, if they fall ill, to go to Cuba and - without access to hard currency - be left to endure the Cuban health service they so idiotically praise, under the same conditions suffered by the Cuban people.  I think we would then hear a lot less about Castro's marvellous health service. The main 'evidence' for this claim comes of course from the Cuban state, famous for its severe prevention of independent journalism or any other critical examination of its activities.

As for the schools, they may well be better than ours at teaching children to read (not difficult) but some, notably the Lenin High School in Havana, are a good deal less equal than others. Like its British equivalents, the London Oratory, William Ellis and the Camden High School for Girls, the Lenin High School provides the children of a leftist elite with a far better education than they might get elsewhere. Everyone in Havana knows this. Why doesn't the Guardian know it? Or the BBC?

Anyway, the problem with being educated in Cuba is that, once you've been educated,  there's nothing to read except the works of K. Marx and V.Lenin, or of course the collected speeches of F.Castro and E.Guevara. - and the world's worst and most absurdly-titled newspaper 'Granma'. (I'll explain later how this journal gets its ludicrous name).

But back to the death penalty. The countries which wield this most keenly these days are all left-wing states. The People's Republic of China, of course, tops the world execution league. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is also quite a keen execution state - supposedly 'corrupt' businessmen have been shot in public, with lemons stuffed in their mouths to stop them screaming.

And then there's Cuba. The jolly, liberal fun revolution of 1959, with all those glamorously-bearded young men in fatigues in charge, began with howling show trials (the few not-guilty verdicts reversed on a whim by the leader himself) and much spraying of bullets, screaming and splattering of blood, a lot of it ordered by the picturesque Ernesto Guevara. The bullet-pocks from the firing squads can still be inspected (I have done so) in the moat of the La Cabana fortress, now a tourist site but until recently a squalid prison. Total figures for those judicially murdered by  the Castro terror are not available, but the distinguished Historian Hugh Thomas has put the figure (perhaps modestly) at 5,000.

More recent executions have been colder, more secret and even more sinister. The 1989 shooting of General Arnaldo Ochoa, after a largely secret trial, ostensibly for alleged drug trafficking, is generally thought in Cuba to have been the despotic snuffing out of a dangerous rival who might have defected. Ochoa, a former ' hero of the revolution,  technically faced a maximum of 20 years in prison for his crime. But in lawless Cuba, where 'Fidel' was all-powerful, Ochoa went to the firing squad anyway. It was typical of Cuba that a political case should have been dressed up as a criminal one, so that Castro could continue to pretend that he has no political prisoners. Opponents of the regime are almost invariably persecuted for imagined or fanciful violations of the criminal code.

So why do the Left swallow this camel,  praising and sucking up to and romanticising this sordid despotism, and ignoring its habit of killing opponents, but strain at the gnat of hanging  a few heinous murderers here in Britain?

It's all from the same root - the Left's worship of the supposedly all-benevolent state which they control, or hope to control. Get in the way of that, and you can be liquidated. It is the supreme law, and you will be an expendable  casualty in a wider war. In fact, most socialists once they have supreme power, happily reintroduce the death penalties they campaigned against when they were powerless.

When I pointed out in my 'Brief History of Crime' that the 1930s English barrister D.N.Pritt, a prominent campaigner against the death penalty was a leading apologist for Stalin's show trials ( which always ended in death for the accused), I drew upon myself the livid rage of leftist critics. How dare I suggest an inconsistency in the Left on the basis of this horrible man? Yet when it comes to the Stalins of today, the Pritts of today still suffer from the same doublethink. You can work out who I'm getting at.

And now, for those of you faced with arguments at work or in the pub about the death penalty, I shall now provide a Question and Answer guide to the case for hanging.

Q. Well, I would be in favour of the death penalty, but I am worried about innocent people being hanged. Doesn't that fear make it impossible to have a death penalty?

A. No. It is a perfectly good argument for taking a huge amount of trouble to ensure that innocents are not executed. It is also a good argument for bringing back some sort of property or education qualification for juries, and abolishing majority verdicts. Nobody should be hanged except on a unanimous verdict of mature and educated people. But the world isn't perfect, and we don't let this concern for the innocent stand in the way of lots of other policies, many of them supported by the very people who raise this objection to execution.

For instance, every three years,  two people are killed by convicted murderers released early from prison. These victims are innocent. In that case, the liberals who advance this argument would have to accept that every convicted murderer should be locked up for life without the chance of parole so as to avoid the risk to the innocent. But they don't believe this. So where's their concern for innocent death now? Then again, most people supported the Kosovo war and still do (especially liberals). But when we bombed Serbia, we knew that innocents were bound to die, and they duly did die - including the make-up lady at the Belgrade TV station. That didn't stop these liberal leftists, who oppose hanging guilty murderers, from supporting it, and continuing to support it after those deaths had taken place.

Not a liberal leftist? Then there's our mad transport policy which just happens to suit quite a lot of us down to the ground, of relying so heavily on motor cars that we require an incredibly feeble driving test and allow tens of thousands of unskilled people to drive cars at a far too young age. We know from experience that this will result, every year , in at least 3,000 deaths. Yet we do nothing.

Our failure to act, in the knowledge that this failure will lead to those deaths, is deliberate, conscious self-interested negligence, morally equivalent to deliberate proxy killing for personal advantage (as offered by Harry Lime to Holly Martins in the Big Wheel in 'The Third Man'). It is also the reason why the courts don't adequately punish those who kill while driving. We're all conscious that driving isn't really safe, that we impose far too much responsibility on drivers in a  fundamentally dangerous system, and that it could so easily have been us who did the killing. Personally I think this intolerable carnage is a much more urgent problem in our society than the faint hypothetical risk of hanging someone for a murder he didn't commit. So is the growing level both of homicide itself, and of violence that would be homicidal were it not for our superb emergency surgeons, who nightly drag back dozens from the lip of the grave.

People dislike being told this because it is absolutely true and very harrowing.  These deaths are all of innocent people. If the fear of killing an innocent person really was an overwhelming veto on a public policy, then the driving test would have to made so difficult that most of us could never pass it, speed limits would have to be lower than they are now,  and private car ownership restricted to a tiny few highly-skilled persons.

The truth is that the fear of killing innocents is not a reason to abolish or ban capital punishment.  If it were, we'd have to abolish the armed services and be forced to ride bicycles. It's an excuse for people not to face up to their responsibilities.

Q. How can you express moral disapproval of killing, by killing someone else?

A. It is not killing we are trying to express loathing for.  It is murder. All of us, except absolute pacifists, accept that killing is sometimes justified. In simple self-defence, the case is easy. In defensive war, in which aggressive actions are permitted, less straightforward but still acceptable to most of us. And I think quite a few of us would be ready to forgive and condone in advance an assassination of an aggressive tyrant before he could embark on war. So we license armed forces to shoot back at our attackers, or to attack our attackers in retaliation or deterrence.

What we are disapproving of is murder ( the Commandment is not, as so often said 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' but 'Thou Shalt do no Murder'). This remember, is the deliberate, premeditated, merciless (and often prolonged and physically cruel in the extreme)killing of an innocent person, generally for the personal gain of the murderer. There is no comparison between such an action and the lawful, swift  execution of a guilty person, after a fair trial with presumption of innocence, the possibility of appeal and of reprieve. 

Absolute pacifists are at least consistent, but if they had their way we'd be in a German empire where innocent people were being executed all the time with gas-chambers, guillotines and piano-wire, and worse. So their consistency doesn't offer much of a way out.

Q. But deterrence doesn't work. Most states in the USA have the death penalty and the murder rate is often higher there than in states that don't have it.

A. First of all, this is not the USA, a country with far higher levels of violence(until recently anyway) than we have had for centuries. Comparisons between the two countries need to be made with great care. Secondly, no US state really has the death penalty. Even Texas, which comes closest, still fails to execute the majority of its convicted murderers, who fester for decades on death row while conscience-stricken liberals drag out their appeals to the crack of doom.Most states which formally have the penalty on their books seldom or never apply it.

The 1949 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (which was inconclusive on deterrence and most other things) pointed out that deterrence was very hard to establish. Countries which abolish the death penalty usually do so after a long period of suspension, or when it is hardly used, or when the law is unclear. So the murder rates before and after the formal date of abolition often tell us very little. In Britain, this is also the case. The death penalty had its teeth drawn in 1957 and the annual number of executions in the final years of capital punishment was small. So the penalty's official date of abolition, 1965, is misleading. There's another feature of this I'll turn to later.

Then there is the difficulty of classifying murder. The 1957 Act introduced a category of 'manslaughter due to diminished responsibility' which got you off the death penalty. And so, for the eight years after 1957, this category of homicide grew quite sharply. Some suspect that these are cases which would have been murders before 1957. If that is so, as we shall see, then it makes quite a lot of difference.  Since then, it has not been so important, since the difference between a manslaughter sentence and the so-called 'life' sentences given for murder is no longer as stark as the old distinction between a prison sentence or an appointment with Mr Albert Pierrepoint on the scaffold.

Nowadays, it is suspected (especially by the relatives of victims who write to me about this complaining) that quite a lot of cases which would once have been prosecuted as murder are now prosecuted as manslaughter so as to get a quicker, easier conviction.

So the homicide statistics offer a rather wobbly idea of what is going on. Skip this if you want, but it is important. The blurred categories might suggest one thing, while actually saying another. Even so, here are some samples.In 1956, when the death penalty was still pretty serious, there were 94 convictions for homicide in England and Wales (all future figures refer to England and Wales unless otherwise stated). Of these, 11 were for infanticide, 51 for manslaughter and 32 for murder. In 1958, after the softening of the law, there were 113 homicide convictions - 10 infanticides, 48 manslaughters, 25 for manslaughter with 'diminished responsibility' and 30 for murder. By 1964 there were 170 homicide convictions - 12 infanticides, 73 manslaughters, 41 manslaughters due to 'diminished responsibility' , 44 murders. So, in eight years, a rise in homicide from 94 to 170,  quite substantial. But those convicted for murder had risen only from 32 to 44, which hardly seems significant at all. What was really going on here could only be established by getting out the trial records. But it is at least possible that, by reclassifying and downgrading certain homicides, the authorities had made things look a good deal better than they were. Remember, these are convictions, not totals of offences committed.

Sorry, more statistics here. In 1966, immediately after formal abolition, there were 254 homicide convictions, 72 of them for murder. In 1975, 377 homicide convictions, 107 for murder. In 1985, 441 manslaughter convictions, 173 for murder. In 2004, there were 648 homicide convictions - including 361 murders, 265 ordinary manslaughters and 22 'diminished responsibilities'. Interestingly, more people were convicted of manslaughter (265) than were charged with it (137) and none of those convicted of 'diminished responsibility'  (22) were charged with it . Many murder prosecutions failed (759 were proceeded against).

The increasingly important charge of 'attempted murder' has also run into trouble. In 2004 417 were proceeded against, and 96 convicted. Prosecutions for wounding or other acts endangering life was even more troublesome, with 7,054 proceeded against and 1,897 convicted. These figures, again,. are for charges and convictions rather than instances of the offence, which in both cases is considerably higher. Offences of wounding etc are now close to the 19,000 mark each year, around triple the total for 30 years ago.

And many of these cases would have been murders, if we still had the medical techniques of 1965. Again, this makes direct 'before ' and 'after' comparisons, required for a conclusive case for or against deterrence. hard. And we must also remember the general moral decline that has accompanied the weakening of the law, and may have been encouraged by it. If you remove the keystone of an arch, many other stones, often quite far away in the structure, will loosen or fall.

Finally, a little historical curiosity which I personally find fascinating. Some American researchers suggest that the sort of murder which has increased since the death penalty in the USA was effectively abolished  is so-called 'stranger' murder, for example, the killing of a woman by her rapist , or of a petrol station attendant by the man who has robbed him. The calculation ( and criminals do calculate)  is simple. "If I leave this person alive, she or he can testify against me, and I could go to jail for a very long time. If I kill him or her, then there will be no witness and I will probably get away with it entirely. And even if I am convicted of murder, all that will happen is jail time." Bang.

So, the death penalty may actually prevent or deter violent crimes which might otherwise end in an opportunist killing. It is said that British bank-robbers, before 1957, would search each other for weapons in case one of them killed, and they all swung - which was then the rule.And Colin Greenwood, a former police officer and expert on Gun Crime, produces the following interesting , in fact gripping fact. In both 1948 and 1956, the death penalty was suspended in this country while Parliament debated its future. During both periods of suspension, armed and violent offences rose sharply. After the 1948 attempt to abolish hanging failed ( Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin being among the Labour MPs who voted to keep it), they fell sharply. After 1956, when the law was weakened, they fell back again, but not so sharply. In 1964, they rose again, and have been doing so ever since.

I think this, taken together,  is strong evidence for a deterrent effect. I am not talking about total deterrence - some crimes could never be deterred - but partial and significant, potentially lifesaving. How many innocents have died, or been horribly maimed,  because those who accept the salaries and perks of office are not prepared to assume its hard duties, and wield the civil sword?And yet opponents of the death penalty whimper on about the minuscule danger of hanging the wrong person.

Q. Surely revenge has no part in a civilised society?
A.How true, and how right. One of the purposes of stern penalties is to prevent revenge by making it clear that the law has real teeth. But a toothless law will lead to the return of revenge among us.  The bargain we strike with our rulers is that we give up the right to personal vengeance, and the endless blood-feuds that follow it.  And in return, we ask our rulers to wield a stern law, dealing with wrongdoing in such a way as to drive home the moral lesson that no evil deed goes unpunished. It's a simple contract.                                                                                                                                      Civilised, law-governed societies rest on it, but our political class prefer not to fulfil it because they haven't the moral guts to take responsibility for sending a murderer to his death. It is this gutlessness among politicians, more than anything else, that has led to the abolition of the death penalty. They won't take the responsibility. This cannot be said often enough. The result is that responsibility is increasingly handed over to an unofficially armed police force, which shoots people without trial, appeal or the possibility of reprieve, and often gets it wrong. Watch the numbers grow.

But that's only the beginning. If ( as I fear) respect for the criminal justice system continues to dwindle especially among the abandoned honest poor, we can expect to see an increase of vigilante private 'justice', even lynch-mobs. What the left-liberals don't seem to grasp is that if they strangle justice, revenge is what they will get. And then, rather too late, they will be able to tell the difference between the two. I wish there was some other way to explain it to them.

*Oh, yes, and the reason why the Cuban Communist paper is called 'Granma' is that this was the name of the boat in which Castro and his friends arrived in Cuba for their second attempt to overthrow Batista. It is a smallish motorcruiser, whose original owner had named it in hour of his grandmother.  I don't think Castro or his comrades ever realised that was what the name meant.

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The Right Wing Castro and why I don't defend him

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

I don't defend Augusto Pinochet, the late dictator of Chile. He was a wicked man who tortured and murdered his opponents and - in a law-governed, constitutional democracy - chose illegal and undemocratic methods. Whatever good he may have done, which is in any case open to serious question, does not excuse these unforgiveable actions. So why won't the Left say the same simple thing about Pinochet's socialist twin, the Cuban torturer and mass murderer Fidel Castro?

As I bicycled past Hyde Park Corner the other day, I was upbraided by another cyclist who said I was unfair about Cuba and - when I called him a sucker for the regime - absurdly accused me of being a toady of the British 'regime'. (So far as I could work out before the lights changed, this was because, despite being as rude as I can be about our major political parties, critical of the Queen and Prince Charles, I support the institution of monarchy. I really didn't have the whole afternoon to spare to put him right about this).

He really couldn't grasp the simple point that, whatever he might believe about Castro's alleged (and dubious) achievements in health and education - the evidence for which comes mainly from Cuban official statistics which cannot be independently checked - Castro is a monster.

He has reversed the verdicts of courts when he didn't like them, so as to punish opponents. He imprisoned his old comrade Huber Matos, who just wanted to go home quietly. His regime began with show trials and mass shootings and continued with repression and censorship and intolerance, which have gone on ever since. For a long period he persecuted homosexuals. He has arranged to be succeeded by his brother, which the left normally would denounce as a sort of sideways hereditary monarchy. His prisons are a disgrace. Torture is used. Interestingly, Pinochet on occasion put in a good word for Castro, and Castro was - reasonably - perturbed when Pinochet was arrested, seeing this as a danger to himself.

The honest thing, whatever your politics, is to condemn them both. I do. What about you?

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