'Dyslexia' - a pernicious myth exploded,

The following articles. published in the Mail on Sunday on 2nd March and 3rd June 2007, are for some reason not easily found in the archives of this blog. As I'm currently running into various people who still think this imaginary complaint exists, I thought I would revive them and post them here.

 

Dyslexia is not a disease. It is an excuse for bad teachers By: Peter Hitchens I DOUBT there has ever been a society so easily fooled by pseudo-science and quackery as ours is. Millions of healthy people take happy pills that do them obvious harm, and are increasingly correlated with inexplicable suicide and worse. Legions of healthy children are drugged into numbness because they fidget during boring lessons, and countless people are persuaded that they or their children suffer from a supposed disease called 'dyslexia', even though there is no evidence at all that it exists. A few weeks ago I rejoiced at the first major cracks in this great towering dam of lies. Dr Richard Saul brought out his courageous and overdue book, ADHD Does Not Exist. I also urge everyone to read James Davies's book Cracked, on the inflated claims of psychiatry since it sold its soul to the pill-makers. Now comes The Dyslexia Debate, published yesterday, a rigorous study of this alleged ailment by two distinguished academics - Professor Julian Elliott of Durham University, and Professor Elena Grigorenko of Yale University. Their book makes several points. There is no clear definition of what 'dyslexia' is. There is no objective diagnosis of it. Nobody can agree on how many people suffer from it. The widespread belief that it is linked with high intelligence does not stand up to analysis. And, as Parliament's Select Committee on Science and Technology said in 2009: 'There is no convincing evidence that if a child with dyslexia is not labelled as dyslexic, but receives full support for his or her reading difficulty, that the child will do any worse than a child who is labelled dyslexic and then receives special help.' THIS is because both are given exactly the same treatment. But as the book's authors say: 'Being labelled dyslexic can be perceived as desirable for many reasons.' These include extra resources and extra time in exams. And then there's the hope that it will 'reduce the shame and embarrassment that are often the consequence of literacy difficulties. It may help exculpate the child, parents and teachers from any perceived sense of responsibility'. I think that last point is the decisive one and the reason for the beetroot-faced fury that greets any critic of 'dyslexia' (and will probably greet this book and article). If it's really a disease, it's nobody's fault. But it is somebody's fault. For the book also describes the furious resistance, among teachers, to proven methods of teaching children to read. Such methods have been advocated by experts since Rudolf Flesch wrote his devastating book Why Johnny Can't Read almost 60 years ago. There may well be a small number of children who have physical problems that stop them learning to read. The invention of 'dyslexia' does nothing to help them. It means they are uselessly lumped in with millions of others who have simply been badly taught. It also does nothing for that great majority of poor readers. They are robbed of one of life's great pleasures and essential skills. What they need, what we all need, is proper old-fashioned teaching, and who cares if the silly teachers think it is 'authoritarian'? That's what teaching is.

DYSLEXIA? A FANTASY TO EXCUSE THE LIBERAL WRECKERS By: PETER HITCHENS DONNING my stab proof vest and my anti-slime suit, I'd like to praise Professor Julian Elliott of Durham University for daring to state the truth. Dyslexia is a fantasy. This is especially important in the exam season. A bewildering number of students claim extra time, demand differently coloured question papers or are issued with equipment worth up to £10,000 – at our expense – on the grounds that they are sufferers from this fictional complaint. Those who take their exams without these things are, with reason, growing more and more resentful about this special treatment. Like its equally suspect cousin 'ADHD', dyslexia is a symptom of a society in trouble and an education system wrecked by liberals. Rather than admit their policies are wrong, the liberals pretend millions of perfectly healthy, intelligent young people are in some way disabled. Their really clever move is to persuade the victims of this trick to rejoice in their victimhood. The enraged letters and emails I shall now get, claiming to be 'insulted', will come from healthy, intelligent people who actually want to believe they have 'dyslexia', or from their parents. Perhaps a small minority of them really do have something physically wrong with them. If so, their cases are completely different from the majority, and shouldn't be bracketed with them. Most alleged dyslexics have simply never been taught to read properly, thanks to some of the worst schools in the rich world and the dogmatic refusal of many teachers to use the one tried, effective method – synthetic phonics. Instead, even now, many persist in the 'mixture of methods' which confuses pupils. It often also confuses parents who are assured that synthetic phonics are part of this mixture. But phonics must be taught exclusively to work. Meanwhile, TV and computer games have displaced books in most children's lives. Few now read regularly for pleasure. Without Harry Potter there would be fewer still. Professor Elliott, an educational psychologist, points out that there is no clear diagnosis of dyslexia.There are at least 28 different definitions of it. Yet parents, alleged sufferers and teachers actively welcome the classification – as it relieves them of responsibility for the trouble. But in countries where this fad is not indulged, the schools still teach reading properly. And these countries are our rivals in a world where a growing contest for scarce energy means Britain's days of wealthy security may be numbered – and will be numbered if we don't stop making excuses for ourselves.

PETER HITCHENS: Nutrition 'experts' are stuffing us full of low-cal baloney

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Whenever I see a ‘low-fat muffin’ in a coffee shop, I have to control an urge to pick it up, jump on it and shout rude words. I am myself an expert in getting fat, and know that this evil blob of sugar and starch is a rapid route to a bigger waistband.

Fat doesn’t make you fat. Butter is good for you. So is cream. Skimmed milk is a futile punitive measure, not a foodstuff, a way of making ourselves needlessly miserable which has taken over the world on the basis of an illusion.

This is because almost everything most people think about food, and almost everything shops tell them, is completely wrong. In an unending struggle to get this across, the National Obesity Forum last week made a renewed attack on these mistaken attitudes.
Sugar, not fat, is the menace to our lives. And this has been known since 1972 when a brave scientist, John Yudkin, wrote a book – Pure, White And Deadly – showing it was so.

He and his unfashionable message were buried in abuse. It may be that some in the sugar industry might have been involved. These days he would have been called a ‘fat-threat denier’, or something of the kind. He died in 1995, too soon to see his ideas rescued and taken seriously again.

Even now, people are getting needlessly fat and dying of horrible diseases because the anti-fat (and pro-sugar) lobby still hasn’t been completely routed. It will be, but these things take time. I mention this not just because it’s true, but because it’s an example of how thoughtless worship of scientists gets us repeatedly into trouble. Doubters like me are told not to dare criticise the sacred men in white coats.

But scientists disagree among themselves and are often wrong. In fact, science progresses by exploding dud theories of the past. And laymen are perfectly entitled to apply facts and logic to what these people say. The obvious argument against the skimmed-milk fanatics is that decades of this policy have left us with more fat people than ever. But we should not have had to wait so long.

There is powerful evidence against many other things now accepted as true, and often very weak evidence for them. I’d name ‘antidepressant’ pills, ‘dyslexia’, ‘ADHD’ and ‘man-made climate change’.

Those who criticise these things are angrily hushed, with righteous cries of ‘How dare you!’, and if they won’t shut up, they are punished – as was John Yudkin. Yet I believe in all these cases the critics will be proved right, as Professor Yudkin was. The miserable thing is that so much damage will be done while we wait for the truth to get the upper hand.

Be less trusting of all fashionable ideas, is my advice.
Gullibility and conformism never advanced civilisation by a single step.

Jailed... for a very odd non-crime 

In the same way that we have to allow free speech to those we despise, we must be most careful to ensure justice for those who are different from us, and with whom we can’t easily sympathise.

So a nasty shiver ran up and down my spine when I saw that Lorna Moore, a convert to Islam who married a Muslim, has been locked up for a very odd offence.

In fact, I know of no other offence like it in English law. This young mother has been imprisoned for not informing on her husband. I’ve yet to see any conclusive proof that she actually knew he was planning to join a terror group. Somehow or other, a return ticket to Majorca was taken as evidence that she was planning to run away to Syria with a husband she loathes.

And my English heart revolts at the idea of a wife being forced by law to inform on her husband. This is sinister, totalitarian stuff, alien to everything we stand for. 

Those who drafted the 2000 Terrorism Act should be ashamed of enacting it. Can they have meant to lock up this person, so undangerous that she was allowed to be out on bail for three months between conviction and sentence?

Will it be children next, snatched into custody for not sneaking to the police about their parents’ conversations? This reminds me of the nauseating cult of Pavlik Morozov, whom Soviet children were taught to revere because he reported his father to the secret police.

There used to be a statue of this little monster (who was promptly and understandably murdered by his grandfather) in the middle of Moscow. 

But while even Vladimir Putin doesn’t encourage such things nowadays, we in Britain are moving towards the all-powerful state, on the excuse of combating terror.

As it happens, Lorna Moore had every reason to do her husband harm if she had wanted to. She went into the witness box (a dangerous thing for a guilty person to do) to say convincingly that she hates her husband, who was given to shoving her head down the lavatory.

To make the matter even more odd, the husband involved hasn’t actually been convicted of doing the thing his wife didn’t tell the police about. 

Indeed, he has sent an email to British media saying he isn’t actually in Syria, but in Turkey. Are the rest of us truly free when people can be locked up for such things? I don’t feel so.

One more lie in the drugs 'war' 

The trumpeted ‘ban on legal highs’ is a fiction, like the rest of our drug laws. The new Act imposes no penalties at all for possessing these dangerous poisons – except for people who are already in jail.

This is an amazing giveaway of the Government’s real drugs policy, which is to look the other way while pretending to be ‘tough’.

In fact, simple possession of cannabis, heroin or cocaine is now hardly punished at all, even though it is illegal.

Claims that this ‘frees up’ the police to pursue ‘evil dealers’ are not backed up by the figures. Prosecutions for these offences stay about the same each year.

It makes no sense. The thing that makes the dealers, importers and growers evil is the damage that the drugs actually do to their users and their families.

The final, crucial link in this wicked chain is the purchase of the drug by the user. Yet this is the one thing we don’t punish.

Users are let off, or treated as if they are the victims of an irresistible disease.

 

*****

One of the reasons why too few people criticise the feebleness of the modern police is that they know they will then be bombarded with spiteful and abusive letters and tweets from workers in this arrogant and unresponsive nationalised industry. 

If the police responded to calls for help from the public as quickly, persistently and numerously as they react to justified criticism, they’d be a lot more use.

******

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Everyone howls at batty Ken - but they wouldn't dare tackle racist Muslims

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I have known and disagreed with Ken Livingstone for nearly 40 years. I especially loathe his slippery excuse-making for the IRA, and I think he has done more damage to this country than almost any other figure on the Left.
But it is ridiculous to call him an ‘apologist for Hitler’, or to suggest that he is an anti-Jewish bigot.
I was just leaving the BBC’s Westminster studios on Thursday when Mr Livingstone stepped into an over-excited knot of political reporters. They looked like what they are – simultaneously a pack of snapping wolves, buzzing with self-righteousness, and a flock of bleating, conformist sheep, all thinking and saying exactly the same thing.
After undergoing a minute or two of synthetic rage and baying, the former Mayor of London politely excused himself and went to the lavatory. The flock waited outside, restored for a moment to calm and reason. Then Ken popped out again and the wild shouting and pushing resumed, as if a switch had been pressed.
At one point this stumbling, squawking carnival was joined by a barking dog. If it had gone on much longer, crowds of tourists would have gathered, mistaking it for an ancient London tradition. This is how politics is reported in this country, almost completely without thought.
I am, as it happens, a keen Zionist, a confirmed supporter of Israel’s continued existence as an avowedly Jewish state. Anti-Semitism – or Judophobia as I call it – gives me the creeps. So does the extraordinarily selective criticism of Israel, which does many bad things, by people who never seem to notice the equally bad crimes of any other country. I ask them: ‘Why is this?’ They can never answer.
And as it happens I had on Wednesday evening taken Mr Livingstone to task (at a London public meeting) for the Left’s feebleness in face of Muslim Judophobia.
This is a sad fact. On visits to the Muslim world, from Egypt to Iran, Iraq and Jordan, via the Israeli-occupied West Bank, I have repeatedly met foul and bigoted opinions about Jews which people in this country would be ashamed to speak out loud.
I have no doubt that there are plenty of Muslims who do not harbour such views. But there are those who do, and British political parties which seek the support of Muslims have often been coy about challenging this. As for all these people who have suddenly got so exercised about Judophobia, and wildly worked up about Ken Livingstone’s batty views on Zionism (standard issue on the far Left for decades), I have some questions for them.
Are you prepared to put the same energy into challenging and denouncing Judophobia among the Palestinians you support abroad, and the British Muslims whose votes you seek here?
Because, if not, I might suspect that you are just using the issue to try to win back control of the Labour Party, which you lost last summer in a fair fight.

The crude murder of a gripping story

This country seethes with scandals brought about by excessive political correctness. Yet many police dramas end up reaching for a particular sort of child sexual abuse, in which seemingly respectable conservative people are exposed as corrupt villains, as the root of the mystery they seek to solve.
Line Of Duty, the BBC’s latest much praised cop drama, took the same line. It’s a failure of imagination, mixed with Leftish politics. Perhaps that’s why its author also resorted to a ludicrous closing scene, in which a real, tense drama of interrogation, slowly moving towards a stinging conclusion, was abruptly ended by a crude shoot-out and a cruder car chase.

I am not interested in football and do not like it. I am loathed by many in the police because I criticise their aloof arrogance and their lack of interest in our problems. I dislike The Sun newspaper. I think Liverpool is a great and majestic city.
So don’t bother accusing me of serving any agenda when I say that I don’t like the unanimous Diana-style hysteria that seems to be developing over the Hillsborough tragedy. It is beyond belief that every police officer present was the devil incarnate. It is beyond belief that every football supporter present was a shining angel.
Those accused of criminal wrongdoing in this horrible event must be permitted to defend themselves and their reputations without being attacked for daring to do so. The presumption of innocence, never more important than when an unpopular defendant is on trial, must be enforced. In our free courts nobody is indefensible, and nobody should be denied the liberty to defend himself. Tragedy is no excuse for injustice.

Clegg's drugs confession

Some things are unsayable in British politics. One such is the truth that cannabis has been, for many years, a decriminalised drug. The police, the CPS and the courts have given up any serious effort to arrest and prosecute users, just as evidence starts to pour in that it is extremely dangerous.
Instead our elite moan about ‘prohibition’, which does not exist, and the cruel ‘criminalisation’ of dope-smokers, which would be their own fault if it happened, but actually doesn’t. Arrests for this offence are rarer every week, and some police forces openly say they don’t do it any more.
Only two years ago, when he was Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg claimed in The Sun newspaper that we were throwing supposedly harmless drug users into prison at the rate of a thousand a year. I’ve never been able to find out where this figure comes from. But on Thursday, he dramatically changed his tune. I extracted from him, on live TV, the most honest thing any senior British politician has actually said on the subject.
‘There is sort of de facto decriminalisation of cannabis going on… it’s not a very remarkable discovery. Everyone knows it.
‘Of course there is de facto decriminalisation … let’s have a bit of honesty that decriminalisation is happening de facto.’
He acted as if he’d been saying this all along. Has anyone else ever heard him do so?
The incessant lie that we are waging a failed ‘war on drugs’ with prohibition and persecution only fuels the cynical, greedy campaign for full legalisation. If this succeeds, we will get advertising of drugs, drugs on sale on the internet and in the high street, and untold irreversible misery.
Now at least Mr Clegg, of all people, has exposed that lie. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

****

Yet another report, this time from the London School of Economics, identifies Synthetic Phonics as an excellent method of teaching children to read. It is by far the best. But many schools still resist it, or dilute it in a ‘mixture of methods’.  More than 60 years after Rudolf Flesch explained ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’ in a famous book, we still refuse to act on the evidence.  

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It's astonishing, I know - but once, a long time ago, Oliver Letwin got something RIGHT

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Oliver Letwin doesn’t want to be defended by me. That’s why I’m doing it. How funny it is that he, of all people, should have been the target of the Leftist Thought Police last week for his 30-year-old memo about the Broadwater Farm disorders.

Giggly Mr Letwin, known among Tories for years as ‘Oliver Leftwing’, long ago embraced the ‘equality and diversity’ political correctness that now screams and howls at the slightest whisper of dissent.

He would have been quite capable of attacking his past self as a disgraceful racist, if he had been allowed to do so. Alas, he has an almost magical power to mess up anything he says or does in public, so Government spin doctors hurried him into hiding till the squall was over.

In fact, quite a lot of what he said in the memo was perfectly sensible, if it hadn’t been for the juvenile remarks about discos and drug dealers.

One part of his reviled memo has a lot of truth in it. ‘Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.’

This statement is not racially bigoted. In fact, it is the opposite. It judges people by their characters, not their skins, as Martin Luther King urged us to do. Mr Letwin’s 1985 remarks came at a time when there had been several outbreaks of disorder in areas where West Indians were concentrated. But they were not mass political uprisings. They were outbreaks of individual crime.

The great majority of West Indian migrants to this country were, are, and always have been respectable, hard-working, law-abiding and Christian in a way that sometimes shames the rest of us.

But liberal reformers, who wanted to change Britain profoundly anyway, saw these disorders as an opportunity. They ignored the truth – that the trouble came from a lawless minority in such districts, some of them white, who were disliked and feared by the majority. And, in a deeply racialist policy, they sought to treat all West Indians as if they could not be expected to behave well without special measures.

Those who wanted to live peaceful, honest lives and desired proper deterrence of crime would be abandoned.

From then on proper, old-fashioned policing (there and everywhere else) would be classified as ‘racist’ and ‘oppressive’. The first big step towards this stupid policy was Lord Scarman’s 1981 report into the Brixton ‘riots’ of April that year. The actual evidence, which few have read, suggests strongly that the conflagration was deliberately started by troublemakers who whipped up a mob against police who were trying to get an injured man to hospital. They did this by spreading false rumours of a death that hadn’t happened.

It also suggests that the disorder was not random but directed by leaders, that the supposed rioters (several of them white) rapidly took to robbery, and that petrol bombs were being systematically made, stacked and distributed. Scarman admitted that the hooligans were enjoying themselves, which anyone who has ever seen a riot will know, but which people like me get into trouble for mentioning.

Scarman, a liberal of the woolliest sort, recorded but ignored these facts. He even said that ‘street crime in Brixton was a grave matter, upon which the silent law-abiding majority of residents felt very strongly’. Yet he was against actions which had been intended to stand up for that majority.

He did at least have more sense than to swallow the ludicrous claim that the police were ‘institutionally racist’. That had to wait for Lord Macpherson’s even more liberal report into the terrible murder of Stephen Lawrence. Lord Macpherson also called – quite astonishingly – for the police to treat different ethnic groups differently. ‘ “Colour-blind” policing must be outlawed,’ he said. Yet I don’t remember anyone accusing his report of being ‘racist’. It’s odd what causes a fuss, and what doesn’t.

In Blairite Britain, the old Soviet rules apply to anyone with an independent mind: ‘Don’t think it. If you must think it, don’t say it. If you must say it, don’t write it down. If you must write it down, don’t sign it. If you must sign it, don’t be surprised.’

There are no simple answers to this misery

York is one of my favourite places in the world. I used to attend Bolshevik meetings beneath a set of buffalo horns in an upstairs room in The Lowther, the solid old pub that features in almost every picture of floods pouring through the heart of the ancient walled city.

I knew when I heard the names of streets affected by the latest inundation that something had gone extraordinarily wrong. Such places did not get flooded.

The temptation to fall in with the crowd and say ‘It must be global warming’ was strong. But I also know enough about York and its rivers to be sure that this isn’t so. I’m still talking to the Environment Agency about exactly what went wrong with the barrier that failed. But it wasn’t global warming.

There are so many reasons for what’s happening – the El Nino effect, the deforestation of much of England, which makes the earth much less absorbent, the straightening and canalising of rivers, speeding up the flow, the silting up of side channels that used to take the pressure off big rivers. Not to mention building houses on flood plains.

And then there’s just the slow decay of skills and structures which our forebears handed on to us. When a bridge collapses, after standing for centuries, isn’t it at least partly our fault for not having maintained it properly? Beware of single-cause merchants. Every crisis has many fathers, though they’re not always keen to admit it.

Ugly secret of our 'private schools'

Solid proof that there are now two kinds of privileged private education comes from Tatler, a magazine I bet Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t read. If he did, he’d find from its guide to the top state schools that quite a lot of his beloved ‘comprehensives’ are now besieged by wealthy and influential parents.

They quickly learn the complex admission rules, which religion to pretend to have got, or which tiny expensive catchment area to move into. It won’t be long before such schools – like the Grey Coat Hospital in Westminster, chosen by two Tory Cabinet Ministers – are as socially selective as Eton and Harrow, and sending their smooth products out into the world on gap yahs. Pity about the people who can’t afford the local house prices. But that’s how egalitarianism works.

It’s always nice to see my opponents tying themselves up in knots of their own devising.

Those who claim absurdly that ‘dyslexia’ is a disease rather than the result of bad teaching have now been caught by their own propaganda.

A major sperm bank has been turning away donations from alleged ‘dyslexics’ – and from supposed sufferers of that other invented complaint, ‘ADHD’, the result of bad parenting or boring schools. The simple way forward is to point out that these aren’t real diseases.

They can’t say that, because then a whole industry would collapse. But I can.

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Think Greece is in a mess? Wait till the UK's debt mountain explodes in our face

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Would we cope with misery as well as the Greeks? If our great fat cushion of state-backed jobs, welfare payments, tax credits and easy loans were whipped away one morning, how would we get on?

I think we would do very badly. In Greece, the suddenly poor and destitute turned to their strong extended families.

And if those families had not taken them in and supported them, there would have been nothing else. Fortunately, they did.

This country doesn’t have strong extended families any more. In many cases, it doesn’t really have families at all.

In too many places, it has gangs instead. And those that survive are weakest just where they would be needed most in a crisis – among the poor.

This country lives on the edge of serious disorder. The misnamed ‘riots’ of August 2011 were nothing of the kind.

They had no political pretext, no wider aim. I suspect many thought of joining in, but didn’t quite.

They followed the realisation by a large number of people, in a period of good weather, that the forces of order were weak, absent and afraid. Many of them were laughing as they stole, wrecked and burned.

Mostly, they turned on shops rather than private homes or individuals. But this seems to have been a matter of chance.

There were one or two especially frightening moments when the lawless mob came into direct contact with the cosseted middle class, who hid from their hooded attackers under restaurant tables while the kitchen staff, ready to defend their livelihoods with force, beat off the assault with rolling pins.

And almost all of the looters got away with it. It was only the dim stragglers who were caught and whom I watched shuffling through the courts in the weeks afterwards, most of them with criminal records nearly as long as a Hilary Mantel historical novel.

They were baffled to find that, after years of cautions, unpaid fines, suspended sentences, community service and limp rebukes, something might actually now happen to them.

Actually, not much did in the end.

That’s bad enough. But what about the rest of us? Generations of all classes have been taught to expect a comfortable, well-fed existence, a reliable safety net.

How much privation would it take to turn us into beggars, then looters and food rioters? I ask this because we are much closer to a Greek-style crisis than we think.

Our debts, national and personal, are huge. We can never pay them off. Our trade imbalance is just as bad. Our recovery is based entirely on a house-price balloon that could burst in a moment.

The main effort of the Government is to avoid any shocks until the Election is over – but what then?

I feel for the Greeks. I don’t blame them for refusing to endure more collective punishment, though they were foolish – as we are now – to let politicians lead them into a swamp of debt.

But I wonder whether, not far hence, it will be the Greeks who are sympathising with us.

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The riddle behind our Gaddafi disaster

Last week, the BBC rightly but cruelly replayed David Cameron’s ludicrous words from September 2011, when he went to Tripoli to say: ‘Your city was an inspiration to the world as you overthrew a dictator and chose freedom.’

Now it’s an inspiration to nobody. He can’t go there to say so, because it’s too dangerous. Why isn’t he in more trouble over his active destruction of an entire country? It’s all very strange. 

The Gaddafi regime fell because Mr Cameron lent the RAF to various gangs of Libyan jihadis (about whom we knew nothing). 

But less than a year before, in October 2010, Henry Bellingham, a Tory Minister, was referring to Gaddafi as ‘Brother Leader’ at a summit in Tripoli.

About the same time, another Minister, Alistair Burt, told the Libyan-British Business Council that Libya had ‘turned a corner’ which ‘has paved the way for us to begin working together again’. 

What changed? Could it be the same forces which decreed that flags in Britain should fly at half-mast to mark the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? 

The Saudis always hated Libya’s dictator because he had overthrown a dynasty very like their own.

Do we still have an independent foreign policy, or is it governed by another, richer country?

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Robots are no match for the most beautiful machines of all...

Some of the best films of modern times feature lifelike robots. 

The latest, Ex Machina, starring Alicia Vikander, left, is a clever and cunning mystery story which I’ll say as little about as possible in case it spoils the ending.

But, as I discovered on a recent visit to a Tokyo robotics expert, we are far, far away from developing anything remotely like a human consciousness, let alone a human ability to move limbs and experience pain, pleasure or grief.

The real wonder in our midst is the astonishing complexity, beauty and mystery of the human body, and the insoluble puzzle of where and what consciousness is. 

We fantasise about creating human-like robots because it helps us close our minds to some of the strongest evidence for the existence of God – an idea we dislike.

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My local police force, Thames Valley, has recently admitted (thanks to a Freedom of Information request) that 54 of its officers, some of them specials, have criminal convictions, including for burglary, arson, drug possession, actual bodily harm, criminal damage and computer misuse. 

I expect other forces have similar numbers. Are the police really so short of recruits that they cannot find people without such pasts? 

Forgiving and forgetting is all very well, but these are the people who come into the homes of burglary victims, and whom we trust absolutely with highly personal details.

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Those who rely on the medical profession’s wisdom should note that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence now says 1.2 million people may have been misdiagnosed with asthma. 

I’m glad someone has noticed the absurd keenness of doctors to classify healthy children as asthmatics. 

How long before they notice that something similar may be happening with some other fashionable ailments, such as the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’? 

Or will the fact that huge drug contracts rely on these subjective diagnoses protect them from watchdogs? 

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Have you noticed that the people most excited about women bishops in the Church of England are those who don’t believe in God and never go near a church? 

Personally, I couldn’t care less what sex a bishop is. I’d like it if they believed in God, preferred poetry and beauty to banality, and didn’t mix up Christianity with socialism. 

Perhaps I should start a campaign.

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A Civilized Exchange

Here’s an encouraging development in the often sterile battle between sceptics, such as I, and supporters of unproven concepts such as ‘Dyslexia’ and ‘ADHD’.

 

One of my critics, Dr Harold Levinson, originally gave a wrong impression of my opinions in a blog posting. But when I challenged him, he responded in a reasonable and a civilized fashion and was creditably anxious to put the error right. This is , alas, notable mainly because it is so rare. But it is also a straightforward Good Thing, and deserves to be praised. We will never get anywhere if we cannot keep to the civilized rules of reasoned debate.

 

 You may read an account of our exchange here:

 

 

 

http://www.dyslexiaonline.com/blog/apology-peter-hitchens-dialogue-opportunity-advance/

 

The Selfists Strike Back (with a damp sponge)

I was struck by the unusual poverty of the objections to the posting on the family wrecked after a child smoked cannabis, and the problem of ‘anecdotes’.

 

Take for instance the lofty contribution from Colin Walker:

 

‘Anecdotal evidence is never enough to make a case, even with a case by case analysis of anecdotes to discern patterns it would not give you any valid indications on how common, likely and severe the reactions can be.

I always find it amusing that people like Peter will give credence to negative anecdotes. They are seen to have some weight while the anecdotal evidence of millions of users indicating neutral or positive reactions is dismissed.’

 

Wouldn’t that depend on the case being made? Recall what I said ; ‘Beyond asking if any rational, responsible  person would or could  pursue cannabis legalisation or 'regulation' or 'decriminalisation' until such 'anecdotes' could be explained, I make no further comment.’

 

Surely even one such anecdote (let alone the thousands available, among the parents, friends and relatives of these victims) should give pause to anyone campaigning to remove the existing restrictions on the drug concerned?

 

I also have to point out again to those naïve enough to think that research is carried out constantly on a broad front about everything that is interesting, and is disinterestedly directed, that this is not so. I would be overjoyed if the state would pay for a full-scale research project on the effects of cannabis, especially on the young. There is no such project. One has to ask why not.  In its absence, we have to make what warnings we can, with the information we have.

 

Then there’s John Rowe, who asserts :’ I really wish Peter wouldn't bother with these kinds of posts, because they're so intellectually dishonest and have nothing to do with the real reasons he's opposed to cannabis use. It wouldn't influence his opinion one way or the other if it were proven beyond doubt that cannabis never led to mental health issues or if it always did, so there's no point trying to discuss harm issues with him.’

 

I use the arguments that come to hand. In a world that doesn’t believe in sin, let alone that it is bad,  there’s little point in telling people not to commit it. In a world given over to self-indulgence which doesn’t believe in the immortal soul, it is not going to be very effective to tell people that it is morally wrong and may have eternal consequences. It happens to be the case (and this is itself interesting) that moral wrongs pretty much invariably lead to various forms of temporal, material damage as well as to those deeper consequences. If this is what I must stress to keep people away from folly, then I will do so. Personally, I have no doubt that the ‘anecdotal’ link would, if subjected to proper research and testing, be shown to be real. As I’ve said before, it is hardly a surprise that a mind-altering drug of some power has a long-lasting effect on the brain .

 

As for ‘complete dominion’ over ‘someone’s flesh’, only one authority has that, and the user of the phrase does not, I think, accept that authority. The law, on the other hand , can – even in the secular moral system -  concern itself with actions which harm others. I have many times explained here why self-destruction is not and cannot be a victimless crime. Indeed, the post to which I linked showed quite clearly who the victims are, and how they suffer, how deeply and how long. It would take a head of concrete and a heart of plywood to fail to see this.

 

Mr Knight’s posting, incoherent, clichéd, self-serving (How does he know it hasn’t done him any harm? How can he know what he might have been and done otherwise?) and rambling as it is, undermines his own case brilliantly.

 

Then there is :’ The millions of anecdotes from addicts of various substances mean nothing to you so I assume this anecdotal evidence means nothing either. Afterall I would hate you to be inconsistent in your views Peter.’

 

That is because a moral concept cannot be transformed into a material illness (the heart of the ‘addiction’ argument)  by any number of anecdotes. It is precisely because lobbyists for ‘addiction’ make such an extravagant claim that they must be subject to such severe tests, which of course they cannot pass, but they get terribly cross when told so. They wish to use pseudoscience to shut up anyone who refuses to accept their (rather squalid) moral position. Any informed person can see that it *is* pseudoscience.

, but of course many gullible peopel are fooled by pseudoscience and Graeco-Latin expressions, , so any dissentient vocie must be furiously attacked lest the truth get out

My claim ( see above) is far more modest. There is enough anecdote to discourage any irreversible change in the laws controlling the suspect drugs, and to justify the extensive, expensive research needed to establish whether there is in fact a danger.

 

And finally, from another lobby wounded by me: ‘In response to Mr. Hitchens's piece some weeks ago on dyslexia, a significant number of people posted comments outlining their personal experiences of suffering from dyslexic symptoms despite the majority having had perfectly good educations. In the interests of consistency, is Mr. Hitchens planning to take those anecdotes on board and re-consider his view that dyslexia doesn't exist?’

 

The question with ‘dyslexia’ is not whether people have trouble with reading, which is beyond doubt, but why they do, and whether this is caused by a complaint in their physical bodies called ‘dyslexia’. Therefore a million anecdotes, or indeed a million peer-reviewed accounts of people describing their own reading problems, would not resolve the issue. What would resolve it would be controlled tests, in which those claiming to be ‘dyslexic’ were taught to read using Synthetic Phonics. When, after a few months ( as would certainly be the case) , they could all read, we could all go home, and the people in the control groups, who were being ‘treated’ for dyslexia could be given SP lessons too.

 

The question here is whether there is enough of a reason to launch a major research project into the effects of cannabis, and  enough of a reason to hesitate before irreversibly abandoning existing laws against cannabis.

 

Only a dogged, dogmatic, and unreasoning adherence to a cause could make anyone confuse the two.

 

Oddly enough, that cause is always the same, whether it be cannabis, ‘dyslexia’ , ‘addiction’ or, ‘ADHD’  - it is the cause that demands absolute personal autonomy, and the cause which denies personal responsibility for actions and failures. It is the most powerful cause in modern civilisation, and it is so intertwined with selfish personal desires that it hates with a passion any voice which suggests it may be wrong. It hates, especially, the idea that there may be a God and any absolute source of law or goodness. I call it ‘Selfism’.

 

Oh, by the way, if the incidence of the problems apparently connected with cannabis was random and unpredictable, the number of those not suffering (or claiming not to suffer) problems from using this drug would have little bearing on the question at issue, which is, simply, whether we should show natural caution and exercise natural curiosity. 

Dyslexia is not a disease. It is an excuse for bad teachers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I doubt there has ever been a society so easily fooled by pseudo-science and quackery as ours is.

Millions of healthy people take happy pills that  do them obvious harm, and are increasingly correlated with inexplicable suicide  and worse.

Legions of healthy children are drugged into numbness because they fidget during  boring lessons, and countless people are persuaded that they or their children suffer from  a supposed disease called ‘dyslexia’, even though there is no evidence at all that it exists.

A few weeks ago I rejoiced at the first major cracks in this great towering dam of lies. Dr Richard Saul brought out his courageous and overdue book, ADHD Does Not Exist.

I also urge everyone to read James Davies’s book Cracked, on the inflated claims of psychiatry since it sold its soul to the pill-makers.

Now comes The Dyslexia Debate, published yesterday, a rigorous study of this alleged ailment by two distinguished academics – Professor Julian  Elliott of Durham University, and Professor Elena Grigorenko of Yale University.

Their book makes several points. There is no clear definition of what ‘dyslexia’ is. There is no objective diagnosis of it. Nobody can agree on how many people suffer from it. The widespread belief that it is linked with high intelligence does not stand up to analysis.

And, as Parliament’s Select Committee on Science and Technology said in 2009: ‘There is no convincing evidence  that if a child with dyslexia is not labelled as dyslexic, but receives full support for his or her reading difficulty, that the child will do any worse than a child who is labelled dyslexic and then receives special help.’

 This is because both are given exactly the same treatment. But as the book’s authors say: ‘Being labelled dyslexic can be perceived as desirable for many reasons.’ These include extra resources and extra time in exams. And then there’s the hope that it will ‘reduce the shame and embarrassment that are often the consequence of literacy difficulties. It may help exculpate the child, parents and teachers from any perceived sense of responsibility’.

I think that last point is the decisive one and the reason for the beetroot-faced fury that greets any critic of ‘dyslexia’ (and will probably greet this book and article). If it’s really a disease, it’s nobody’s fault. But it is somebody’s fault. For the book also describes the furious resistance, among teachers,  to proven methods of teaching children to read. Such methods have been advocated by  experts since Rudolf Flesch wrote his devastating book Why Johnny Can’t Read almost 60 years ago.

There may well be a small number of children who have physical problems that stop them learning to read. The invention of ‘dyslexia’ does nothing to help them. It means they are uselessly lumped in with millions of others who have simply been badly taught.

It also does nothing for  that great majority of poor readers. They are robbed of one of life’s great pleasures and essential skills.

What they need, what we all need, is proper old-fashioned teaching, and who cares if the silly teachers think it is ‘authoritarian’? That’s what teaching is.

The sign of an honest butcher

I wondered when the Soppy Lobby would get  round to trying to ban butchers’ shops displaying the recognisable carcases of dead animals. The first attempt, in the Suffolk town of Sudbury, has failed. But it won’t be the last. How sad.

Now that most meat is  sold ready packaged in supermarkets, many children grow up with no idea where  it comes from. Proper butchers are rarer and rarer. My own view is that you shouldn’t eat meat if you don’t know what it is and how it came to be on your plate.

The spread of cheap, unrecognisable hypermarket meat has helped to create hideous meat factories, where animals are imprisoned and tortured in unspeakable conditions before being cruelly massacred. I’d rather eat lentils than support such methods.

Proper butchers know the names of the farms that supply them, and can tell you where the animals were humanely slaughtered. It’s the hidden cruelty we should object to, not the honesty of the remaining butchers.

Here's the real IRA scandal

What a lot of twaddle we have heard about the  dropping of the case against the alleged Hyde Park bomber, John Downey.

On page 56 of the judge’s ruling, point 32 states ‘even  if convicted of all the offences he [Downey] would, in consequence of the 1998 Act, serve no more than two years in prison’. So, even if a jury had found him guilty of that ghastly crime, two footling years would have been his lot.

The 1998 Act was part of Britain’s grovelling  surrender to the Provisional IRA, made under fierce American pressure.

I said at the time that this was a total and unmitigated defeat, but I have been told over and over again by  pious persons that it is the price of ‘peace’.

Well, we have not got peace. We have been utterly humiliated by a criminal gang, at the behest of our supposed allies in the ‘War on Terror’.

And what do you think will happen if we ever dare prosecute another IRA man, let alone put him in jail? They haven’t gone away, you know.

How’s the ‘liberation’ of Ukraine going  for you? Gullibly welcomed by 99.9 per cent of the British media, it doesn’t look quite so simple now, does it?

Beginning to have doubts about Britain taking sides? You should. Apart from all the worrying developments in Crimea, which are no surprise to any informed person, it comes to something when that old class warrior, Dennis Skinner MP, speaks for Britain.

But his brief outburst was the most telling thing anybody in Parliament has said about  this. He asked William Hague, Secretary of State for Foreign Meddling: ‘Have I got it right, or not, that a Tory Foreign Secretary has come to the House to take money out of the pockets of people in Britain – flood-ravaged and austerity-riddled Britain – to hand it over to the EU fanatics in Ukraine?’ Yes, he has got it right.

More from Mike Barton, Chief Constable of Durham and advocate of free heroin for abusers. I suggested his job was to enforce the law. He retorted: ‘When you say that my job is to enforce the law, between 18 and 22 per cent of my work is law enforcement and crime-fighting. Fifty per cent of my work is concern for safety. That’s what I’m in, so when you accuse me of being a social worker, I’m proud to be a social worker as well as a tough law enforcer.’

What odd figures, and what a strange sort of pride. And I think the people of Durham should be the judges of whether he is a ‘tough law enforcer’.

If you wish to comment, please scroll down

 

The police didn't kill Mark Duggan - 50 years of liberal 'compassion' did

We asked for it. We repeatedly voted for politicians who promised compassion. And now we have compassion coming out of our ears. And we moan that we don’t like the result. Yet we carry on with the same plan, madly expecting it to have a different outcome.

It was ‘compassion’ that abolished the death penalty for murder, so forcing us to arm the police – who had until then been guarded from violent criminals by the real threat of the gallows.

Look how compassionate that turned out to be. The lone armed constable in the dark and dangerous street now has to act as prosecutor, defence counsel, judge, jury, executioner and appeal court, and all in a matter of seconds.

No wonder the inquest jury in the Mark Duggan case ruled that this was a lawful killing. Which of us knows how he would act in such conditions?

And yet why is this bloody system morally better, more just, more kind, more proof against error than a jury trial with the presumption of innocence and the possibility of appeal and reprieve?

But we’re all so compassionate that, when we’re not bombing and invading foreign countries for their own good, we feign horror at the idea of bringing back the hangman.

There’s no logic to it. The liberal bombing of Baghdad and Belgrade unavoidably and predictably killed innocent human creatures. Yet the people who backed the bombing claim that the much smaller risk of hanging an innocent makes capital punishment unacceptable.

Because abolishing the noose is compassionate, the feeble logic of the abolitionists still triumphs. Try defending the death penalty in any ‘civilised’ gathering in this country and see how quickly you are sent to Coventry and dismissed as a Victorian monster.

And then we make ourselves angry at the spectacle of modern Britain on TV, the claimers of benefits turned into a sort of national entertainment.

But why do these unhappy, hopeless people exist? Who corrupted them, by offering them the chance to live in this dreadful, doomed way, while at the same time giving them no moral guidance or help?

We did, repeatedly electing governments that offered compassion to the poor, in the form of a welfare state with its moral heart ripped out.

Try suggesting that there is a difference between the deserving and the undeserving poor, in any public forum, and feel the temperature drop below freezing. And yet a welfare state which refuses to recognise this is bound to corrupt people into idleness and worse.

Roughly 50 years ago, beguiled by smiley reformers, we chose the wrong future. We adopted ideas which were mistaken and have proved to be disastrous.

We called them ‘compassion’. But who were we really being compassionate to? Not, as it turns out, to the poor we claimed to be helping. They suffer most from the compassion of our criminal justice system – which in 2012 was so compassionate it refused to imprison 28,997 offenders who had committed at least 25 crimes.

It is the lives of the poor that are blighted by anarchic schools that can’t teach, and by amoral handouts. It is their streets which are full of the drugs whose use we won’t punish. It is they who have been first to experience the abolition of fathers and stable families, which leads directly to the growth of criminal gangs.

All these policies were implemented in the name of compassion. But who were we being gentle to? Why, we were being nice to ourselves, sparing ourselves the hard and unpopular decisions and choices that make civilisation possible, like indulgent parents who mingle neglect with bribes, only on a vast scale. And we still are.

To hell with compassion. Give me good honest harshness any day. It’s far kinder in the long run.

Isn't it rather insulting and racially bigoted for the police to assume the ‘Black community’ will be particularly upset by the death of a gangster?  Black people, just like everyone else, hate and fear crime and criminals.    

A 'risk' I'd be thrilled to run

What a lot of silly fuss about people risking the giant waves that have thundered against our shores during the last week.

Next thing you know, the whole sea will be fenced off and patrolled by portly wardens telling us to keep away lest we fall in.

If I lived in Porthcawl, I would certainly have got as close as I could to the raging of the sea. I have had the good luck to see most of the great sights of the planet, from the Himalayas to the Grand Canyon, and our lovely coastline in a storm is at least the equal of all of them.

Anyway, we should never forget that the sea, in its many moods, was what kept us safe and made us a great and rich nation.

I told you ADHD was a myth...

Wait long enough and the rest of the world will catch up with everything in this column. For years I’ve been pointing out that there is no objective, testable evidence at all for the existence of the fake ailment ‘ADHD’.

Now here comes Dr Richard Saul, one of the US’s leading neurologists (that’s a real qualification based on hard science), with a new book called ADHD Does Not Exist. Of course it doesn’t, but it soothes a lot of bad consciences, triggers a lot of welfare payments and makes a lot of money for the pill manufacturers.

So you get into trouble for saying so. Will ‘dyslexia’, that other great phoney excuse of our age, be next? I do hope so.

The TV series Blackadder was infantile Left-wing drivel. But, alas, it was still pretty much right about the First World War. That war was worse than futile. It was malevolently stupid and wrong. It destroyed this country, wiping out the best men of a whole generation before they could become fathers. We still suffer for that.

There was no good reason for this country to enter that war. We weren’t really obliged to defend the invented country of Belgium. The great Lord Palmerston oiled out of a similar commitment to Denmark in 1864, and nobody cared.

The US benefited hugely from staying out, then and later. Germany ended up dominating Europe anyway, through the EU, but only after millions of deaths, the destruction of countless homes and the horrors of Hitler and Stalin – all of which we would have been spared if France had been swiftly defeated in September 1914. If Michael Gove could just stop being so keen on supposedly benevolent wars, he would see that.

 

Berlin Time, 'antidepressants' and 'Reefer Madness'

My  simple, factual and logical case – that countries should set their clocks according to the natural time at which noon occurs over their territory (i.e when the sun is at its zenith) has an amazing capacity to infuriate certain people.

 

I don’t really understand why they get so cross, unless it’s because they know I’m right and wish I would shut up because they have some shameful interest in doing what they know to be wrong. A lot of people , I think, take this view of me, hence the rages which follow my attacks on pseudo-scientific inventions, which validate poor teaching, bad parenting or lazy medicine and commercial greed,  such as ‘ADHD’, ‘Dyslexia’ - or ‘Clinical Depression’ – as for ‘depression’ see this interesting account: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2437657/Happy-pills-Critics-claim-antidepressants-handed-like-sweets-Now-shocking-experiment-uncovers--The-proof-doctors-doling-happy-pills-asks.html 

 

 

To this day I have yet to see a solid material argument for the mad ceremony of moving our clocks forward just as Spring is lightening the evening skies perfectly adequately anyway. On the other hand, since we have taken to doing this loopy, disruptive thing (invented by a property developer who hated the fact that other people didn’t get up as early as he did, and a bug-hunter who wanted to chase insects through the gloaming, and thought time should be shifted to suit him) , there’s a powerful case for putting them back to where they ought to be in autumn, which appeals to any of the millions who need to get up early for work or school.

 

This habitual idiocy, the pushing forward of clocks in Spring,  has now been going on for almost a century (having been intensified during the semi-totalitarian War-Communism of 1939-45, when such inconveniences were foisted on us to promote a spirit of shared adversity), and now affects much of the world. Perhaps a lot of people object to having this pointed out because it’s embarrassing to admit that you have been doing something daft for decades, and never even thought about it.

 

Well, Spain, which has for some years been on Berlin Time (look at a map to see how absurd this is) is now wondering whether this is a good idea – as you may read here.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24294157

 

My thanks to Darren, from Orpington,  the reader who pointed this out. Alas, we will never hear anything similar from poor France, though it really ought to be on the same time as us(look at a map, once again). But that country’s subservience to Germany in all things is the price it pays for being allowed to pose as a world power and maintain a toy nuclear deterrent.

 

On ‘Reefer Madness’, I am always puzzled that dope campaigners seem to think that mentions of this otherwise forgotten 1936 film, which is plainly of no value in any serious discussion, somehow close the debate about cannabis and mental illness.

 

The film predates (by more than 30 years) the isolation of the main active ingredient in cannabis, THC. It predates the long experience this country now has of cannabis users seeking psychiatric care and the correlation, observed by Professor Sir Robin Murray of the Maudsley hospital among others, between cannabis use (especially in the early teens) and mental illness.

 

Correlation, as we all know, is not necessarily evidence of causation. But nor is it necessarily *not* evidence of causation. It is certainly highly suggestive in this case, and is the subject of so many so-called ‘anecdotes’ that any unprejudiced person must accept that there is reason for concern.

 

Nor would it be surprising that a potent mind-altering drug has the power to trigger mental illness.

 

Due to the extreme difficulty of achieving objective classifications of mental illness (which does not mean that physiological mental illness does not exist ,as some of my thicker opponents have tried to suggest) , or of categorising those mental illnesses that are observed in any reliable way, statistics on this matter are hard to achieve or obtain. But those who mock ‘Reefer Madness’, as if it were the argument of modern campaigners against cannabis,  might do well to turn to Patrick Cockburn’s recent book ‘Henry’s Demons’.  There they may read  what happened to his son Henry *after* he used cannabis as a schoolboy, and see if they still think the subject is risible.