PETER HITCHENS: This isn’t a revolution – it’s New Labour in a blue frock

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

British politics has finally vanished up its own pretensions. The old signposts and measurements have all been removed. We have no idea who stands for what or where we are going. Who would have thought to see a Tory conference applauding a Prime Minister for vowing to raise more tax and weaken employers’ rights? Surely that’s the job of the other lot?

In fact most of Chairman May’s speech could have equally well been written and delivered at a Labour conference. She may have derided Jeremy Corbyn personally but she has noticed quite a lot of his ideas are rather popular, especially with the young, and stolen them.
Who can blame her? She faces nothing but uncertainty and danger. The Labour Party is very nearly dead but her own Tories seethe with intrigue, rivalry and suppressed dissent.

The landscape before her is like one of those lakes covered in bright green water weed that looks – at a first glance – like a smooth lawn. In fact it conceals slimy depths. Only a fool would try to walk on it.

Her inexplicable breezy confidence about leaving the EU makes me shudder, and I am a veteran campaigner for national independence.
I wouldn’t dream of activating Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which starts the two-year clock for our exit, because it places all the negotiating power in the hands of our continental rivals. And they, especially Germany, hope to scare all the other EU nations into staying in. The last thing they want to do is to make an exit easy for us.

I’d insist on getting all the talking done before taking this dangerous step. As for her Great Repeal Bill, it is nothing of the sort. Until we actually get out, it just confirms 40 years of EU laws and regulations.

Already her Cabinet is openly divided about keeping access to the Single Market.
And if anyone thinks that the Bad Losers’ Party has given up its dream of rerunning the referendum, just wait and see. They will fight this in the courts, in the Commons, in the Lords, in the civil service and in the BBC.

Given all these perils, it is only wise of Mrs May to blow kisses in the general direction of Labour voters, while also trying to persuade refugees from Ukip to come back to mummy. The 2020 Election seems far away, but its result will probably be decided during the next two years.
You may not like any of this. I certainly don’t. But it comes, as so many bad things do, from taking short cuts and trying to bodge complicated bits of carpentry with a few swift strokes of the hammer.

Millions of voters thought they could have a policy without a government to implement it. They thought they could leave the nation’s fate to the political class rather than taking a hand in it themselves.

They fell for David Cameron’s promise of a referendum, which he never expected to keep because he intended to continue the Coalition with the Lib Dems until 2020.
They thought they could rely on the Tory Party to take them out of the EU, even though it had let them down on so many other things.

So, deep down, they changed nothing. A few toyed with the Dad’s Army party of Ukip, now once again enjoying ripping itself to pieces, its main activity. But they wouldn’t see that the Tories had become a blue-tinged version of New Labour.Now there’s a new collective delusion, that Theresa May is the new Margaret Thatcher. Actually she’s the new Harriet Harman. I’ve charted her embrace of political correctness here over many years.

Even her increasingly vague promise to maybe, just possibly, open one or two new grammar schools, provided the middle class cannot get into them, will probably trickle away into the damp sands of compromise where truly good ideas end up in our system.

*****

I know I’m not going to like Netflix’s The Crown, the new drama about the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. In fact I think it should not have been made, and should not be made for another 20 or 30 years when the actual facts are known and the papers available.
Even then, it would probably be nearly as bad. Like all such productions, it exploits the real people it pretends to portray. If it were about fictional royal figures, and did not claim to be their real lives, nobody would watch it.

But it cannot possibly be true. Above all, like the misleading, over-rated film The King’s Speech, it tries to see people through the distorting lens of present-day prejudice. My parents and their friends were more or less of the same generation as the Queen and Prince Philip, and my father was a naval officer.
And it seems to me that even the faces of Claire Foy, who plays the Queen, and Matt Smith, who plays the Duke of Edinburgh, are wrong. They lack the depth and grief and sense of duty carved into the faces of that generation by their stern upbringing, and by the war. They are too knowing about trivial things, and too innocent of important ones.

Their attempts at the accents of the time sound as if they have been laboriously taught them and they long to burst out laughing, not as if they think it normal to speak like that, as such people really did.

And the odd thing is that they spoke like that while enduring danger, pain and fear and, in a way, saving the world. There wasn’t anything funny about it
I am told King George VI, that improbably decent monarch, is shown using the c-word. I doubt he did. Naval man though he was, and so familiar with the whole range of filthy language, I think he would have regarded it as impossibly crude.

And if they can get that wrong, it is like a clock striking 13. All that went before, and all that comes afterwards, is in doubt as well.

*****

I am not sure that the alleged comedian David Baddiel was trying to be nice when he urged the BBC to give me a ‘Right-Wing Hour’ on Radio 4.
The last time we met, on a TV review programme, I said that I was pleased and relieved when his dreary film, The Infidel, came to an end. He may not have forgotten.

But even so he now joins many other BBC types, from Andrew Marr to Mark Thompson, in admitting ‘there is generally a centre-Left, liberal bias to its output’.
And this is getting worse. As this newspaper revealed last Sunday, diversity commissars are culling BBC performers on the grounds of race and sex. This is a mad outcome.

When I was a Leftist in the 1960s, we at least believed that discrimination of all kinds was wrong. To this day I write ‘human’ when asked for my ethnic details by some busybody.

Even an hour a week in which such wicked ideas could be attacked and mocked would be better than nothing.

*****

One of the saddest sights in the university town where I live is ‘Freshers’ Week’, which means nightly pathetic processions of bewildered teens, clad in uniform joke T-shirts, being led off to bars to be taught how to get drunk. I really hope that the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference was right when it said today’s sixth formers are sick of the Olympic boozing that has become so universal.

It is the drinking, of course, that also leads to so many of the rapes and alleged rapes that cause so much misery of so many kinds. I wonder why we treat this sad business as a joke.

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A few Comments on the EU, Railways, Love, Truth, T.S. Eliot and Liberty

As the world at last wakes up again, and the crisp mornings and sharp evenings signal the end of the strange period of sloth and  suspense that has endured since the referendum, I thought it was time for some general correspondence on many different issues.

First I am amazed at the way in which Chairman May’s speech to the Tory conference has been greeted, as if it truly cleared the air. As my friend and ally Christopher Booker pointed out yesterday (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/01/this-is-the-only-way-brexit-wont-plunge-us-over-the-cliff/ )

Ministers till seem to have very little idea of just how difficult it is going to be to negotiate complex trade agreements with the EU from scratch.

Note that Mr Booker and I are longstanding enthusiasts for a British departure from the EU, have longed for years for us to leave and still hope for a genuine restoration of national independence. We have every reason to hope for a so-called  ‘hard Brexit’ and to want one. But both of us fear that the practicalities are insurmountable. If that is so, aiming for such a target can only end in tears, and worse, the ultimate blocking of our true departure.

Why then is the government acting as if the matter is so simple? Perhaps Messrs Fox and Davis are right and we are wrong, in which case I shall be delighted. But I wish they would explain how.

This is the constitutional crisis of which I have been warning since it became clear that ‘leave’ would win the referendum, my most recent accurate prediction.

Do some in the government actually *hope* it will go wrong? Do they think they can wing it? Are they just naive? Do they imagine ( as David Cameron did) that our EU ‘partners’ will rescue us? Or is Chairman May hoping that the difficulties will allow her to propose a permanent compromise, under which we more or less remain in the EU in all but name (the most likely outcome in my view).

For me, the problem remains that the mandate from the referendum is both so vague and so narrow, and so lacks any serious representation at the top of British politics, that the gap between promise and fulfilment is too wide to be crossed.

Voting to leave the EU, without first creating a party committed to doing so and versed in what it wants to do with the freedom gained, was a dangerous short cut, like building the roof before building the walls. It was too easy. And like all things that are too easy, it will become difficult in time.

*****

Why do supporters of Rail Privatisation continue to jeer at British Rail. Before privatisation, BR was an extremely well-run organisation, running a surprisingly good service on a much smaller subsidy than the one now given to the privatised operators. It successfully completed the electrification of the London to Edinburgh line (compare with the delayed over-budget mess of the current electrification of the Paddington line), its track maintenance was of a high quality( not maintained after privatisation, as well found to our cost at the turn of the century). Railtrack, or ‘Failcrack’ as I dubbed it,  has now, in effect, been renationalised as Network Rail. But it’s still not as good as BR was at maintaining track and at big modernising projects.

There’s no reason to believe that the increase in traffic which happened after (but not because of) privatisation would not have happened under BR. And if BR had received the subsidies given to private train operators, much more of the money would have spent on railways and trains, and much less on making various individuals rich. I cannot see how a franchise to run a system based on taxpayer subsidy is real risk-taking business. If it were, I doubt if anyone would step forward to run it. Many have indeed walked away from their franchises.

One thing I do associate with privatisation, and suspect is linked to it, is the cramming of passengers into smaller and smaller spaces. The habit of shoving in as many seats as possible, and no longer lining them up with windows, seems to have begun around the time that privatisation happened. So does the provision of shorter, smaller trains of three, four or five coaches on routes which used to be served by trains of eight full-sized Inter-City carriages.  I wonder if it saves fuel and other costs, so directly increasing revenue.

*******

On Sunday evening I provided a short prologue to a dramatised reading of the final part of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ in the Friends’ Meeting House at Chichester, beautifully situated near the lovely old Priory, now the Guildhall,  where William Blake was once put on trial.  The reading was of very high quality, and I found myself riveted both during the rehearsal and the actual performance, by Eliot’s apposite words, full of power and truth.

There was a good and attentive audience, most of whom stayed for a while afterwards to discuss the case of Bishop bell, in whose cause the reading was held. I always gain a special pleasure from voluntary, civic occasions such as this, when individuals band together for a good purpose. Chichester itself is an intensely civilised corner on England since Roman times, every stone and brick, and every tree, lawn and garden evidence of the long and peaceful existence of a prosperous society of free, independent men and women. But none of this will survive forever if we do not resolve to defend it. I regard the George Bell campaign as part of the battle to keep free civilisation alive, because it is entirely about disinterested justice and truth. I visited Bishop bell’[s memorial in the Cathedral early this morning, and found it surrounded by flowers. This contrasts with the occasion  a year ago when I laid a small posy there and wit was swiftly snatched away. At that time the memorial was obscured by a large notice about ‘safeguarding’, which has now gone.

A few feet away lies the lovely ‘Arundel Tomb’ of which Philip Larkin write,  moved by the way that the effigies of a knight and his lady are shown holding each other’s hands in death. ‘What will survive of us is love’, he concluded, reluctantly and conditionally. I think he was righter than he knew or wanted to be. I must now go to the special service (to be held at St Michaels’s Church at Cornhill in the City of London)

to remember Bishop Bell, whose life and work are commemorated today (the 58^th anniversary of his death) in the Anglican calendar.  

Some Thoughts on the Channel 4 Drama 'National Treasure'

I had high hopes of Channel 4’s new drama series ‘National Treasure’ , a fictional portrayal of a prominent showbusiness figure accused of long-ago sexual crimes.

But after two (of four) episodes I am losing hope that it will be good enough. Because for me the greatest possible horror in any such case is not that the accused may be guilty, but that he may be innocent. And I mean innocent. But the character played by Robbie Coltrane in ‘National Treasure’, a comedian called ‘Paul Finchley’,  has already been revealed to us as a serial adulterer, who has cheated on his wife (played by Julie Walters as a long-suffering devout Roman Catholic) all his life - and is still doing so despite barely being able to walk. He is also shown as a secret midnight peruser of internet pornography and perhaps (I am not clear from what I have seen what is intended. Perhaps I have missed something) as the sort of man who does not exactly resist the improper advances of rather young women. Even worse is being hinted at.

I have had letters from prisoners convicted (wrongly, they say) for sexual abuse, describing the misery in which they live. If they are indeed innocent (and this is perfectly possible in our current criminal justice system) then it is almost impossible to bear the thought of what they are going through. For me, the treatment they receive at the hands of some of their fellow-prisoners (which I  shall not detail because it is quite enough to have them in my memory without putting them in yours) is intolerable anyway, even if they are guilty. It is for the law to punish, and this should never be done through leaving convicted persons to the merciless anarchy of other criminals.

 

This is why I very much favour the reintroduction of far stricter discipline and authority in prisons. It is more humane than the current 'liberal' arrangements. I know that there are people (I meet them here) who rejoice in the torments inflicted on certain criminals by other inmates. I am appalled by this unChristian attitude, which I have sometimes found among left-wing liberals who simultaneously pose as ‘civilised’ by objecting to the death penalty.

So for me we need – at the very least - a drama about such a case in which the accused is not *known* by us (the audience) to be a transgressor. We should be in the position of a jury presented (as they are) with a man of previous good character suddenly beset with accusations of ghastly, unthinkable wickedness.

Others may disagree on what should happen next. For me, the most effective drama would involve a cloud of highly persuasive witnesses against the accused, securing a unanimous conviction. The convicted man should then be dragged off into the underworld amid abuse and execration, disowned by all, ruined, broken, humiliated beyond all humiliation.

But we should then be given, too late to help, impossible to produce in evidence, absolute knowledge that the accusations were all false from the start and that we have, in effect, watched,  been taken in by and have joined in a lynching.

Has this ever happened? I do not know. Nor do you. Will it? I should think so.

 

(By the way, I’d be grateful to be left alone at this point by the Jimmy Savile partisans who still seek to clear that name and try to recruit me to their cause. Savile, being dead, cannot be tried. Technically the presumption of innocence must be applied to him, despite the huge numbers of complaints made against him by living accusers and actual eyewitness evidence of his behaviour cited by others. But even mentioning his case in the same breath as certain others, especially that of the late Bishop George Bell, only damages those others).

But I think our attitude towards sexual abuse is now such that we do tend to presume guilt on this charge, and this presumption has poisoned the wells of justice very deeply. And I suspect that a good fictional drama would lead us on, through our own passions and self-righteousness, to an understanding of exactly where that presumption of guilt might lead an innocent man, and how it might do it. Maybe, the final episodes of ‘National Treasure’ will do this. But it seems to me that we already know too much about the fictional ‘Paul Finchley’ to be outraged or dismayed if he goes down in a fictional court.

.  

Some Thoughts on the New Film 'Anthropoid'

The City of Darkness

 

It must be 40 years since I first saw the film 'Operation Daybreak', about the assassination in Prague of the monster Reinhard Heydrich. I hadn’t been to Prague then (I would put that right two years later). That unique city, as imagined but never seen,  had a powerful, mythical, almost mystical hold over my mind. It still does, provided I stay away from it. Recent visits, in which I have come to see it as a modern place rather than a dark and lovely stage set on which good and evil do battle, have rather spoiled it for me. I do understand that its inhabitants much prefer it the way it is.

The Kafka associations and two films , ‘Operation Daybreak’ and Costa-Gavras’s now almost unobtainable ‘L’Aveu’ (‘The Confession’) about the Slansky show trials of 1953, helped fix it in my mind as a frightening place of violence, melancholy, gloom, betrayal, dungeons and defeat, but also a very beautiful one.  Later I would come to read Lionel Davidson’s charming and enthralling ‘Night of Wenceslas’, later very badly filmed, in which the city – lovely and captivating, but hiding terrible menace - plays a starring role.  As is the case with anyone in my generation, my mind was also full of black-and-white TV news pictures of Soviet tanks trundling through Wenceslas Square (which isn’t a square, as I now well know), bulldozing trams to one side (this sight made me realise what a potent thing a tank is. I’d seen trams and thought they were heavy, a useful obstruction if needed. But Moscow’s tanks just biffed them out of the way as if they were plastic toys). And I have some sort of memory of immense crowds at the funeral of Jan Palach, though perhaps I have made it up (having been privileged to see at first hand the equally enormous multitudes who turned up for the funeral of Czech Communism in the winter of 1989) . Then years of frozen silence.

 

An odd anomaly

 

I’m still not quite sure how ‘Operation Daybreak’, a western-made and financed film (it was called ‘The Price of Freedom’ in the USA, a title I’ll return to),  got the co-operation of the Communist Czechoslovak authorities, less than ten years after the extinction of the Prague Spring.  Remember, it is about Czechs trained in Britain, making an attack on the Germans in 1941-2. Czech co-operation with Britain in the 1939-45 war tended to be forgotten or suppressed. Warsaw Pact Czechoslovakia owed its territorial restoration (apart from sub-Carpathian Ukraine, then in Soviet hands, now in Ukraine) and its form of government to the USSR’s victory over Hitler and the resulting Yalta settlement. Likewise, they owed to Stalin the reunification of the country after Hitler’s removal of Slovakia from Prague’s control. Slovakia, encouraged by Berlin to break away from post Munich Czecho-Slovakia(note the hyphen added to the country’s name at the time), was treated very differently from the Czech lands under Nazi rule.  

They also owed the ethnic cleansing of German-speaking Czechoslovak citizens (thus ‘resolving’ the pre-war Sudeten German problem) mainly to the Soviets, who helped them carry it out with British and American blessing, under the deliberately forgotten Potsdam agreement.  

 

The Wrong Allies

We in Britain were by then (the mid-1970s) very much the wrong allies. We were on the opposite side of Europe, in NATO. And it went deeper than that . Not only had Britain abandoned Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938. It had then given a home to the exile government of Eduard Benes, the figurehead of Czech nationalism who was not really thought of as an ally by the Communists who seized power in Prague in 1948 in a ‘spontaneous’ mob-backed coup d’etat (which continued to fool some sympathisers for long afterwards, who described it as a ‘rising’ and argued that it was legitimate)..

It wasn’t as bad as it had been. The days were gone when Czech pilots, returning home to their supposedly liberated land from service in the RAF , were imprisoned as politically unreliable (see ‘Dark Blue World’, an interesting if disappointing film on this subject). But it wasn’t done to mention it, or draw attention to this awkward period in history.  I remember a British diplomat in Prague describing to me the little ceremony those Czech RAF fliers would try to hold each year at a war memorial in a Prague cemetery. Many would struggle into their old RAF uniforms. And the whole thing would be very aggressively watched, photographed and filmed by spooks and musclemen from the StB, the Communist Secret Police of the time. Their existence challenged the official orthodoxy, that liberation had come solely from Moscow.

Maybe the Prague Communists of the early 1970s just wanted the dollars, to help finance the mildly prosperous consumer society they were creating to soothe the wounds of 1968 and encourage forgetfulness.  Whatever the explanation, Prague was the star of the film , Prague as it then was, as I first saw it, black with age and neglect, falling to bits, indifferent to tourists, ancient,  sinister, seductive, shabby within and without, an inhabited cemetery of great loveliness and enormous gloom,  whispering from its many-spired sooty towers the last enchantments of an older, crueller, yet also more beautiful and more exciting age. Perhaps that is why , when the barbarities of the past came to life again the mid-20^th century, they did this so horribly in that particular city.

 

A Man So Horrible He had Two Funerals

One scene from ‘Operation Daybreak’  is probably clearer in my mind now than in the film. I find my imagination quite often embellishes and lengthens scenes in films watched long ago. When I finally track them down,  episodes which last many minutes in my recollection are over in 20 seconds. But the film-makers’ re-staging of Heydrich’s Prague funeral must have shocked the city at the time, only 35 years after the real thing. Hitler gave Heydrich  two lots of obsequies, one in Prague and one (with lots of Nordic fir trees and Wagner) in Berlin, with an armoured train-ride in between. This was not to make sure he was dead. The Prague ceremony was held to hammer home to the Czechs just who was in charge, and how much they were going to pay for the death of Hitler’s favourite. In the film it is a pagan occasion of barely-suppressed savagery and vengeance, the thudding SS drums a message of evil to come.

 

An SS Film Crew Makes a Horror Movie

I also recall a clever, deeply shocking shot of an SS camera crew, complete with clapperboard and very modern camera, but garbed in the armour, death’s head badges and deadly-black uniform of their hellish society, swinging their lenses towards the ruins of Lidice, one of two villages (everyone remembers Lidice, nobody remembers the other, Lezaky) destroyed and subjected to mass murder, including women and children,  as collective punishment. Unlike so many other German atrocities of the  period carried out in secret, this one was openly avowed and publicised by Berlin.  They wanted the world, and especially their subject peoples or those like us and the USSR, still insisting on fighting them,  to know they were capable of this. All of us live within a century of this event, an open, purposeful, publicised mass reprisal murder in civilised Europe. And yet we think we’re safe and that there is such a thing as progress. Lidice was only a small part of the bloodbath. Many others were murdered elsewhere.

Year later I saw the film again on a rather inadequate DVD seemingly made for the Arab market, in which the subtitles for the German-language segments were not much help. And yet it still had some of its power, after all that time. Anton Diffring, as Heydrich, was suitably hateful and arrogant – there was a legend that Heydrich had defiantly donned the ancient crown of Bohemia to underline his absolute power,  so activating an old curse and ensuring his death. He is shown doing so. In that part of the world, where violence and legend are in the bones of the landscape,  such things seem more credible.

 

From 'Daybreak' to 'Anthropoid' 

Now the story is once again the subject of a film ‘Anthropoid’. This is in fact the genuine name of the operation, which was nevr called ‘Daybreak’ , though it is a better title.  ‘Daybreak’ came from the title of the book about the event ‘Seven Men at Daybreak’ by Alan Burgess (once an RAF pilot) , a book now so rare that it is on sale for mad prices in the Internet, and so effectively unobtainable.

Much of this new film is spoiled for me by the casting of Cillian Murphy, the absurdly good-looking star of the unwatchably preposterous BBC drama ‘Peaky Blinders’, as Jozef Gabcik, one of the assassins.  You can find pictures 0f Sgt Gabcik ( a Slovak) on the Internet. His resemblance to Cillian Murphy is slight.  Perhaps as a side-effect of ‘Peaky Blinders’ (as so often in films about the past) no opportunity is lost (I put this mildly) for the lighting of a cigarette, though only the glamorous ignition tends to be shown, not the half-smoked stub jutting from the corner of the mouth or jammed between yellow fingers, nor the grinding out of it in some nasty place, let alone the revolting smelly piles of debris in ashtrays, or the jaundiced tinge the damned things left everywhere; let alone the grey lined faces of the smokers and their hacking, productive coughs with their ever-present promises of major phlegm expulsion.

I’ll be told that Anthony Andrews, as yet undiscovered by Brideshead, who played the same part in ‘Operation Daybreak, might also be a bit distractingly good looking. But somehow he wasn’t.  Andrews can efface his beauty quite a bit, when he chooses, and did so rather brilliantly in the later scenes of ‘Brideshead’ where he played a washed-up, broken old soak with great power.

What I can’t recall from ‘Daybreak’ and couldn’t get from ‘Anthropoid’ is any great consideration of the claim often made that Churchill thought the Czechs were a bit too quiescent and content under German occupation, and hoped to end that by killing Heydrich.  In short, he is said to have been counting on a severe retaliation by Hitler.  Though whether he expected what he got,  or rather what the poor Czechs got, who can say? Even Churchill, a man who knew a lot of history, may not have fathomed the National Socialist capacity for wickedness. Idealists are so much more dangerous than ordinary tyrants.

We did several rather questionable things during the long years when we had no army on the European continent, and to this day it is hard to discuss them without meeting the wall of rage which I encounter if I criticise our bombing of German civilians. NOTE: Since first writing this passage, with its reference to Churchill’s alleged attitude, I’ve made some effort to back it up with historical warrant, and can’t find anything which implicates Churchill, though another name does come up, which I’ll come to. I’ve kept it in because I am still not sure of the truth, would be glad of any contributions or references which either confirm it or explode it, and because I decided it would be dishonest to cut it out, as I have long believed it and often said it.  Certainly the Czechs were more lightly occupied than many other of Hitler’s subject peoples, their factories produced valuable armaments for the German Reich, and attempts to send in saboteurs by parachute often failed, ending in the denunciation of the agents or in the round-up and massacre of the resistance members who had helped them. 

 

They Rightly Feared Reprisals

But I will say one thing for ‘Anthropoid’ (which follows ‘Daybreak’ quite closely in many aspects but not all  - most modern film critics don’t seem to have seen ‘Daybreak’, or at least don’t mention it if they have). It makes it clear that those who helped Heydrich’s assassins did not, in many cases, find out till rather late what it was they were aiding – by which time, of course they were doomed to appalling fates by their participation. And it does not hide the fact that leading figures in the Czech resistance, on the spot, were horrified when they learned of the plan, opposed it and tried to get it stopped by appealing to London. (They were, in their defence, already gravely demoralised by the clever and efficient repression which Heydrich and his forerunners had visited on them. They had been penetrated and many of their best people had been arrested and murdered).  This is all true and very much confirmed by the authoritative book on the subject, Professor Callum Macdonald’s  1989 work ‘The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich’ .

According to Macdonald, the man who wanted to go ahead with the operation was Eduard Benes, who seems to have spoken personally to Gabcik before he set off. With the USSR now in the war, Benes need a major stroke against the Nazis to show that the non-Communist Czech resistance was capable of potent action. If Churchill opposed or encouraged this, I don’t know, and would be grateful for any reference.

I thought that the  depiction of the assassination in ‘Anthropoid’ was wrong because in it  the bomb aimed at Heydrich’s car also damages  a passing tram and wounds many of its occupants(the event took place on a hairpin bend in an untouristed part of Prague, north-west of the city centre). The earlier film shows the events taking place in a deserted street.   But Macdonald’s book confirms that ‘Anthropoid’ is  absolutely accurate. It also confirms that both assassins found girlfriends in Prague during the long months between their (botched) landing and the killing.

 

What would YOU have done? 

 

 

The treatment of the traitor Curda, who betrayed his comrades for a huge reward and to save his skin( see below), is perhaps a little inaccurate. I doubt that he was rotten from the start, and I don’t think the Gestapo had any need to beat his evidence out of him. He was just frightened out of his wits once the reprisals started, assumed the German would be in power forever, and did what many others would have done. Indeed, when he was brought back to Prague to be tried and hanged, he said in court that anyone else would have done what he did, given the huge size of the reward (and his likely fate if he was tracked down).

‘Anthropoid’ also invents an incident at the beginning of the film, in which the ordinary Czechs who discover the parachutists limping, lost, through the snow, appear to betray the two agents. This never happened. The men who found them helped them, and smuggled them to Prague. They were mistakenly dropped hundreds of miles from their intended landing point, missed their rendezvous and made contact with the resistance only by guesswork and luck, amid a great deal of entirely justified mistrust.

The end of the assassins’ story, with the two men and several other parachutists surrounded by the Waffen SS in a Prague Church, and their legendary, epic last strand against the Nazis (which really ought to be better known) is lengthily portrayed, as it must be. But it is not, alas,  the end.

 

Unbearable to watch

In both films the Moravec family who sheltered the assassins are prominently featured, especially Mrs Moravcova and her gentle, violin-playing, hero-worshipping teenage son Ata. Anyone who knows the story must tremble for those courageous, honourable people as soon as the assassins come into their lives.  And they duly encounter a fate so horrible and distressing that I will not recount it in detail here. In my view ‘Anthropoid’ gives too much detail of that fate, but you could, I suppose,  make a moral case for doing so, if only to remind people of how bottomlessly wrong torture is and how terribly human beings can behave when they think that cruelty is justified by necessity. But I thought we knew that about the Nazis. Maybe we are forgetting it. Cover your eyes if you prefer.

You can certainly make such a case for the awful scenes of torture shown in ‘The Battle of Algiers’, a film which did a lot to convince me that there can never be any excuse for the use of this method by any country which calls itself civilised, whatever the supposed gains.

Nazi torture, of course, requires no such examination. It involves the servants of evil doing evil things for evil ends. It is uncomplicatedly wrong. The issue here is quite different. Knowing what we knew of the German National Socialists, and of the sordid, cruel gangster Heydrich¸ were we right to embark on an operation which was more or less bound to bring about retaliation of a mediaeval type (as it indeed it did)?

There is something in me that says no, and I am not satisfied by being told in the closing credits that Heydrich was an architect of the Holocaust (as indeed he was). He was a foul man, a nasty bullying philanderer and pervert who ceaselessly betrayed his ‘good Nazi’ wife (most of the Nazi elite were amoral in their personal lives, to put it mildly, a fact not often dwelt upon, for some reason. Heydrich’s sordid morals did not harm him in the eyes of Hitler)  as well as a mass killer and wielder of terror.

Nor am I impressed by the other postscript in which it is stated that, after the killing of Heydrich, Britain revoked the Munich agreement and welcomed Czechoslovakia as a full participant in the alliance for freedom. This just draws attention to the fact that, before 1942, the relationship was much more ambiguous – and to the fact that ‘freedom’ for Czechoslovakia took the form, after Yalta, of subjection to Soviet Power for 40 long hard years, plus the savage expulsion of ethnic Germans mentioned above and described here in my posting on the Potsdam Agreement  and the fine book about it by R.M.Douglas ‘Orderly and Humane’  http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/orderly-and-humane.html

 

Happily Ever After?

I also note that in the end, Czechoslovakia was dismantled altogether, once again  waving goodbye to Slovakia (Benes would have been appalled by this, I am sure)   and absorbed, in pieces,  into the EU. Does any of this justify what we see happening to poor Ata Moravec, whose pitiable fate in the film might be said to represent all the thousands of other gentle people hacked and smashed and torn to pieces in the red mist of vengeance which followed the assassination of Heydrich?  I am by no means sure that it does.

Peter Hitchens FAQs

Here, elsewhere and on Twitter I am frequently asked several questions which I weary of answering.

A reader suggested I might create a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ page to which I could direct such questions in future.

Here it is.

Any further suggestions will be gratefully received

Q.Why do you call yourself ClarkeMicah on Twitter?

A.You’ll have to work out why I cannot use my own name. I had wanted to call myself ‘MicahClarke’, the name of a favourite historical novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, about the Monmouth Rebellion and the Battle of Sedgemoor. But this was taken. So I reversed it. And now I am stuck with it. By the way ‘Micah ‘ for those unfamiliar with either the Bible, Protestant England or literature, is pronounced to rhyme with ‘Leica’, not with ‘bleaker’.

Q.You are a Tory, why do you support renationalisation of the railways, oppose foreign wars and defend Jeremy Corbyn?

A.I am not a Tory. I loathe the Tory party, which has embraced modern left-wing ideas without understanding them, in an attempt to survive. I hope for its collapse. I am a social, moral and political conservative. I judge policies by asking if they are good for the country. I disagree with much that Corbyn thinks, says and does but feel he should be given a fair hearing. The British political media (see my book ‘the Cameron Delusion’ ) are much too close to power and much too unanimous. I refuse to go along with this

Q.Why don’t you support UKIP?

A.I think it is a Dad’s Army party, a mixture of cravat-wearing retired colonels, wide boys and Thatcherite nostalgists. Its leader (most of the time), Nigel Farage, is not a moral conservative and favours relaxing the drug laws. Were I to endorse *any* party, I would have it dangling round my neck like an albatross, and be made responsible for every stupid thing it then did. I think this would be a mistake. One day, a new party may emerge from the wreckage of the Tory Party which I feel I can support. But I see no signs of any such thing

Q.You are very much against legalising cannabis. Have you ever taken illegal drugs?

A. To my lasting and continuing shame and regret ,yes, when I was in my mid-teens I did do this stupid, wrong thing in the period , 50 years ago, when prosecutions of leading rock stars for drug offences were overturned, thanks to the actions of establishment figures, and I (correctly) saw that the law and the state were no longer serious about the issue. I had no idea of the dangers I was courting, and was far too selfish to consider the horrible possible consequences for my parents. I despise politicians who confess past drug use without any serious regret, or who refuse to say. That is why I make this full statement

Q.What about alcohol?

A.I drink very moderately, seldom more than a single glass of wine or pint of beer. I believe that, if alcohol were being introduced into our society now, and was illegal, it would be folly to legalise it. But I also believe that drugs which have been legal *and in mass use* for centuries, cannot realistically be banned. Present-day Iran is proof of this. I do however support the return of the alcohol licensing laws which existed in this country between 1915 and 1985. Under which pubs were closed for much of the day and alcohol was in general harder to find and more expensive to buy.

 

I believe this prevented much misery, domestic abuse and other crime.  At the time the Thatcher government was destroying the alcohol laws, I had no platform from which to criticise them, though I was aware of what was going on and much distressed by false government claims that longer drinking hours would not lead to greater disorder. New Labour did make this worse, but the policy was bipartisan, and this should never be forgotten.

Q.What are your religious beliefs?

A.I am a broad-church Anglican, Catholic and Reformed, opposed to religious factionalism and sectarianism and uninterested in telling anyone else what to believe. In return, I ask not to be told what to believe by other people. I am bored by theological disputes, and take an inclusivist view of other faiths. My own religious opinions are best summed up in the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer, especially the Collects. I am not a Bible literalist and believe its many differing books must be read with discrimination and understanding. Some are poetry, some prophecy, some political tract, some legal manuals, some history and some exhortation. It would be absurd to treat them all the same.

Q.Did you have a conversion experience? I have read something about a picture you saw that made you believe in God.

A. Absolutely not. My belief in God was a rational choice based on many ordinary material experiences, on reason and on hope; My detailed religious affiliations even more so. The picture, a Last Judgement by Rogier van der Weyden, in Beaune, just scared the pants off me. But I remained an atheist for some time after I saw it.

Q.What thinkers have influenced you?

A.None especially, though Edmund Burke is a useful corrective to the tendency among 18^th century writers to see the French Revolution as a good thing, which it wasn’t. As an ex-Marxist and Trotskyist, I have a better idea than most conservatives of what I am opposing. I am a jobbing scribbler, not an intellectual. My beliefs have been formed by almost 40 years on Fleet Street, which I sometimes describe as ‘The University of Fleet Street’. This, together with more than three years spent on evening papers in Swindon and Coventry (originally as an indentured apprentice) has given me a great deal of direct historical and practical knowledge about politics, foreign affairs and the application of ideas in practice. During this time I have been an education reporter, an industrial and labour reporter, a political reporter, a defence and diplomatic correspondent and resident correspondent in both Moscow (1990-92) and Washington DC (1993-95).  I have seen (without intending to) open conflict in Romania in 1989, Lithuania in 1991, Somalia in 1992. I have, on my last counted, visited 57 countries.  I write from time to time about books which I have liked and from which I have gained  (usually light novels and heavy histories, I struggle with ‘serious’ literature, and literary criticism makes me feel numb all over). These can be found indexed under ‘culture’ on my blog.  I urge everyone to read George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. Everyone.

Q.Why are you so concerned about the abuse allegations against the late Bishop Bell? 

A. First because, having helped make a BBC Radio 4 'Great Lives' programme in which I praised several of his actions, I felt it my personal duty to defend that judgment when he was attacked. But also for two other reasons. 1. Bell's reputation is hugely important because of his lonely, near-solitary principled opposition to the deliberate British bombing of German civilians during World War Two (this was our policy, though few now realise it). 2. The way in which the Church of England failed to protect that reputation, and abandoned the most basic rules of justice in handling the accusation against him. Please see

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/03/murder-in-the-cathedral-the-casual-wrecking-of-a-great-name.html

Q.Have you written any books? Are you writing any now?

A.I have written several: ‘The Abolition of Britain’ is a description of the cultural revolution which transformed this country during the late 20^th century. ‘The Abolition of Liberty’ (originally ‘A Brief History of Crime’) argues that a free country is also one which severely deters crime, and that the two are in fact interdependent. It was sparked off by George Orwell’s remark in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ about the hanging judge who is stupid but also incorruptible. ‘The Cameron Delusion’ (originally ‘The Broken Compass’) examines the collapse of traditional Labour vs Tory politics, the misleading nature of most British political journalism and some of my reasons for abandoning the left. ‘The Rage Against God’ is a response to my brother’s book ‘God is not Great’, an examination of the strong links between revolutionary politics and atheism, and an attack on the certainties (and intolerance and  illiberalism) of the new atheists. ‘The War We Never Fought – The British Establishment’s Surrender to Drugs’ is exactly what it sounds  like. All are available as e-books or audiobooks. Any library will get them for you, on inter-library loan if they don't have them.

My latest book ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ is a compilation of foreign despatches from all over the world, including China, Russia, Iraq, Egypt,  Ukraine, North Korea, Bhutan and India. It is only available as an e-book.  A compendium of ‘Daily Express’ columns, ‘Monday Morning Blues’ can still be found in obscure second-hand bookshops if anyone really wants it. I was feeling my way as a columnist at the time (the early Blair era) and regard it as a curiosity. 

I am currently contracted to write a further book ‘The Phoney Victory’ about the terrible price we pay for the prevailing myth about World War Two, that it was an uncomplicated good war between good and evil, in which good triumphed., and for the connected myth that ‘We, the British won the war’. I am only just digging the foundations of this.

Q.You go on about grammar schools? Did you go to one?

A. No. I was privately educated to the age of 15, then attended a College of Further Education, then went to University ( at York). I don’t discuss my private life but am prepared to say that, where and when I have been able to, I have educated my children privately. Had I lived in an area where grammar schools were available, I would have hoped they would have been able to attend such schools. But I do not.

Q.Do you really claim that all terrorism is caused by drugs?

A. No. This is what I actually say:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/he-wasnt-no-terrorist-bruv-reflections-on-the-leytonstone-knife-outrage.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/11/the-use-of-mind-altering-drugs-by-terrorists-some-new-facts.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/07/more-facts-on-the-relation-between-mass-killings-and-mind-altering-drugs.html

Q.Do you really think there’s no such thing as addiction?

A.  Do *you* really think there *is* any such thing. What’s your evidence? Please see

https://citizensane.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/further-adventures-with-peter-hitchens/

Q.You have some pretty revolting ideas about ADHD, antidepressants and Dyslexia, don’t you?

A.I think they are pretty well-thought-out, myself, see below,

The following links go into more detail about some of the above .

What about alcohol?

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/02/the-continuing-crisis-and-some-responses.html

Grammar schools reinforce privilege, surely?

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/07/a-new-discussion-about-school-selection-.html

‘Dyslexia’

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/06/does_dyslexia_e.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/07/dyslexiaexploded-an-article-form-2007-missing-from-the-archive.html

‘ADHD’

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/05/the-adhd-fantasy-posted-once-more.html

‘Antidepressants’

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/01/time-for-some-serious-thought-about-antidepressants.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/the-anti-depressant-controversy-again.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2323104/PETER-HITCHENS-Wondering-ignored-kidnapper-Ohio-Well-ignoring-MUCH-bigger.html

 

NB : Suggestions for further subjects gratefully received.

 

In a free state, Ministers do not 'run the country'

Every year in the depth of summer there are stories in the papers about some middle-ranking Cabinet Minister (the most recent was Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, the Foreign Secretary ‘running the country’ because the Prime Minister is away. These stories make me grind my teeth in rage.

In free lands, the government does not ‘run the country’. In fact, when the government is entirely absent ( as was the case for ages in Belgium recently, and is more or less the case now in Ireland and Spain) things often carry on just as well, if not better, than they did when there was an administration in place.

But I think this is (or was)  especially so in England, a land where for centuries self-reliant people have obeyed and enforced the Law of the Land, devised by them for their own pleasure and convenience.

The age and power of this idea isn’t very obvious in London. The capital is full of symbols of government, and much of the rest of it is an increasingly unattractive megacity in which the impossibly rich are served by the unconscionably poor in grotesque, even gross surroundings.  

But over the past few weeks I’ve been travelling through a part of the country that is often unvisited, stretching from Nottingham over towards the east coast.

And one sees, in the old heart of Nottingham, in the handsome broad streets of Derby , the glorious market square of Newark and the profound Anglican peace and elegance and beauty of Southwell (whose unvisited Minster contains some of the loveliest, most exuberant carved stone in Europe), the architectural relics of English independence and liberty.

There’s a plain, four-square, unpretending solidity about this style of building. It is confident without being arrogant, mostly undecorated, predominantly brick, its streets are not too straight or regular but its displays of wealth don’t have the cold haughty grandeur of their French equivalents. These houses were inhabited by stout, independent men who would stand up for themselves and not be ordered about, and their governments knew it, and treated them accordingly.

It speaks of an age in which a Member of Parliament really was somebody, and so was a Justice of the Peace and a Rector, and the editor of the town’s newspaper, and the head master (two words, not one) of its grammar school.

Now most of these people are cyphers, stifled into obedience by whips, quangoes and government inspectors,  and every town is pushed towards sameness and subservience.

And if it carries on like this much longer, someone like Al Johnson really will be ‘running the country’ one day,. Though why anyone would ask him to do so, I do not know.

Look out! They're sneaking up on you with a chemical cosh

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The most sinister thing I have heard all year was this week’s revelation that British government doctors secretly sought to drug troublesome teenagers in the 1960s – and we have only just found out.

One of the pills they wanted to use was called Haloperidol. Its side effects include incurable lifelong twitching, delirium and rigid muscles.

This plan was stopped, but another worrying substance, Beclamide, was given to boys at a Yorkshire ‘Approved School’ (a state-inspected home for troubled teens). Neither the boys nor their parents were told of this experiment.

To qualify for the secret chemical cosh, you had to be ‘impulsive, explosive, irritable, restless and aggressive’, which for teenage boys is more or less a description of being alive and awake. Both schemes were endorsed by the Home Office’s own in-house psychiatrist, Pamela Mason. How many other such horrors happened – are perhaps still happening – without us knowing?

I have long suspected that the Home Office – and much of our elite – are quite keen on doping the population. Despite making various militant noises over the years, this secretive department has quietly filleted the drug laws so that they are now the boneless wonder of the western world.

And for many years our prisons have pretended not to notice the epidemic use of illegal narcotics behind bars. I suspect the authorities hoped prisoners would be so stupefied that they would not riot, or escape in large numbers – things the Government greatly fears, and which have destroyed many Cabinet Ministers.

This policy is now going badly wrong, as cannabis is not in fact the peaceful drug some claim. Many of the drugs readily available in jail, such as the synthetic ‘Spice’, make their users more violent, not less.

The Government has also been quite happy to allow pharmaceutical companies to run huge experiments on adults and children with sketchily tested and unproven tablets that I would not give to a dog, even if I disliked it.

Astonishing numbers of people are now regularly taking mind-altering drugs – Ritalin for children who get bored in school, ‘antidepressants’ for unhappy adults (and sometimes both together, as adults now have ‘ADHD’ and children are allegedly ‘depressed’). Having wrongly feared that George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare of drabness and surveillance would come true, we missed the much more accurate warning in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Huxley didn’t just foresee the state rummaging about in the womb, the abolition of parents, the family and private life, the cheery disposal of the old and ill, and the distraction of a wage-slave population by flashy entertainment and sex.

He predicted the invention of an all-purpose happiness drug called ‘Soma’. It would keep the middle classes content, and could be used in spray form to quell riots by the poor. He said it would have ‘all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects… there is always delicious Soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon’.

They haven’t actually invented it yet. Huxley’s Soma was harmless, which today’s drugs somehow never are. But they are working on it. And you might like to know the name of the brilliant, subtle, well-funded campaign to legalise marijuana launched almost half a century ago by the late Steve Abrams (I discussed it with him at length before he died). It was ‘Soma’.

Rewriting our history? That's hard to Swallow

As a child I never took to Swallows And Amazons. 

I had a boarding school headmaster who drove us ceaselessly out of doors, made us accompany him on to the heaving, open sea (without lifejackets) in an ancient ketch, taught us to make fires, camp in the rain, gut fish and endure more than our fair share of mud, wet and cold.

I had no idea how lucky I was, and I am sure it was very good for me. But as a result I didn’t much want to read about such things, let alone do them on my holidays. And I only came to know Arthur Ransome’s books when I read them to my own children.

I instantly recognised the children and adults in them, the way they thought and spoke, and the lives they lived. I could guess in detail what their homes or schools were like, though they were never described. I knew (I still do) what a country station platform felt and sounded like on a summer afternoon just after the train had steamed away. I also knew (as the film-makers don’t) that British Railways didn’t exist in 1935. And I knew that pemmican (a joke in the books) was never on sale in tins in British grocers’ shops; and that telegrams came in khaki-yellow envelopes.

But the new film suffers from the constant problem of modern people. They can’t begin to imagine the recent past and know almost nothing about it.

One thing that struck me is that the children in the film (pictured above) seem to be much ruder to each other than I remember from the books. The girls are also a lot screamier. Of course, hardly anything really happened in most of the books. It was all imagination, a thing which has died in the age of TV and computers. And you can see why they inserted an absurd plot about Russian spies. Odd that it blames Russia for coming up with the idea for the atom bomb, when this was from the first a scheme dreamt up by Western idealist scientists horrified by Hitler.

People keep telling me these things don’t matter. But they do. If we get the past wrong, we will get the future wrong, as we prove every day.

The real scandal of Corbyn's empty seats

Actually, I can quite see why Jeremy Corbyn thought that train was full. Rail companies punish anyone who just wants to travel when he feels like it.

So we’re all forced to make reservations we don’t want, and dozens of seats are blocked by this and festooned with silly labels.

Then there’s the strange urge to make train travel even worse than going by plane, including nose-to-tail seats crammed close together, cunningly arranged to obscure the windows.

It’s increasingly hard to spot a vacant place. I suspect most of those having a go at the Labour leader haven’t done much second (sorry ‘standard’) class travel by train recently.

*********

I see we now have flashily painted ‘Border Force’ cutters with go-faster stripes, just like the US Coastguard.

I detect the hand of Chairman May and her clever PR team when they were still at the Home Office. But what use is all this? It will be worth checking in six months what has happened to the six migrants picked up by HMC Valiant off the Kent coast on Thursday.

Your guess is as good as mine, but unlike Australia, we have no remote islands where we can put such people.

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

 

Radio 4's Debate on Prison

This debate can now be heard here

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pj2pk

 It lasts 45 minutes, and is obviously edited down from a far longer recording. I make no complaint ( if I cannot take a joke, I shouldn't have joined). I merely point out the difference in nature between my contributions and those of practically everyone else who took part.

 

These are, in my view, twofold. My use of language is incomparably more direct and concise than that of my fellow panellists or of the presenter. Two the principal concern of everyone else on the programme was the effect of prison on its inmates. While this is a matter of importance (and I did not and do not ignore it) this is far less important than its effect on potential wrongdoers, who are deterred from wrong by fear of prison, and on those many people who will become victims of crime if prison fails to deter - and who will be spared this horror if it succeeds.

I continue to be impressed by the lack of self-seeking in Erwin James's attitude towards his past crimes. And I am sorry we had no time to touch on the subject of prison suicides, a dreadful scourge, and a reflection the despair these places create in many of those confined to them for long periods.

 

I have also noticed that my unchallengeable factual statement, that most of those in prison are habitual criminals *long before they get there*, a truth which undermines about 90% of the liberal case in itself is (like my unchallengeable factual statements on the non-existent war on drugs) simply ignored by my opponents and never acknowledged, addressed or rebutted.

 

Such is debate in modern Britain, where moral conservatism is regarded as shocking, counter-intuitive and transgressive (note the point in the debate where my argument about the abolition of the presumption of innocence in many sexual offence cases is dismissed as tangential) .

 

***AS a footnote, I might add that I was telephoned this morning by an arm of the BBC this morning and asked if I would comment on the French ban on 'Burkinis'. When I said ( as any reader of mine would have expected) that I strongly deplored the ban and that he state has no business telling people what to wear, I could feel the researcher's interest waning down the phone line. Oh, actually, no, they didn't want me after all. As a 'right-wing' person, I had been assumed to have a crude and oppressive view. When I failed to provide one, I had no further use for them.

 

 

 

 

The Hijab versus the Bikini

I am always risking wilful misunderstanding, and have grown to expect it and to be used to it. But it can also be frustrating. A few months ago I commented on the use of a hijab-wearing model by a British advertiser, and said this was significant, as it was. I was subjected to all kinds of thought-police interrogations whose aim was clearly designed to make me confess to some shameful phobia and (quite irrelevantly, since Islam is not an ethnic group but a religion which all may join) ‘racism’.

 

I confess that I became so scornful towards these questions that I said less than I would have done had they asked me intelligent things.

As I am old enough to remember when most Englishwomen covered their heads in public, often with not-very-elegant headscarves tied savagely beneath their chins as they bent to face the drizzle and the east wind, I find all kinds of odd emotions stirred by the sight of the scarf’s return on our formerly bare-headed streets. I certainly don’t feel an unmixed hostility, more a curiosity and a sort of respect.

I don’t know, and cannot tell, how much of the Muslim scarf-wearing is voluntary and how much is forced on women by husbands, imams and indeed the Islamic sisterhood, which – having embraced the veil in various forms for whatever reason – is no doubt anxious to see others do the same. It’s a kind of conformism. Squads of veil-wearers take to the streets in some Muslim cities, cheerily urging uncovered women to adopt the hijab or the niqab.  

 

Having grown used to it in London, I’m not even especially  bothered by the severity of the niqab, the full-face veil with a narrow slit for the eyes , so often wrongly described as a burqa. On a visit to Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan I encountered the most extreme form of veiling, where the women’s heads seem totally covered with fairly thick cloth (they must be able to see out, but it is not obvious how) , and they look shockingly like walking corpses in their shrouds risen from the tomb. That I did find worrying and hard to look at.

But I also wrote the words below about a visit to Iran (to the Shrine city of Mashhad, where I was hospitably invited into several homes where some women were uncovered but others remained veiled). In the case I describe the woman involved, a schoolteacher articulately and rather fiercely defended her style of dress to me. I tried to reflect this in what I wrote:

‘ There is more than one Iran, and even the passionately Islamic version should not be dismissed with scorn or distaste, though some of it remains baffling or repellent to us. One of the most articulate and intelligent people I met was a young schoolteacher, the mother of a young child. It was clear that her relationship with her husband was that of an equal. Yet as we discussed propaganda in the classroom, I was greatly struck by her extraordinary, medieval, night-black robes, so intensely sombre that they darkened the well-lit room in which we sat and so emphatically, ferociously modest that they represented an unspoken, passionate argument against secular modernity and all its works.’

In writing that I did not alter by one jot or tittle my absolute opposition to Islamic ideas of marriage or of the legal status  of women. These can and do exist independently of any dress code. Nor do I believe that women are necessarily oppressed or repressed by modesty, provided that they choose it for themselves. On the other hand I remain totally unconvinced by those left-wing Western feminists who try to claim that the Muslim dress code is ‘liberating’. It certainly isn’t in their terms, and I believe they say this for the same reasons that Ken Livingstone and other British male leftists try to suck up to Islam. They think Islam is just a squad of voters which can be appeased into supporting the left’s project forever.  

But it is not. It is a very serious, very determined religion and if, one day , English women find themselves compelled to cover themselves in black shrouds to venture on to the street, it will be because a) we completely rejected any Western philosophy or religion which might have helped us pull back from the wilder bits of the sexual revolution, so ceding that task to Islam,  and b) we did not understand just how determined, uncompromising and tough a  religion can be , because we no longer have one of our own.

I was thinking of the Mashhad schoolteacher when I wrote my brief few sentences about the Egyptian beach volleyball player  Doaa Elghobashy . She says ( see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37009324 ) that her headwear is her own choice, and she seems to have had to battle a bit with the Olympic authorities to be allowed to wear it. Her team-mates remained bare-headed.

I am against this being a divide between the Muslim world and the West. I don’t see why Western women shouldn’t object for their own reasons  to the near-nakedness that (in some cases) they now come under pressure to adopt in certain circumstances. Is it really so empowering and liberating? Is it truly voluntary? If we can ask this about the hijab, we can surely ask it about the Beach Volleyball bikini.

I am also convinced that the ‘West’ will grow tired of the moral and sexual revolution, which has now been taking place without pause for about 50 years. Such moral counter-revolutions have happened before in  human history, or how did the Victorian age come about? And it is almost bound to happen again. Who will lead it? Last time it was people such as John Wesley, whose work came to fruition in Victoria’s reign. If we don’t find his successor, it will be imams who do so.

PETER HITCHENS: Grammar wreckers KNEW they would make our schools worse

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Here's why the quarrel about grammar schools never ends: it is not really about schools, but about what sort of country this should be.
Grammar schools stood for adult authority, for discipline, for tradition, for hard work first and reward afterwards, and for self-improvement. They also tended to assume that boys and girls were different, and so educated them apart from each other. I like these things, but many don’t.

Old-fashioned Labour saw the point of this. They realised that it helped the poor become better-off and to have better lives and more power. They created a peaceful revolution that changed Britain for the better. Labour councils used to build new grammar schools and be proud of them.

But the modern liberal Left don’t like any of these ideas. They would rather teach children how to have sex than teach them to believe in God. Especially they don’t think parents or teachers should have any authority over the young. The State should be trusted to tell them what to think. They should look to the State for any improvement in their lives.

They don’t like the idea that there are fixed things that you just have to learn – which is why the teaching of languages and sciences is shrivelling in our schools. The people who smashed up more than a thousand of the best state secondary schools in the world didn’t do it to make education better. They knew it would make it worse for bright children.

In one case, that of Sir Graham Savage, they openly admitted this. They did it to make the country more ‘democratic’, more like the USA. They have made it like the worst bits, but very unlike the best bits.

How odd it is to recall that in my childhood there was a thing called the ‘brain drain’, which meant British scientists being lured away to the USA because they weren’t educating enough of them. And in those days a set of English A-levels was said to be equal to an American university degree. It isn’t so now. The enemies of grammars really should stop lying about the subject to get their way.

They moan about those who don’t get into grammars. But what about the huge numbers who can’t get into good comprehensives, and are dumped in vast bog-standard comps which are, in reality, worse than the old secondary moderns.

Of course selection for any school has losers as well as winners. But we have selection in our supposedly comprehensive schools. It is mainly done through the secret privileges (fake religious belief, close knowledge of feeder schools etc) exercised by sharp-elbowed, well-off parents. How is this better than selection by ability?
A 2010 survey by the Sutton Trust found that comprehensive schools in England are highly socially segregated. In fact, the country’s leading comprehensives are more socially exclusive than the remaining grammar schools.

Both the 164 (then remaining) grammars and the 164 most socially selective comprehensives drew pupils from areas where about 20 per cent of children were from poor homes. But the supposed comprehensives were more socially selective, taking only 9.2 per cent of their pupils from poor homes, while the grammars took 13.5 per cent. Who’s democratic now?

In fact, most of the remaining grammars are so besieged by middle-class commuters hiring tutors that their entry figures are utterly distorted. If we still had a national grammar system they would be far fairer than the top comprehensives are.

I wish I thought Theresa May really wanted to restore grammars. This has been successfully done in the former East Germany. But I fear that this is just a token move to try to hold on the support of the many voters who want to see this change. Even so, it is a good deal better than nothing, and a sign that this dreadful national error may one day be reversed.

A modest victory for decency

Islam’s real challenge to Western society is not terrorism. With a bit of resolve and common sense we can always defeat this filthy thing, and most Muslims would (in my view) be as happy as us if we did.

No, the challenge comes from Islam’s near-total monopoly on things we used to value quite a bit and then totally gave up – female modesty being one of them. And yes, I know that plenty of other things, much more controversial, come with the package.

Pictures of Egypt’s veiled and covered Doaa Elghobashy, right, competing against bikini-clad Western opponents in the Olympic beach volleyball, are very thought-provoking.

You don’t have to go more than 100 years back to find Western women who would have had much more in common – in attitudes and dress – with Ms Elghobashy than they did with her near-naked rivals.

I often wonder if our society will sicken and tire of its seemingly endless relaxation of rules. Such things have happened before. If it does, the Muslim religion may be very well-positioned to lead the counter-revolution. I don’t want this to happen. I just think it might.

*****

Shouldn’t we have a formal ceremony, with parchment documents, trumpets and heralds, to declare that the ‘war on drugs’ is over? Then at least Sir Richard Branson would stop claiming tediously and inaccurately that we groan under a cruel regime of prohibition.

If the Government still seriously disapproves of illegal drugs, explain this: EU enthusiast and hereditary Labour politician Will Straw (son of Jack) has been awarded a CBE, a heavyweight mid-ranking honour one down from a knighthood, aged 36, despite being caught (aged 17) trying to sell cannabis to a newspaper reporter. Indeed, for many people this event is the most memorable thing about him.

He went on to boast that he had carried on smoking the drug for the next nine years.
There was a bit of a fuss about the award – but it wasn’t about the illegal drugs.
Stop pretending we are actually trying to do anything about this.

*****

Of course judges should not swear in court, especially at defendants. Justice is not emotional revenge, but a cold, rational process where we all try to keep our feelings out of it.

Judges hold the keys to the prisons. They can change a convicted person’s life utterly. To wield such power, they have to be cool and self-controlled.
In fact the person Judge Patricia Lynch swore at is pathetic, fat and lonely – a dismal life probably made worse by taking State-approved ‘antidepressant’ drugs, the failed panacea of our age. Stupid four-letter words are all that is left to such people.

Her Majesty’s judges shouldn’t stoop to such sad things. Only two kinds of people use this language in public. The powerful, who employ it to bully, and the inadequate, who have no other way of expressing themselves.

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