From a Delayed Train - Identity Cards, Bishops and Kenneth Clarke

I must apologize to readers for the absence of new postings here today. I was caught in a typical post-privatization jam-up on the railways this morning (and no it's not rose-tinted glasses.There simply was not so much of this in the days of BR). And then I had a speaking engagement at a school in Watford, so all the hours I had meant to spend blogging were eaten up by waiting in the hope the jam would clear, followed by lengthy re-routing.

 

During a brief period of wi-fi, I managed to write a little on the fiddly keyboard of a portable device:

 

A few responses. Passports and driving licences are not identity cards, unless we allow them to be used as such. Each of these documents is issued for a specific purpose. it is quite possible to have neither and survive quite well.  nobody has any business asking to see them unless you are driving a car or travelling abroad. You are not required to carry them. Even a driving licence does not have to be produced on the spot, but can be taken - on police request - to a police station within a reasonable time.


Personally I have always refused requests from hotels or traders to produce a passport when registering or paying. They have no legal right to request this and if everyone simply says 'no' then it cannot be imposed. The trouble is, of course! that so many people are ready to be pushed around in this way.

It is this misguided meekness that has allowed many of the attacks on our liberty which we have endured during the last century . World War One was the point at which the state in England began to recover powers it had lost in the previous four centuries, simply because states naturally do this, as plants grow towards the light. The supposedly unanswerable pretext of national peril always seems to work, perhaps because the mass media are always so horribly willing to go along with it.

Patriotism, which once included a pride in our unique freedom, was perverted to support the extinction of freedom. The interesting process by which our right to bear arms was whittled away by bureaucratic action is described in my book 'A Brief History of Crime'. The chapter involved was deemed so shocking that I removed it from the book's paperback incarnation, 'The Abolition of Liberty'. I learned during that experience that many modern men and women find actual human liberty too gamey and strong-flavoured for their sensitive taste-buds. I quite understand this. Freedom *is* frightening, and people often don't like it as much as they claim to do - the same is even more true of freedom of speech, hated in fact by millions.

The deepest difficulty for friends of liberty is in fact the attitude of people such as Mr 'Bunker', who can see nothing wrong in being required by the state to 'prove ' who they are.  Of course, the possession of state-issued documents proves nothing of the kind. States can be defrauded and often are. All such people are doing is conceding to the state a weird monopoly on identity, and allowing it to take a power which it ought not to have. If people such as Mr 'Bunker' subscribed to private organisations which offered to provide documents giving their names, addresses, personal details and pictures, it wouldn't  trouble me , as long as such things were entirely voluntary and conferred no advantage. The truth is that we have quite enough ways in which commercial organisations can make reasonable checks on our ability to pay (some would say too many) and anything else really needs to be left to the criminal law. 

....

But it wasn't a day for lengthy reflections on assisted dying, cabinet reshuffles, women Bishops or other subjects I might have got round to.  They'll have to wait (though I would stress once again that the supporters of women Bishops could have had their way *years* ago, had thye been ready to be kinder to those who oppose the idea. the general impression given by media coverage, that the delay is caued by obdurate traditionaists, is misrepresentation. I should also record my regret at the departure of Ken Clarke form the government. I do not agree with Mr Clarke about anything much, but he represents a strand of opinion which deserves a hearing, and he is a human being with a sense of proportion and an understanding of real life.

 

Can I ask readers not to moan about those posts which draw readers' attention to my new book? I have absolutely no shame about doing this - there is no point in a book if nobody reads it, it is in my view a very good book,  and my experience is that you have to keep on adrawing people's attention to something again and again before most people will even notice it. I am also quite enitled to point out that I have difficuties in getting such material published not least to deal with the incessant moans of the other lot, who say annoyingly that they won't buy it until it's in hard covers, which will be at about the same time we get Middle East Peace. Guys, I published it as an e-book only after I was sure it was the only way to do so. The only tiny chance of a three-dimensional book would come if it broke all records as an e-book, which won't happen if people hold off from buying it. A paradox, but there you are. So many true things are paradoxes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still Useless After All These Years - the Tory Party

More than five years ago I summed up the case against the Tory Party as it then was. The indictment is to be found here and is still, in many ways, valid:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/the-tories-are-.html

 

But the events of the past few weeks have not only confirmed my view, but taken us into a new stage in British politics.  So I will now re-examine the case against the Tories, and reinforce it.

Among matters I will discuss are :

The Draft Bill on a referendum , about which there is so much fuss

http://www.conservatives.com/Policy/Issues/~/media/Files/Downloadable%20Files/Draft_Referendum_Bill.ashx

 

Those who read this will see that every single contentious matter (timing, whether the result is binding, rules on broadcasting and advertising spending, and on the distribution of factional manifestoes to voters,  freedom of front benches to campaign etc etc etc) has been left to be defined at the time, bad in any case, but even worse when the time will never come. Who is fooled by this stuff?

 

A e-mail allegedly from David Cameron, sent out by Tory headquarters to journalists including me (For my own amusement I have added some emphases) :

 

‘In January, I set out our party’s position on Europe. I made clear that the EU needed fundamental, far reaching change - and that Britain would lead the way in negotiating that reform.

I also promised an In-Out referendum once those negotiations were complete, and at any event by the end of 2017. That's the right time to have a vote - it is wrong to ask people whether to stay or go before we have had a chance to put the relationship right.

But make no mistake - my commitment to a referendum is absolute. If I am Prime Minister after the next election, there will be an In-Out referendum. No ifs, no buts. And before the 2015 election, we will do everything we can to make it the law.

That’s why today the Conservative Party is publishing a draft bill that would legislate for a referendum by the end of 2017. We understand that we are in a Coalition government - but we are going to examine every opportunity to bring it before Parliament and try to get it on the statute book.

For too long the British people have had no say about their future in Europe. I am absolutely determined to put that right. Our action today is further proof we’re serious.’  

 

It does make me laugh that even as he pledges no ifs and no buts, the Prime Minister inserts the biggest if he can find in the shops,  ‘If I am Prime Minister after the next election’ . And he begins with a ‘but’ the absurd idea that a minority party can get its own Referendum Bill on to the statute book.

 

And a recent ICM poll, published by the Guardian (but, oddly enough, not picked up much by other media, which I feel it should have been, given its very striking data), showing the Tories at 28%, an extraordinarily low level of support at this stage in a parliament for a party which carries on as if it is the next government.

 

The complete chart was

 

Con 28% (-4)
Lab 34% (-4)
LD 11% (-4)
UKIP 18% (+9)
BNP 4% (+3)
SNP/PC 3% (nc)
Other 0% (-1)

 

 

This was the lowest Tory share since 2002, when Iain Duncan Smith was leader,  and also a record showing for ‘other’ parties of 27%, almost equalling the Tory total. This distressingly includes 4% from the BNP, a surge which can please no civilised person .

 

If I have read the figures..

 

http://www.icmresearch.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/05/2013_may_guardian_poll.pdf

 

..aright, the raw data are even more striking. Out of 1001 people polled, 104 said they would not vote, 222 said they didn’t know how they would vote, and 102 refused to say. Thus, 42% of those polled expressed no party preference.

 

Just 152 (15%) said they’d vote Tory, 210 (21%)  Labour and 109 (11%) UKIP. The raw BNP figure, reassuringly, was 22 people,  (2%)

 

The none-of-the-above party which before 2010 tended to be around 36%, has plainly grown quite sharply, to 42%. How long before it has the majority? . The UKIP vote seems to me to be  mainly Tory defectors and predominantly older people,   but with a significant number of Labour dissidents now joining in. I suspect Labour would do worse, but for a flow of deserters from the Liberal Democrats back into their old Labour-voting habits.

Tory support is weakest among the 18-24 age-group, at a pitiful 9%, though interestingly it is no better among the old (17%) than it is in the 35-64 age range. I had always assumed that Tory strength was concentrated in the over-70s. Maybe they have broken with the Tories in larger numbers than other age groups. UKIP is significantly stronger in the 65+ age group.

 

Now, to revisit days, weeks , months and years gone by – my article of October 2007. I said then that we had a unique opportunity to remake British politics. The chances are not quite so clear-cut now, as the Try Party cannot be despatched to its reward with a single blow, as I think could have happened had it been treated as it so richly deserves back in May 2010.

 

The principal difficulty we have now with habitual Tories is that they have fooled themselves into thinking that their party did in fact win the 2015 election, when it didn’t.

 

This explains their frequent empurpled rage when their desires are frustrated, on the grounds that the Tories are in Coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Of course, anyone who understands the Tory party knows that these desires , on the EU, on immigration, on crime and punishment and on education, etc, etc,  would be frustrated anyway. The Tory party doesn’t actually need the Liberal Democrats to help it take the wrong view on all these subjects. It takes it anyway. How could it be otherwise, when its chief brains are David Willetts,  Oliver Letwin and the Right Honourable the Lord (Michael) Heseltine, Companion of Honour?

 

So we have a double delusion here. One, that the Tories can still win an election, and have done so, when they can’t, and haven’t. Two, that the feebleness of Tory policies is attributable to the wicked Liberal Democrats, rather than to the Tory party’s own conscious and deliberate choices of policies and leaders.

 

Thus the argument can still seriously be advanced that votes for UKIP might prevent a Tory victory at the next election.  You cannot prevent something that isn’t going to happen, and can’t happen. Thus voting for UKIP will have no effect at all on the Tory prospects of forming a majority government. But millions still believe that it might, and may be restrained from taking a perfectly reasonable step, when 2015 comes, by this absurd fantasy.

 

Next, the fantasy can be maintained that, if there *were* such a Tory majority government under David Cameron, it would be significantly different from the Coalition. It wouldn’t be. It might even be worse, given the grave shortage of talent and intelligence among Tory MPs.  It just wouldn’t have so many excuses. But since it couldn’t exist, that’s of no interest.

 

Thus, the people who have it in their power to demolish the Tory Party and clear the way for real change are heavily restrained by commonly believed falsehoods, which cloud their minds and restrict their willingness to act decisively in their own interest.

 

Even so, UKIP's success has attracted success, and will attract more success before it begins to falter in the year before the general election. And, as I have mentioned before, the frenzied personal attack on Gordon Brown, which shored up the sagging Tory vote in 2010, cannot be repeated. Much of the loathing then directed at Mr Brown is beginning to turn towards Mr Cameron himself, who is increasingly seen to have portrayed himself as something he was not.  Without the Gordon Brown weapon, the Tories will struggle to keep the seats they have, especially since Labour is now aware of the damage which mass immigration has done to its cause and , while it won’t undo the damage, it is prepared to fight dirty on that topic if needs be. Gillian Duffy (referred to by Mr Brown as a ’bigoted woman’ after he met her on his campaign trail, because of her perfectly reasonable views on immigration and welfare benefits)  will be wooed, not insulted, in the next Labour campaign. They’re already working on it.

 

I would like to reproduce here what I wrote in 2007:

‘Even if the Tories could win an election (I speculate on this unlikely event at greater length because so many people now seem to believe that this is the case), what would that mean? I predict a government very similar to that of John Major, only even more torn by its unhealable division over the EU.  People forget now, but Major's government was one of political correctness, weakness on crime, failure on education, high taxes and conflict over the EU.

 

‘It is claimed that the Tories are now more anti-EU. In truth, this is not really the case. Many Tories have shifted from passive acceptance of the EU to what is called 'Euroscepticism', an unrealistic belief that, while the EU is bad for Britain, it is possible for us to negotiate ourselves a safe corner within it, which does not threaten our independence and laws, or the control of our borders. This 'in Europe but not run by Europe' view simply doesn't stand up to practical politics. The EU demands of its members a constant and accelerating surrender of national independence. If you win a small battle, you will rapidly find that the EU tries another attack from a different direction to achieve the same end. Don't like the Euro? How about a constitution? The end result, the whittling away of sovereignty, is the same. Why shouldn't it be? Ever-closer union is the EU's stated purpose.

In practice, those who are honestly in favour of EU membership and all that it entails, or honestly against it (the only two honourable positions in this debate) still cannot possibly agree - and it cannot be long, in the nature of the EU, before any government is confronted with the choice of continued reduction of national independence, or departure. There is no doubt which option Mr Cameron would choose.’

 

In what way was I wrong? Taxes are in fact rising, though it has been uncontroversial because the opposition would have raised them just as fast. It has been done largely by stealth methods the extension of the ‘higher rate’ to modest earners, the increasing load on council tax, the savings tax through ‘inflation’, which reduces the government debt while shrivelling our savings, and of course the huge green taxes, levied through household bills,  funding the mad dash for wind power.

 

I’d also like to reproduce (in full, as, though I was righter than any other prophet,  I was not perfectly right) my predictions for the last election, made two and a half years before it took place:

 

‘The result of the next election is already decided - the Left will be in office, either with a Labour majority, or a Lib-Lab pact, or a Lib-Con pact, or a Tory government in thrall to left-wing ideas. No radical change, on the areas which Tory voters care about most, will take place.

But it is far more likely that it will be either a Labour government or a Lab-Lib pact.’

 

I wish, in retrospect, that I had left out the most far-fetched of those options,  a Tory government in thrall to left-wing ideas.  It wasn’t really possible then (not that such a thing would have been desirable from any rational point of view) , and is even less possible now.  What remains wholly unthinkable is a conservative Tory government, a contradiction in terms.

 

The last line, actually, is now a better prediction for 2015. I can’t presently see much likelihood of a Labour majority, but it’s not wholly impossible, especially if the Coalition stays together and the Lib Dems are dragged beneath the waves by the suction, as the Tory Titanic gurgles and bubbles towards the ocean bed, with Dan Hannan at the prow and Ken Clarke at the stern.   

Fruitcakes and closet racists? Cameron's talking about YOU!

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

It is now just a matter of time before the Tory Party dies. This is not a moment too soon. For far too long this futile and fraudulent body has stolen the votes of conservative patriots.

For far too long Tory leaders have secretly despised their own supporters.

When David Cameron described UKIP voters as ‘fruitcakes and closet racists’, he was actually giving his true opinion of the men and women who have kept his own party alive.

Since then, he has shown by his every action that he loathes what is left of conservative Britain, and that none of his promises is worth anything.

If there is ever a monument to him, it should be made of cast-iron, brittle and prone to rust away, like his broken pledges.

Now that Tory voters have at last realised that he hates them, they are deserting him.

Some may come back, in the vain belief that the Tories can win the next General Election – or indeed, any General Election, ever again. But plenty more are gone for good.

As I wrote here three years ago: ‘I beg and plead with you not to fall for the shimmering, greasy, cynical fraud which is the Cameron project. You will hate yourself for it in time if you do.’

Of his various promises, I wrote: ‘These “guarantees” fly from his lips whenever he needs to please a crowd, but they are less valuable than Greek junk bonds.’

At that time, shockingly biased and misleading media reporting had suggested falsely that the Tories might win the 2010 Election. Anyone who read the actual poll figures knew they hadn’t a hope.

And a savage campaign of personal denigration had been directed against Gordon Brown, as a substitute for anything resembling a conservative manifesto.

So there was some excuse for continuing to vote Tory. Now there is none. Tory stalwarts have not voted for UKIP because they love Nigel Farage – I think he is a charming charlatan myself, and his party a rickety jalopy bolted together in a garden shed. They have voted UKIP to punish the Tories for many years of betrayal and deceit.

But it goes much deeper than that. Tory voters were, until now, deeply loyal. They thought it was part of their creed. They would flock to the colours at the trumpet’s call, however little they liked it, because it was their duty.

But the Tory leaders have been disloyal to their rank and file, and that old, deep magic has finally failed. That is why the Tories are done for. Once loyalty is gone, it is all too easy to see that the party machine is wretched, decrepit, exhausted and broke; and to see that the party leadership is dishonest, cynical and careerist.

I do not know how many elections it will take, but the chance will soon be here to build something much better. Let us hope we take it, for if we do not save ourselves, nobody else will do it for us.

I wouldn't dare to hug lovely Diana

Where does reasonable feminism stop, and where do mad man-hating wimmin’s rights begin? The

Still-lovely Diana Rigg says the frontier runs somewhere between putting your arm round a woman (Dame Diana seems to think this is just about OK, though dangerous) and patting her bottom, for which she recommends a slap.

I wouldn’t dare attempt either without prior written permission. But I’ve never understood why a sensible equality, in education, property, work and elsewhere, should stop men giving up their seats or opening doors to women. To me it’s so deep it feels like an instinct, and it hurts nobody.

Taxes need rescuing from their sad fate

I had hoped that mine would be the only household in the country to be getting child benefit, a free bus pass and winter fuel allowance all at the same time.

Alas, we have had to give up the child benefit, so it will never come to pass. But I am not at all ashamed of seeking to get every penny I can back from the State.

I regard taxes as an absolute legal duty, but a cold one. I certainly don’t regard them as a moral obligation. Most of the money I have given the State (for which they have never once said ‘thank you’) is spent on things I don’t like.

There are the bad schools, whose primary purpose is to force compulsory equality down our throats, with education a very poor second. There are the increasingly frightening hospitals, whose main job is to employ people.

There are the motorways I hate, and the European Union I want to leave, and the police who won’t do the job we pay them for. And there are the subsidies for fatherless families which condemn so many children to blighted lives.

So if I can rescue any of my money from these purposes, I am glad. For me, it isn’t a free bus-ride, or a free prescription, or a winter fuel allowance. It is unhappy, abused money, rescued from a sad fate and given a good home.

I knew when I first heard of ‘restorative justice’ that it was a scam of some kind. Since then, its semi-secret onward march has been rapid and decisive.

As we discovered last week when it was revealed 34,000 offenders were dealt with using ‘community resolutions’, it means that quite severe violence now goes completely unpunished.

What reformers need to understand is that before we had criminal law, we had blood-feuds and chaos. A grudging insincere apology or a trivial payment are no substitute for justice.

Who really wants to privatise the Royal Mail? Who, after BT, the private water companies and the private power companies, thinks it will be better as a result?

It can only be done because we, the taxpayers, have taken on the Post Office pension fund. And how can the company be both private and Royal? Dogma once again overrides common sense.

Given that the police now seem to be mainly concerned with crimes (or alleged crimes) committed 40 or more years ago, can we expect, around 2053, a great nationwide mass arrest of elderly, white-haired muggers, burglars, shoplifters, vandals and GBH merchants?

I do wonder just how many of the planned ‘tough’ prison rule changes will actually happen. I’ve been studying the summary, issued by the ‘Ministry of Justice’, and parts of it seem a bit vague. I think we should monitor it carefully once it comes into force, remembering that it was announced in  an election week.

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

Should We Trust Official Crime Figures?

What are we to make of the following facts ?

The week began with leaked figures apparently showing that ‘Recorded crime fell by at least 10% in 19 out of 43 force areas in England and Wales while budgets were cut by an average of just under 10%.’

 

Later came the revelation that the Prison population in England and Wales actually fell during last year – dropping by 2,869 to 83,909. Don’t get too excited The prison population is still very, very high( in 1950-51 it was 20,474, in 1960-61 it was 27,099, in 1970 it was 39,028, in 1980 it was 42,300, in 1990 it was 45,636 and in 1999 it was 64,770, passing 70,000 for the first time only in 2002).

 

But under Kenneth Clarke there is no doubt that, by some means or other, a way has been found to halt and even reverse the rise. The least likely explanation for this, especially under Mr Clarke, must be a tougher and more punitive justice system scaring wrongdoers back on to the path of righteousness.  So either crime really is falling (a comically unlikely solution to the riddle) or a way has been found of a) ignoring more crimes b) not sending people to prison for offences which would formerly have merited prison sentences and c) letting more people out of prison more quickly. (Later addition**By the way, I don't myself believe that Mr Clarke's departure and replacemnt will make much difference. His successor, Chris Grayling, posed as a tough guy in a newspaper interview, but the Coalition and the Treasury together - as he well knows - are on Mr Clarke's side. So are the civil servants and the bureaucracy of the Criminal Justice system. So the Clarke policy will continue**).

 

One hint came when, on Thursday 3^rd January)the ‘Sun’ newspaper revealed on page 2 (where important stories are put, which editors do not regard as exciting) that one in nine murderers is freed from prison after serving fewer than ten years of a life sentence. The figures, obtained by the genuinely conservative MP Philip Davies , showed that 275 convicted murderers were released during 2010 and 2011. Of these, 32 served fewer than ten years. Four served fewer than eight years, seven served fewer than nine. It is also the case that 35 people,  who had been convicted of homicide, killed again after being released, surely the indefensible deaths of innocents caused by deliberate state action.

 

Will those who oppose the death penalty,   because they are on principle unwilling to risk using it because there are a small number of wrongful executions, abide by the same principle, and also oppose the release of any convicted killers, lest they kill again? No, I thought not. Understandable, but in that case their objection is not a principle, it’s an excuse behind which they hide their real beliefs.

I might point out here that a huge amount of prison space is taken up by murderers serving ‘life’ sentences. Unlike many ordinary criminals, who (after 15 or so crimes) then start serving very short repeated sentences, murderers must by law be kept inside for comparatively long periods. I believe at least one prison in the South of England is largely devoted to housing such prisoners, many of whom are regarded as unlikely to reoffend.

 

 

The Ministry of Justice says that the *average* time served by convicted murders is now 16 years. I would stress here that many crimes which would once have been treated as murder are now tried as manslaughter in the courts, in order to obtain a swifter, cheaper conviction. So one could only get a true picture of the situation by close study of manslaughter cases and their outcome, which I have not done, lacking the time and the resources. I suspect such a study would show that , if cases were categorised as murder or manslaughter according to the rules of 30 or 40 years ago, the average time served for murder would be a  good deal lower than 16 years.  But it would be legally difficult to obtain, publish or comment on such information in individual cases.

 

Even so,  I think it fair to say that homicide is less sternly punished in this country than at any time in modern history. I’d also add, as I always do, that the reason why we don’t have more homicide is not that people are getting nicer or more well-behaved, but because medical skills are getting better. Many attacks involving extreme and potentially lethal violence,  which would once have inevitably resulted in homicide, no longer do so because of much-improved emergency trauma treatment. These facts are an important example of the way in which raw figures, examined without background knowledge, can give a seriously misleading impression.

 

It’s important to put in these distinctions because, as I recounted in ‘A Brief History of Crime’ , the existence of a functioning death penalty for heinous murders (which satisfied the public’s justified  thirst for justice and retribution)  enabled the relatively early release of the many more pitiable murderers who, even in the days of the gallows,  were reprieved and instead sentenced to life in prison. By the  end of the 19^th century, 20 years had come to be regarded as the maximum time to be served by reprieved murders. Fifteen years was normal. By 1939, most life sentence prisoners were released after between ten and thirteen years. During the 1939-45 war this fell to between six and ten years, though afterwards it rose again to between seven and eleven years (figures mainly from the 1949 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, an excellent source). In a  few exceptional cases (‘mercy killings’ and survivors of suicide pacts, for example) those involved were released after one, two or three years. In the whole period between 1900 and 1949 only one released murderer committed another murder after being freed. 

 

 

But I digress. My main argument is that the crime figures are fiddled for political reasons, and cannot be trusted. And , thanks to the dedicated work of Dr Rodger Patrick, a former Chief Inspector in the West Midlands Police turned academic, I can tell you how it is done.  Dr Patrick got in touch with me after I wrote about the astonishing increase of ‘Out of Court Disposals’ (OCDs) of crimes – including the use of ‘cautions’ to dispose of rape cases, in return for an admission of guilt.

 

He has been researching the manipulation of crime data for many years. During this time, police performance has been politically important – so bringing into operation what (unless anyone else wants to claim ownership) I shall term "Hitchens’s Law - Any politically sensitive statistic will be manipulated". This sits alongside the well-known ‘Bikini Effect’, noted by Sovietologists in the 1960s, under which  the official interest in deception is so great that ‘What the figures conceal is more interesting than what they reveal’.

 

For example, in a period when the police are trying to obtain more money and resources, and the party in power is keen to oblige, police and state might co-operate to give the impression that crime is rising. When the government of the day is anxious to show that its ‘crackdowns’ are working, then the figures will be massaged to show that crime is falling. But the police, with other objectives, may not co-operate. Cue conflicts between different sorts of statistics. Similar things are true of inflation figures, exam results, school performance. But we will stick to crime.

 

 

 

Often the attempts to manipulate statistics show up when one force or another seems to be doing particularly, exceptionally well. Detection rates, for instance, sometimes rise quite spectacularly. In the case of at least one force, large numbers of supposed detections were obtained through offences being ‘Taken Into Consideration’(TICs) *after* culprits had been convicted and sentenced. Or crimes were dealt with through ‘Penalty Notices for Disorder’ (PNDs), thus avoiding the expense of a trial, but also sparing the culprit from proper punishment .  You will have to get used to quite a lot of acronyms in this discussion, for there are more to come.

 

TICs are supposed to be offences which accused persons admit to when they plead guilty, so that they can be sentenced for them as well, and will not be prosecuted for them in future . You can easily see how a police force under pressure to show evidence of improved performance might persuade criminals to admit falsely to such offences, thus increasing their clear-up rate. There have been instances when this has been proven to happen. As for PNDs, once again it may be useful for criminals and police, in that the police can say the offence has been dealt with, while the offender avoids prosecution and a much more serious penalty.

 

Then there is what Dr Patrick refers to as ‘nodding’, when the number of burglaries and vehicle thefts ‘detected’ through TICs suddenly rises. If malpractice is exposed, the numbers then fall.

 

Next there is what Dr Patrick calls ‘cuffing’ ( a term taken from the trade vocabulary of conjurors, who use it to describe the hiding of objects up one’s sleeve).

This, most crucially for our discussion, is used to deflate the  level of *reported crime*. You will note that it is *reported* or *recorded* crime that is said to have fallen in the figures leaked at the weekend. This is crime actually fed into the records by police forces, who have compiled the figures themselves. It is different from the levels of crime recorded by the British Crime Survey, an opinion poll of the over-16s which has considerable faults (not least that it leaves out so many young people, who are often victims of crime) .

 

Older figures, of arrests and convictions, are simply not comparable with either of these measures, as police are often reluctant to make arrests for ‘minor’ crimes because of the appalling bureaucracy they must then suffer; because those arrested are often not charged by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), when they would have been in the days when police took such decisions;and because a lot of prosecutions fail or are dropped ; and because a growing number of offences are dealt with by OCDs ( see above) including (largely unpaid) fines, farcically feeble ‘restorative justice’  and non-punitive actions such as probation or community service orders.  

 

An attempt was made to avoid such ‘cuffing’ when in, 2002 a National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) was introduced. This was based on the idea that the victim decided whether he or she had been the object of a crime, and what that crime was.

 

But around 2004, this absolute standard was altered. Instead, the police were asked to classify notified crimes according to the ‘balance of probability’. This meant that individual forces were once again free to decide whether a crime really had taken place. Sometimes senior officers cancelled crimes that had been recorded, by ruling that ‘no crime’ had taken place. A BBC survey in 2011 found wild variations among forces in how many crimes had been ‘no crimed’ (2% in one force, 30% in another) . These decisions are recorded and so fiddling is fairly easily detected.

 

Since this method was exposed, forces have tended to put pressure on officers not to record an event as a crime in the first place. Thus members of the public are asked to accept that that a theft is in fact no such thing, just ‘lost property’. Or a group of burglaries in one block of flats are classified as one crime.

 

One way in which these figures are influenced is in the police response to reports of (for instance) stolen mobile phones. There have been cases of youngsters (with no conceivable dishonest motive as they were not insured) threatened with prosecution for making false claims that their phones had been stolen. Could this be to help keep the figures down?

 

Some social scientists have in any case estimated that around half of all robberies and of theft from the person are never reported to the police at all, probably because the items are uninsured and the hope of detection is very small. The fact that many people do in fact have insurance on mobile phones may have increased the number of such cases, previously unrecorded, which began to be recorded.

 

In one of his papers, Dr Patrick shows how levels of certain crimes dropped abruptly when particular forces adopted new policies of challenging and discouraging the reporting of certain types of crime. This was a shift from a victim-centred approach, under which the police believe you unless there is evidence to the contrary, to a police-centred approach, under which the person who reports a crime is not believed until he can produce proof of the crime.

(I mention here a general point, that I often hear from readers, that police are uninterested in pursuing a crime unless actual CCTV evidence exists of it taking place, and a particular point, the extraordinary account of a burglary in Southampton, carried out in broad daylight (with a crowbar) and recorded on a web cam, so clearly that the burglar’s face is plainly visible. Police did then act and the burglar was convicted, but he was then (ludicrously) bailed while he waited to be sentenced (presumably because of the usual ‘social inquiry reports’ which have to be compiled before anyone is sentenced these days, so that excuses can be found for their behaviour).

 

The burglar then simply failed to turn up for sentence. Despite his victim reporting sightings of him to the police, nothing was done until the victim and his friends tracked down the culprit to his pace of work.

The burglar was then sentenced to 30 months in prison (in reality, a maximum of 15 months and probably a good deal less than that), despite the fact that he was already subject to a ‘community order’ for a drugs offence. The story is amazing in several ways, and the video footage dispiriting and disgusting. But the simple inertia of the criminal justice system, when a convicted burglar is on the loose, is not accidental or untypical. There is no moral fury in the system, just a weary bureaucratic going-through-the-motions ‘oh well then, if you insist’ attitude. If the victim hadn’t captured the event on film, how much chance do you think there would have been of anything happening? The thief thought he was safe, having smashed another camera on his way in, and failed to realise there was a second one.  He was very nearly right to think he was safe. But I digress. This is a comment upon the spirit of the system, which of course affects its behaviour.

 

Dr Patrick quotes Hans de Bruijn, an expert on performance measurement, saying that any system of performance management can be threatened by the activity known as ‘gaming’ , generally accepted as one of the failings of the Soviet centrally planned economy’. What this means is that , seeking to meet targets, those involved will distort the figures to please their political or other masters.

 

As De Bruijn wrote: ‘Once a system of performance measurement has been designed and introduced, the perverse effects will, in the long term, force out the beneficial effects’.

 

 

Another method mentioned by Dr Patrick is (apart from deliberate under-recording and the conversion of post-sentence admissions into TICs, dealt with above) is ‘the shifting of efforts towards easier-to-detect offences, and the systematic redeployment of specialist officers traditionally committed to combating serious and organised crime in inner city areas to affluent suburbs’. This is known as ‘skewing’.

 

One thing which Dr Patrick homes in on the use of cautions and informal warnings.  ‘This resulted in many individuals gaining a police record when the evidence was insufficient to secure a conviction at court. In some cases the suspect would be unaware they were being recorded as responsible for an offence, this included serious offences such as rape and kidnapping’.  This might mean they continue in their criminal behaviour, and do much more serious things later. They also escape justice, as their crimes are dealt with through minor fixed penalties or cautions, and cannot thereafter be brought to court.

 

We have dealt with ‘cuffing’ , ‘nodding’ ‘skewing’ and ‘gaming’. Another method available to police forces which want to give a false impression are ‘stitching’ under which offenders are charged with crimes when there is insufficient evidence. The police know perfectly well the CPS will not pursue the charge, but can still claim that the crime has been ‘solved’ in records.

 

You might think that the massaging of figures could be shown openly to clash with the British Crime Survey, which for all its faults cannot be manipulated in the same way. But Dr Patrick says the Home Office has in recent years stopped asking the specific questions in the BCS , on which such comparisons could be based.

 

 

I think those who ceaselessly maintain that the official crime figures should be believed without question have to re-examine their position in the light of Dr Patrick’s research (which I have here briefly summarised from voluminous papers).

 

 

 

The Rhetoric May Change. Nothing Else Will

 

The cruel killing of two police officers has ignited a row so phoney that I hesitate to join in. Nothing of any interest or use will happen as a result of these two sad and irreparable deaths.

As the astute old liberal Kenneth Clarke has rightly said of the government’s crime policy in general ‘The rhetoric may change but the substance will stay the same’. This is as true of penal and police policy in general as it is of the present government, though I see the new Injustice Secretary has already given an interview in which he pretends to be ‘tough’, and nobody has laughed (except me).

 And let us here pause for a moment to consider the waves of grief and loss, spreading out over years and decades, caused by the violent ending of these two women’s lives.

Forget all the soppy talk about the deceased person only being in the next room. Even for religious believers, who retain the hope of eternal life,  death is still a slammed door, an end, a silence and an impenetrable barrier.  What use it if the person is ‘in the next room’ if no effort of will or love can find the door to that room, let alone unlock it?

So many people have been robbed of hopes. So many people’s lives now lack a purpose they used to have. So many good things which would have happened will now never happen.

And the reason? We do not know and cannot speculate upon who committed this crime. That, I am glad to say, is still a matter for an impartial court of justice with the presumption of innocence.

But we can say with near certainty that the culprit, whoever it might be, had this single characteristic , the common feature of all criminals  - arrogant selfishness.

Such a characteristic, unchecked either by moral force or the fear of punishment, is, if let loose in a society, as dangerous as a nuclear bomb. We are only just beginning to see the consequences of the amoral, punishment-free experimental society we so blithely allowed to be imposed on us 50 years ago.

The long afterglow of Christian moral law, and of Victorian and Edwardian law enforcement, is finally fading into twilight. Those who retained the habits of older British people, of deference to law they had made themselves, and whose principles they had been brought up to understand and respect, are dying fast. Our ordered peace existed in their hearts. When they are gone, it will be gone too.

Then there will be darkness. And I do not know what force in our society will be able to take us out of the dark age that is coming.

‘Bring back hanging!’ . The logic of this is in my view unanswerable. That is why those who advance it logically are not met with reason but with fury and scorn. But how can a post-Christian society accept a punishment based largely on the idea that even murderers have souls, and of course on the deeper idea, that human life is so uniquely valuable that the deliberate taking of it for evil ends is a crime of special horror? It will not happen now (though when this country finally sinks into the enlightened paradise for which the left have worked so hard for so long, I expect it will eventually return. It is in left-wing countries, such as Communist China and Communist Vietnam,  that the death penalty is most commonly used, but without any of the safeguards that would make it acceptable).

‘Arm the police!’ Well, we already have an armed police. This has been done, and will continue to be done, without legislation.  I see armed police officers every day. And I note that the uniforms of most forces are now designed to look semi-military, and give the impression that the person is armed even when he or she is not. Add a gun-holster to the ensemble already dangling from the average uniformed officer’s waistband, and it wouldn’t be a shock. The near unanimity with which media outlets described the two murdered officers as ‘unarmed’ made me wonder if there had been a briefing of some kind in which this fact was stressed. From what I have seen, there is little evidence that they would have been much safer if they had been armed. Nor would they have been. Handguns are largely useless weapons at the best of times,  except to threaten people with, and even heavily-armed soldiers often die in surprise attacks. 

If we do get a  fully-armed force, they will of course increasingly find themselves imposing an informal, unjust, ill-regulated death penalty, against which all the powers of Amnesty International and Mr Clive Stafford Smith will not prevail, because it will not ever be admitted that it is in fact a death penalty. But it is an entirely useless one, since it has no moral purpose or consistency.

By the way, I often point out that the deterrent effect of the death penalty does not simply affect murder.  It restrains criminal violence and the use of weapons in general. I’ve also pointed out that modern medical techniques save many lives which would have been lost in the 1950s and 1960s, so making ‘then and now ‘ comparisons of homicide figures rather misleading.

This morning I read an example of such a case in my own local newspaper, the Oxford Mail. This sort of thing is now counted too trivial to get into the national papers, though I think it once would have done.  You may read it here
Note that the victim nearly died and was left with his intestines exposed and a punctured lung.

 

Our 'A-grade' children can't even manage a paper round

How we used to jeer at the Soviet Union for claiming record tractor production, record wheat production and record economic growth.

These fatuous lies were obvious falsehoods, in a country where the fields were full of weeds, the factories rusty museums of incompetence and waste, and life a series of queues for rare, wonky consumer goods and unfresh food.

But our own official figures are now just as laughably false. The worst of all are the annual claims that our schools are producing a new generation of brilliant wonder-children.
Tory MP: Graham Stuart said 'the standard of performance is better than it's ever been, the teaching's better and the children are cleverer than ever before'

A Tory MP called Graham Stuart, who as chairman of the House of Commons Education Committee ought to know better, actually said on the radio on Thursday: ‘The standard of performance is better than it’s ever been, the teaching’s better and the children are cleverer than ever before.’

Presumably that’s why my local newsagents now employ pensioners to deliver papers, and most of the hard-graft jobs for young people in this country are done by migrants from Eastern Europe. Our own children are just too clever to do paper rounds, or work on a building site.

If Mr Stuart is typical of our lawmakers, it strikes me that they too could all be profitably replaced by pensioners or Poles.

Does he really believe what he says?

For more than a decade, people like me have been abused and denounced because we dared to point out that British school standards were falling, and that our benchmark examinations were being watered down.

There was good evidence for this. The Engineering Council noted 12 years ago that maths standards at A-level had fallen by objective measures. They blamed a softer syllabus.

Durham University, by equally objective methods, found a similar rise in grades – unmatched by a rise in standards – in other subjects.

Now our case is absolutely proved, by the sudden halt in ever-improving grades. This was caused by a simple warning from the government, requiring the exam boards to show that any more ‘improvement’ was justified by better-quality work.

And yet the lies continue.

The BBC, which in my view rightly doubts George Osborne’s pitiful economic policies, has never questioned the absurd Stalinist claims of our education industry, or our equally ridiculous crime figures, apparently compiled in Toytown by Noddy and Mr Plod.

That is because the causes of our wretched education standards, and of our ever-increasing disorder, lie in the failed Left-wing policies of the Sixties.

The BBC passionately supports these policies, and the Tory Party has adopted them just as their utter failure has become evident to anyone with a spark of intelligence.

Trust me, this is much more fun than Las Vegas

I thought we were now agreed that what people did behind their bedroom doors was none of our business.

In that case, it seems to me that all of us, reactionary dinosaurs like me, and the wildest liberals, must accept that what Prince Harry does in a hotel room is his affair. I’m much more distressed that a member of the Royal Family should visit that smelly, tacky, Godless colony of tat, brand worship and false hope.

I’d rather spend a week in Novosibirsk than endure another night in Las Vegas.



If you want to know where all the police are, who once patrolled the streets but do so no longer, you can find them hanging about outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

If they really want Julian Assange to come out, why don’t they arrange for the sort of roadworks that everyone else has to put up with?

You know – they dig the road up for six weeks, and then resurface it. Then the gas people come and dig a hole, then the cable people come and dig  a trench, then the electricity people.

By then the water main should have sprung a leak which needs fixing in the middle of the night. By then it’s time to resurface the whole thing. He’d come out.



Forget Moscow, is spying for Brussels the new treachery?

In the days of Kim Philby, British traitors worked for Moscow. Do they now work for Brussels?

Alan Judd, whose clever spy novels suggest a close knowledge of the subject, recently published Uncommon Enemy, in which a Briton is caught telling the French about British negotiating secrets in EU talks. He also points out that this  may well have happened in  real life.

The distinguished U.S. academic, Peter Schweizer, some years ago quoted a retired French spook as saying that a British official spied for the French between about September 1985 and the June 1987 Brussels Summit.

He allegedly passed ‘invaluable’ intelligence to the French on British negotiating positions and was also said to have had his photograph secretly taken with Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission.

Is this true? And is our foreign service in any case as penetrated by Eurofanatics as it once was with Soviet fellow travellers?

It would explain a lot.



Can I put in a plea here for Ken Clarke? Mr Slippery should certainly not sack him as Secretary of State for Injustice.

The great thing about Mr Clarke is that he does not pretend to be what he is not. He is a great big soft soppy liberal who doesn’t believe in punishing criminals and doesn’t care who knows it.

Far better have him doing the job than some slick fraud who makes ‘tough’ speeches about how prison works, while letting prisoners out even more quickly than Ken does.

Maybe if people realise what sort of Government this really is, they’ll do to the Tory Party what really needs to be done to it... provided we can find a big enough wheelie bin.



If people still got married, and sorted out the basics from the start, then we really wouldn’t need George Galloway or anyone else to explain what is and what isn’t rape.

George is cleverer than he gets credit for being, but I suspect bedtime etiquette is not his strong point.



Did you notice that the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, has quietly abandoned his carefully leaked and spun plan to bring back O-levels?

He told the BBC (who else?) that he doesn’t want a two-tier system. Back to one-size-fits-all, and no hope for excellence.

As I said here exactly two months ago: ‘The return of O-levels in England and Wales is as likely as the return of the sabre-toothed tiger.’



Here’s the real reason why the BBC can’t host a statue of George Orwell (Orwell himself would have loathed the idea of such a graven image).

Orwell was neither of the Left nor of the Right, but dedicated to truth at any cost. The BBC, by contrast, can and does distort the truth to serve its Leftist ends.

Why don't you want our children to have as good an education as you, Nick?

In a horrible, ignorant speech last week, the Deputy Prime Minister revealed himself as a limited, conformist slave to conventional wisdom. He  is also a wretched, skulking hypocrite, as I shall explain later. He ought to know better.

Thinking people of Left and Right have at last begun to see that comprehensive state schools have failed the country, and, above all, have failed the children of the poor.

Even veteran radical commentators such as Nick Cohen and Mary Ann Sieghart see the sense in selection by ability.

But Mr Clegg is demanding that our great universities should be ruined by the same egalitarian dogma that has wrecked secondary schooling.

Put simply, he wants the best colleges to lower their entry requirements. This will, of course, increase the number of state school pupils who get in. And it will reduce the numbers from private schools.

It is easy to sympathise with this, if you forget that it will also mean that university standards will fall, irrecoverably. It should not be possible to buy privilege in education. It is obvious that ability and merit alone should be our guide.

But that is exactly where we were heading in this country until the Left-liberal levellers got to work. Mr Clegg thinks that ‘little has changed’ in the past 50 years. Oh yes it has. It has got much worse, thanks to people like him.

In 1965, just before most grammar schools and Scottish academies were abolished, 57 per cent of places at Oxford University were taken by pupils from state grammar schools or direct grant schools (independent schools that gave large numbers of free places on merit, a fine system done away with in 1975 in another wave of vindictive Leftist spite).

What is more important, the number of state school entrants was rising rapidly, and had done ever since 1945, when the grammar schools were opened to all who could qualify.

No special concessions were made in those days. The grammar school boys and girls were there by absolute right. These brilliant people still hold high positions in every profession and activity.

But after 1965, the flow dried up, and instead of having a proper, qualified elite, we had to make do with privileged ninnies such as Mr Clegg instead.

Either they had gone to hugely expensive private schools, as he did, or they arrived at the top via the rich, well-connected socialist’s route to privilege, a semi-secret network of excellent state schools, some religious, some with tiny catchment areas where most people cannot afford to live, some with other elaborate arrangements to keep out the masses.

These schools – the Roman Catholic London Oratory that atheist Mr Clegg has visited as a prospective parent is an example – are officially comprehensive. But, in fact, they are comprehensive in the same way that 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terrace house.

What does Mr Clegg plan to do for his children? Does he plan to toss them into a bog-standard comp, where they will have to struggle to learn from demoralised supply teachers amid the shouting, the mobile phone calls and the fights?

Will he then feel his parental duty has been done if, despite the fact that they know very little, they are given privileged access to Oxbridge, but are unable to benefit from its rigour? I doubt it.

He won’t talk about it. He thinks it’s none of our business. Well, he is wrong. He has made it our business by supporting and defending a system that slams the gates of good schools in the faces of all those who are not rich.

Don’t work, Dave, just rest and play

A word of praise for our Prime Minister. The fact that he likes to relax and to spend time with his wife and children is the best thing about him.

I would far rather have a Premier who enjoys his leisure than one who lives his life in meetings, growing pale and gaunt from never seeing the sun.

True, I am much too crusty to see any point in Fruit Ninja. Give me a decent book any day, or an old film.

But a man who lingers over an extra glass of wine with his Sunday lunch is far less dangerous than a glowering sobersides who ignores his children while he stares at spreadsheets.

And remember, like all politicians, he can only do damage while he is working.

Tories should be wary about making it easier to sack people. Since they don’t do the job they claim to do, and haven’t for years, voters might get it into their heads that it is time to sack the Tory Party and replace it with something better.

I can't really see why we fuss so much about convicted prisoners being given the vote. We already elect the sort of governments that burglars and muggers dream of.

Why would the inhabitants of Wormwood Scrubs or Strangeways not vote for Kenneth Clarke, Secretary of State for Injustice?

He provides them with prisons full of legal and illegal drugs.

He gives them in-cell TV sets and snooker tables, multiple menus and relaxed regimes. The only thing they might object to is that he makes it so difficult for them to get in (15 offences necessary to qualify, in most cases) and insists on cutting all sentences by at least half.

I know who’ll get the convicts’ vote.

We are promised that five calls to the police about one problem will now guarantee that they take action. I don’t want to sound too demanding, but shouldn’t one call be enough?

During the Cold War, I did all I could to oppose those who wanted to get rid of our nuclear weapons. Only the USSR would have benefited. Now I’m baffled to find many old Left-wingers happy to spend billions on modernising the Trident system, which has no conceivable point now that the Soviet Union is dead and gone for ever.

The main threat to this country’s independence is the growing need to import energy. As Vladimir Putin has proved, natural gas is a weapon that can actually be used.

Windmills will not save us. Scrap Trident and spend the money on dozens of nuclear power stations. Soon.

Bicycling through an idyllic village in Cameron country on a perfect May day, I was musing on moving there when I saw coming towards me a gross figure in jeans, T-shirt and one of those stiff-brimmed baseball caps that invariably betoken outstanding stupidity and aggression.

A cigarette was screwed into the middle of his face. He was being towed along by a pair of slobbering weapon dogs, slightly better looking than he was. There is no escape from our nation’s moral and cultural decay. It is everywhere.

So, there is a Plan B after all: saving the reckless at the expense of the thrifty

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The gruesome carnival of the party conferences is now over, so I can stop taking my nausea-suppressing pills at last. Do you have any idea how fraudulent these things are?  They are sealed off from the people by police guards and high fences.

The applause is phoney and stage-­managed. Even the arguments are faked.  The vast halls are half-empty, and reached through bazaars of lobbyists for various forms of greed and folly.

The speeches themselves are seldom ­written by the people who obediently deliver them.  There is no real life. All three major ­parties are living corpses, kept walking by transfusions from the taxpayer, dodgy billionaires or trade-union funds.

Meanwhile, the media coverage has mostly degenerated into pathetic partisan bootlicking of the party in power, matched by equally pathetic partisan savaging of the one that is out of power.

No doubt, Edward Miliband made a pretty dreadful speech in Liverpool the week before last. But it was nothing like as bad as the hogwash that gushed and gurgled out of the Prime Minister’s smirking mouth on Wednesday.  As an exhortation to slackers and  grumblers in some public-school football

team, it would have been average. As a statement of policy and aims from the Prime Minister of a middling nuclear power, it was pitiful.

Nor did it see fit to mention that the very next day the Bank of England would embark on a desperate plan (for once the word ‘desperate’ is justified here) to deliberately provoke yet more inflation.

Let me remind you of what one of our greatest economists, Lord Keynes, once wrote about this awful thing: ‘Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency.

‘By a continuing process of inflation, governments can ­confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.’

This colossal, unfair stealth tax on the prudent, to pay for the folly of the imprudent, is what we are reduced to. This is, as it turns out, Plan B. We have driven the country and  the people deep into debts that can never be paid. So we will shrink the debt by shrinking everyone’s money.

So much for the careful, the thrifty, the provident who foolishly thought the Tories were their friends.

Their savings, their pensions, their long years of caution and restraint all shrivel to a handful of change in a surprisingly short time.

This crisis wasn’t made yesterday, or even in the Blair-Brown years. It has been in  the making for decades, as sup­posedly Conservative politicians have refused to get the Welfare State under control, refused to release this country from the chains loaded on to  it by the EU, and risked all  on the bubble of the housing market.

Of these people it has been rightly said that: ‘They could  not dig, they dared not rob, and so they lied to please the mob.’ I hope I live long enough to see it carved on their tombstones.

Thought Police are still feeling collars

Much more should have been made of the amazing treatment of the Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, a thoughtful and distinguished man. Mr Tyrie made the bad mistake of believing that free speech still exists in his party, and criticised the leadership. He was then taken into custody by a pair of Downing Street thought police officers, and soon afterwards emerged with his mind completely changed. Humiliating pictures of this event then found their way to the newspapers. This is how Blairism operated – and still operates.

Knox deserved to go free –  just like ‘Lockerbie Bomber’

As it happens, I don’t think the Italian state ever came close to proving beyond reasonable doubt that Amanda Knox was guilty of murder.  So, in a general way, I am pleased that she has been freed.

But compare the frenzy of interest over this rather unimportant case with the strange silence over the equally dubious – but far more important – conviction of the so-called Lockerbie Bomber, the Libyan Abdelbaset Al Megrahi.

One of the key witnesses against him has since admitted to lying in court.

Another, described by a  senior judge as ‘an apple short of a picnic’, shockingly received a $2 million (£1.28 million) reward after giving evidence that many experts regard as highly dubious.

I suspect Megrahi’s release had more to do with the fear of a  final, successful appeal revealing inconvenient facts than it did with ­ British oil interests. If the US had wanted to stop him being freed, they could have. After all, they made us surrender to the IRA.

** DOES Richard Dawkins exist? The noted foe of religion seems set to be absent (despite many requests that he take part) from a planned debate   with William Lane Craig, a leading American Christian philosopher (a number of other anti-God blowhards have also declined to debate with Craig).

To tease Professor Dawkins out of his Oxford lair, organisers of Craig’s tour plan to put advertisements on the city’s buses next week proclaiming ‘There’s probably no Dawkins.’ In the age of BCE and CE, it’s nice to see the other side hitting back.

** IN the supposed ‘Catgate’ row between Theresa May and Kenneth Clarke, who won? I don’t know, but I know who lost. We lost. This country is still subject to the European Convention on Human Rights, and to the views of judges on how it is to be interpreted.

Plenty of people who should never have been here in the first place will continue to be allowed by the courts to stay, even if they behave very badly.

But a lot of voters have been given the entirely fake impression that Mrs May is going to do something significant about this. I very much doubt it. I advise you to check on progress a year from now.

** MEET the new young MPs of the Labour Party and the Tory Party and you would  find it very hard to tell the difference between them, if they weren’t actually wearing badges.

They’re not very interested in politics, though they know what views to adopt to get them up the ladder of ambition most quickly. They certainly have far more in common with each other than they do with a normal British person of any class.

Searching for any differences between the Labour and Tory parties this autumn, I can come up with only one. I don’t think Labour would have dared to devastate our Armed Forces with the disastrous and irreparable cuts visited on them by Mr Cameron.

** IF I have to read another word of praise for the magazine Private Eye on its 50th anniversary, I think I shall feel ill. It was, long ago, part of the cultural revolution that turned Britain into what it now is. These days it is   a smug and very profitable organ of the new establishment, made all the worse by a pretence that it is still brave and dangerous.

The picture that tells you everything you need to know about the Great Faker

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

It is now clear that we have learned nothing from seeing our cities in flames and our streets ruled by violent thieves.

The governing elite have decided to respond by pretending to be fierce for a few weeks.

But they will do nothing to change the policies that brought us to this state. Those policies will continue, and so will the consequences.

The Prime Minister, who has a great talent for faking anger and concern over things he couldn’t care less about, gave a speech on Monday that could have been delivered by his idol Anthony Blair. It even contained several of Mr Blair’s favourite verbless sentences.

We had the usual lies, told now for more than 30 years by politicians of all parties, about scrapping police paperwork, putting constables back on the beat, replacing rights with responsibilities, and distinguishing right from wrong again. Nothing will happen.

We had the curious confession that ‘you can’t say that marriage and commitment are good things – for fear of alienating single mothers’. And, lo, the word ‘marriage’ was not mentioned again in the entire oration. Why not? Because of that very fear.

We will continue to subsidise the fatherless families that create the conditions for gangs and feral youth.

There was praise for the few exceptional state schools that work. But there was no commitment to build the new grammar schools that would spread such standards to the whole country. Why not? New grammar schools are currently illegal – yes, illegal – under an Act of Parliament.

The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, made a commitment to stick with the tried, tested and utterly failed egalitarian stupidity of comprehensive schooling more clearly still. He delivered his thought-free post-disorder speech at a comprehensive school which was presumably opened up specially for him.

Mr Cameron’s choice of location was also significant. By that I don’t mean it was near the expensive house in the country which he could have afforded himself but which we taxpayers kindly helped him to buy with the (now discontinued) special housing benefit for MPs – though it was.

I mean that the place was picked to send a careful message to the liberal elite that he remains one of theirs, and that they can ignore his claptrap about the ‘broken society’.

He chose to deliver his words at Base 33, a ‘youth centre’ in Witney, a solid symbol of the failed policy of appeasement towards vandalism and feral behaviour.

Behind him, plainly deliberately selected for the purpose, was a wall vividly covered in graffiti – that ugly, hateful and aggressive blight that law-abiding people rightly see as a sign of menace and a warning that the neighbourhood is troubled. It is loutishness rendered in spray-paint.

Mr Cameron also declared that ‘government cannot legislate to change behaviour’. This is both defeatist and untrue. The whole Fabian socialist project, which revolutionised our nation throughout the 20th Century and which eventually took over the Tory Party itself, was intended to change behaviour, and did so. So is the new programme which has replaced it, the politically correct drive for ‘equality and diversity’.

The 1969 Divorce Reform Act completely changed the nature and standing of marriage. The Children Act of 1989 sharply reduced adult authority.

The consequences of the Human Rights Act are limitless. The Misuse Of Drugs Act 1971 decriminalised cannabis, with huge results for behaviour. So did the abolition of the old alcohol licensing laws.

Numberless Criminal Justice Acts have robbed the courts of power. What does he mean, ‘government cannot legislate to change behaviour’?

It can, and it does – but always in the wrong direction.

Gripping day that changed the world

It is 20 years since I woke up to find tanks trundling down my Moscow street, gun barrels aslant in the early morning sun. It was, in a way, what I had been waiting for and expecting during my entire time as a correspondent in what was then the capital of the Evil Empire.

I had hurried back from the Black Sea coast the day before because of rumours that something of the kind was about to happen.

Yet the actual sight of naked force near my home was still a fearful shock, and I have never claimed to have understood fully the world-changing events that followed.

There’s still a tremendous unsolved mystery in the supposed suicides of several
people at the heart of the failed communist putsch – especially those of Nikolai Kruchina
and Georgi Pavlov, the chief treasurers of the fabulously wealthy Soviet Communist Party, who both ‘jumped’ from high windows in the days after the coup.

But we now have a clear and exciting account of these momentous times, written by my old friend Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times, one of the great reporters of our age.

Crammed with fascinating and telling detail, it describes Mikhail Gorbachev’s final evening as President of the USSR, with a series of flashbacks to the events that led
to the hauling down of the Red Flag from the Kremlin.

It also explores and illuminates the bristling personal rivalry and loathing that crackled between Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.

It is a marvellous read and would make an unmissable TV docu-drama. It is called Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day Of The Soviet Union.

Please read it.

Pull the plug on Child Power

Those who seek to blame or indeed punish parents for the misdeeds of their children should heed the painful cry of one such parent this week, a respected TV cameraman.

‘I am heartbroken and totally ashamed,’ he said of his daughter’s criminal actions.

‘This is the end product of a society that tells you that you can’t discipline your children.’

Those who do, he said, risked being reported to police or social services.

He concluded: ‘Children now have the power over their parents, not the other way round.’

I think all modern parents will recognise the truth in this. Except for David Cameron and Ed Miliband.


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News that watching too much TV can shorten your life comes as no surprise. It certainly makes us more easily fooled and more conformist, and is the only explanation for the electoral success of the Blair creature – surely a form of mass mental illness.

I think it’s worse than that. You can, of course, argue that it’s the slumping in the armchair and the grazing on junk food that actually kill people. But what if TV, by switching off our imaginations, weakens important parts of the brain?

Could it be the explanation for all this dementia and Alzheimer’s which are afflicting the first generation to be exposed to lifelong TV-watching?

If so, then expect these scourges to strike at younger and younger victims in decades to come.

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If the courts always behaved as they are doing now, we wouldn’t have many of the problems we have. But the current frenzy of ‘toughness’ is a public-relations gesture and will not last.

Suspects who would normally be given bail are being held in custody. Magistrates, who normally send two per cent of convicted criminals to prison, are now sending 70 per cent there. Sentences are up to 40 per cent longer than average.

Within weeks, things will have settled back to where they were before, not least because the jails will be bursting.

The absence from public view of the Injustice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has been one of the most interesting features of the past week. He is biding his time.

Some rapes ARE worse than others... there, I've said it

This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column

I am sick of the censorship that surrounds the issue
of rape. So I shall defy it. Of course all rapes are bad. But some rapes are worse than others.

The extension of rape, to cover any situation where a woman says she has been raped, is a huge difficulty for a fair legal system that relies on actual evidence before deciding guilt.

Even for saying this, I know quite well that I will get raging, lying abuse. This is what
happened to Kenneth Clarke, right, when he went on the radio and tried to speak his mind as if
this were a free country.

As he quickly found out, it is not. I am sorry that he was in the end forced to grovel. But this is a Liberal, PC government, and I am not surprised.

Revolutionary feminism, which regards all men as predators and sees the married family as a sordid prison, has scared most politicians, most judges, most journalists, most civil servants – and most people – into accepting its nasty dogmas.

Oddly enough, Mr Clarke would normally be an ally of this cause. But ultra-feminist zealotry is bitterly intolerant of any disagreement, however gentle or thoughtful. Nothing short of total submission will do.

The problem is Mr Clarke’s unceasing search for ways of stopping our prisons from bursting. The answer is quite simple – the reintroduction of serious punitive prison regimes, plus putting the police back on preventive foot patrol. But that would never do in the liberal world of David Cameron.

So instead sentences – even for rape – must get shorter and shorter until they almostentirely disappear.

It won’t work. Whatever this lot does, I promise you, the prisons will be crammed, with their revolving doors whizzing round fast enough to generate electricity.

Modern liberals make a few exceptions to their view that lawbreakers need to be let out of jail quickly.

One is over child-molesting, which has become the one form of sexual behaviour of which we can all still disapprove.

One is when people ‘take the law into their own hands’, by defending themselves, their families or their property. The courts and the police view this as competition, and fear it. So it is crushed with heavy sentences.

Another is offences against political correctness. And another is rape.

But in this case rape does not usually mean what most people think it means – the forcible abduction and violation of a woman by a stranger. It means a dispute about consent, often between people who are already in a sexual relationship.

It means one person’s word against another’s, in highly unequal circumstances, with the accuser granted anonymity and the accused under the glare of publicity.

Those who don’t think there’s anything wrong with this definition are quite entitled to their opinion. But they’re not entitled to shout down those who disagree with them. Even so, I bet they try to.



In full hijab, is Orla trying a bit too hard?

Here's the BBC’s very severe reporter Orla Guerin broadcasting from Pakistan after an atrocity.

Ms Guerin, who during her stint in Israel often seemed more like a prosecutor than a reporter, has adopted the full hijab or headscarf, completely covering her hair, plus a very, very long dress.

Is she trying too hard here? And if so, why? The BBC said it was a ‘conservative area’ but couldn’t provide any details of how it measured this. It also said other female reporters had done the same thing, but couldn’t, despite repeated requests, substantiate this.

I’m all in favour of showing respect to the culture where you are. But in this clip, Ms Guerin is speaking to camera and standing in front of a van, not conversing with some mullah stuck in the 14th Century.

Even the late Benazir Bhutto, who was Premier of Pakistan and needed to keep the imams happy, usually wore her headgear further back than this.


Now Gerry Adams can lay a wreath in Guildford

Following the Queen’s successful visit to the Irish Republic, I look forward to the day when President-of-all-Ireland Gerry Adams makes a state visit to London and lays wreaths at Harrods, in Hyde Park, outside the Old Bailey, in Bishopsgate and at Canary Wharf, and then heads out of town to do the same in Brighton, Deal, Warrington, Manchester, Guildford and Birmingham – and on the graves of Ross McWhirter and Ian Gow.

If he will wear a Union Jack tie, then I don’t see why an Army band can’t play Kevin Barry or some other rebel ditty while he lays his tributes.

As far as I am concerned the Irish people, almost all of them, are our friends, brothers and sisters, bound to us by many common causes, greatly enriching the culture and history of our two islands.

If I could undo the Easter Rising and the execution of its leaders, I would.

The obvious liking shown on both sides during the Queen’s visit is far more representative than the violent, undying hate of Sinn Fein.

Yet, behind all the smiles and generosity, Sinn Fein has been the ultimate winner in this conflict.



Lawrence retrial is a bad day for liberty

I am sorry but I cannot rejoice at the planned retrial of a suspect in the Stephen Lawrence murder case.

The rule against being tried twice for the same offence is a keystone of freedom. And to work, it has to be a rule, even when it breaks our hearts to obey it. For if it is not absolute, then one day a bad government will use this as a precedent to pursue and crush opponents. Why do we care so little about these great treasures of liberty? Perhaps we no longer deserve to have them.


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The head of the Armed Forces, General Sir David Richards, has been making political speeches, calling for more indiscriminate bombing of Libya.

This is not his job. He is also plumb wrong. We should abandon this daft ill-considered war before we get in any deeper.


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It always gravely saddens me to see Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, a distinguished doctor who has dedicated his life and mind to the cure of disease and the easing of pain, supporting the dangerous campaign to soften our drug laws. If successful, this will lead to greatly increased pain, misery and disease.

The pro-drug lobby – much like Big Tobacco when the link between cigarettes and lung cancer was first made – is hostile to any facts that contradict its claims. I fear Sir Ian’s allegiance to this cause has affected him in this way.

During a London debate on the subject last week, my ally Dr Hans-Christian Raabe tried to hand Sir Ian an article from the New England Journal Of Medicine that supported a point he had just made – that deaths due to legal prescription drugs (eg methadone) far exceed deaths due to illegal drugs (eg heroin) in the USA. Sir Ian flung it to the floor.

Is this what we should expect from a former president of the Royal College of Physicians?